You lost all non-partisan credibility right there. The Defense of Marriage Act was a special interest proposition by Christians. There is supposed to be a separation of Church and State. Just because you have your beliefs doesn't mean you get to use the government as a vehicle to force your beliefs on everybody. If you think that's the definition of marriage and your community thinks that, great. Support that in your community. Not everyone agrees with you or thinks your belief system is true. Get over it.
I am curious how you inferred my position on the Defense of Marriage Act from what I wrote. I assume you inferred something about my beliefs because you chose to see partisanship where there was none.
What I stated was an objective fact: the Defense of Marriage Act was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Bush. It therefore became the law of the land. If you carefully read the US Constitution it is the legislature's job to make the laws (with the President's signature or overriding a veto) and the executive's job to enforce the laws. We have lots of awful laws on the books and they should be repealed or stricken down whenever possible, but in accordance with the methods set out in the Constitution. However, to say that the executive has latitude to not enforce laws that they don't like threatens the integrity of the entire system of government.
Suppose for a moment that Congress passes a law and the President rejects it with a veto. If Congress successfully overrides the veto and the law goes into effect anyway, can that President or future Presidents choose to ignore the law? Why or why not? If you believe that President Obama did the right thing by ignoring the Defense of Marriage Act, then did he do the right thing by also extra-judicially ordering the assassination of American citizens overseas? You see, I think that the latter was a violation of one or more laws as written (in addition to being an unconstitutional deprivation of the right to life), so it was wrong. Based on that, his decision to ignore the Defense of Marriage Act was also wrong. In the end, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which settled that issue. My personal views on marriage, religion, etc., in no way enter into this.
The problem with your logic is you are putting words in his mouth and then arguing against statements he never made. He never said illegal immigration wasn't a problem. He was I believe inferring it wasn't as big of a problem as it is being made out to be, which is a fair point. Illegal immigration is arguably just an appropriate byproduct of failing immigration policies. Our country needs more workers willing to do jobs US citizens tend to find undesirable but that produce goods US citizens do find desirable at a low cost (like food). Unless we create a legal way to let millions of workers into this country to fill these jobs, we need illegal immigrants. The tragedy is how poorly these immigrants are treated, not that they are here in the first place. The thing to fix is to thank them for the risks they take to improve our country even as our country marginalizes them.
If I put worse in his mount, then that was not my intention. However, I would no more thank someone for violating our immigration laws than I would thank someone for breaking into home and stealing. Also, you have created a false dichotomy the choice is not let in millions of immigrants willing to do undesirable jobs so we can have products or don't let them in and go without. We could let the marketplace figure out how to fill the gaps. Of course, that doesn't appeal to statists (not saying that you are one, just pointing it out).
Thankfully we have people willing to break our laws when they are unjust and harm our country, just like we had people willing to fight against slavery while that was still legal. The thought that the rule of law is more important than human decency is a horrible source of evil in this world. It is a shameful belief to hold.
You can't seriously compare the current immigration situation to slavery. The issue with slavery as an institution and the associated laws was that it removed inalienable rights from certain classes of people. Nobody has a right to enter another country. That sort of thing is a privilege. Now, you may think that we should extend the privilege to more people, slavery and immigration are nowhere close to related in the sense which you have connected them. I am curious what your basis is for declaring current immigration laws unjust? What human right are the violating?
The problem with your logic is that you think this is about illegal immigrants. Your entire rest of your post rests on the presumption that this is all Trump cares about. If that were the case, Slashdotters wouldn't be so excited by the notion he's going to "do something" about H1-Bs. Do you think H1-Bs are illegal? For the matter, look at what Trump is actually doing, to thunderous applause from his supporters: Do you think being a refugee and turning up at an American airport is illegal? Do you think that having a visa issued by an American embassy in a country that's suffering war or terrorism is illega?
I never said or implied any of those things. H-1B is an economic/jobs issue hiding in the immigration debate. Personally, I think H-1B is badly broken, but for economic reasons, not because I dislike immigrants or immigration. In fact, I come from a family of immigrants and I know many immigrants who have come here (legally) and done great things for their families, communities, and for the country. I think that we should help refugees, but I think throwing the doors open without acknowledging that we may in the process allow in those who wish to harm us and without trying to do something about that is disingenuous. Of course, we send lots of foreign aid to war ravaged places, but then that may not be enough and that is part of the debate in the current discourse on immigration policy.
Look again at the words Trump uses. He's not talking about how Mexicans are here without valid visas and making some nuanced point about the consequences of immigration outside of the legal immigration framework that applies to everyone else.
No, he's flat out stating that Mexicans who come to America are rapists, murderers, and drug pushers.
Well, this is in fact true in many cases. How to do you think we end up with such a huge supply of illegal drugs here? Perhaps people order it through Amazon? Seriously, the truth is that many countries export good and bad people. Look at the Cuban community (I know a little something about this). Those who came in the "first wave" after the revolution were mostly educated and hard working. Those who came later (particularly during the Mariel boatlift) were mostly not; there were lots of criminals in the latter group. There are other immigrant communities in the US with similar issues. As much as people argue that Trump's statements make him prejudiced (hint: they are not racist, as Mexican is not a race), the evidence in the form of crime statistics shows that there is some truth to what he says.
You're another variant of the kind of person I'm criticizing, because you've decided to not to care about what Trumps actual reasons are, instead just hoping the fact he's "anti-immigration" means he'll fix an immigration-related issue you care about. He doesn't care about your reasons. He's not doing it for you. He's doing it because immigrants are a convenient scapegoat. His goal is to get you to blame America's problems on immigrants, because it's a hell of a lot easier to ban people from entering America than it is to fix America's problems for real.
See, you have completely missed the mark with me. I come from an immigrant family, have many immigrant friends and colleagues, and am decidedly in favor of immigration. However, I believe that those who seek to come to the US without respect for its laws should not be allowed stay or should not be allowed in to begin with.
You imply that I somehow agree with Trump's position on immigration, when I said no such thing. What I agree with him on is that the government has been dysfunctional and too meddlesome for far too long. (It is interesting to note that Obama made transparency a key component of his campaigns, which I thought was a good thing and a great first step to fixing the dysfunction in the federal government, but then did nothing meaningful to actually deliver; in fact he continued with the dr
Your entire post has left me shaking my head. I have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. Since I can't possibly address everything, I will pick on this:
This is not about jobs. This is about scapegoating immigrants for America's problems, and then "dealing" with immigrants as a substitute for dealing with the actual problems America has.
The problem with your logic is that you don't see people violating our laws and the government not enforcing the laws as a problem. We are going on 20 years of presidents picking and choosing which laws they like/dislike (Obama failing to enforce and vigorously defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Bush deciding that pesky things like the Fourth Amendment were more advisory in nature, and others). In fact it is the only thing the current generation has even seen presidents do.
People have become so accustomed to cheering when their guy ignores the laws they don't like and screaming when the other side's guy ignores the laws they do like, that when somebody comes along and says he wants actually enforce the laws (motivation aside) everybody loses their minds.
Personally, I think our immigration system is a train wreck. However, I believe that the rule of law is more important, so the proper sequence of events is enforce the laws on the books as they stand now so that the executive branch gets to what its like to actually do their jobs. Once that is in order people can start writing their representatives to get the mess fixed. People can even start writing their representatives now and get some work started on fixing that in parallel. What Trump is doing is an attempt to fix the problem. You probably disagree with his approach, but he is still trying to do something.
The crazy thing is that Obama twice campaigned successfully by wooing the immigrant community with his promises of fixing immigration. He had the ability and opportunity to fix this. Both times he didn't lift a finger. Check that, he lifted one finger: his middle finger right in their faces.
Like it or not, lots of people immigrate legally to the US, as much of a pain as it is. The way we have handled illegal immigration for the past few decades is just a slap in the face to people who have come here in a way that respects our laws.
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood.
There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
We also thought that we knew that the appendix was a useless organ, only now we are beginning to understand that it is in fact useful. For centuries we thought that "humors" were the key to understanding the body and that bleeding was a good treatment for many ailments. After we have improved the science we look back and realize how little we really understood.
If you think that in a couple of centuries humanity will not look back at this period and time and say something like "wow, we really didn't understand the true effect of humanity on the global environment," then you haven't been paying attention to how science has advanced in the last century.
That's OK, though. I am accustomed to being berated for not kowtowing to the accepted orthodox politically correct view of things. It comes with the territory.
Human-induced climate change is real... but this article is alarmism.
Climate change is real, but how much of a role humans play in it is something we will not fully understand for a long time.
That said, this is definitely alarmism. There is a reason why even just a few hundred years ago, even a few decades ago, places like what are today Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, etc. had very few people living there: those places suck without modern air conditioning.
Sure there were wealthy people who wintered in Florida (Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were even next door neighbors during winter on the gulf coast). Sure there were people who lived on the coast year round or in the mountains in the southwest year round, because those were the only tolerable locations in those otherwise intolerable climates. But with things like air conditioning and draining wetlands, very dense populations of people now live year round in places where people simply didn't live before.
Las Vegas is another great example. Imagine a city of 2,000,000 in the middle of the Sahara or some similarly inhospitable place. Of course when temperatures stay mostly in the "normal" range for those places, modern conveniences make them reasonably comfortable. However, our modern conveniences are at times no match for the extremes.
It is the same reason people sometimes freeze to death in cold climates. Though, I don't recall similar alarmism associated with that, even though in the last few winters, in North America at least, most places have experienced much colder than normal temperatures and people have died as a result.
... software takes an increasingly starring role in an expanding range of products whose failure could result in bodily harm and even death. Anything less than such a threat might not be able to budge software engineers into taking greater security precautions.
What you are seeing is the maturing of software engineering as a profession. A few hundred years ago if you needed surgery you would go to your barber. The reason for this was that they were usually in possession of the right tools. The medical profession eventually matured to what we have today, where a surgeon is a specialized physician. But that didn't happen overnight and lots of people died in the process. In fact, we didn't even have a theory of infectious disease until the 1830s.
The point is that right now hardware, including its firmware components, is oftentimes made without the involvement of a software engineer. It wasn't that long ago that software engineers didn't even exist and in time as the profession matures we will get to the point where developing a piece of hardware without the participation of a software engineer will be unthinkable. But we are not there yet.
An important side note is that there is a difference between a coder, a developer, a programmer, a software engineer, and several other specialized disciplines in the software arena. I think that a precondition to solving the problem identified by the article has less to do with things like development methodology (that is not central the problem at hand) and more to do with establishing minimum standards for some who claims to be a software engineer. For instance, a surgeon in 2017 has to meet vastly different minimum qualifications than a surgeon did in 1917. We didn't even have software engineers a hundred years ago, so who knows what it will actually looks like by the time the field really starts to mature.
Look, I think Trump has a chance to drive some good change for our country. Please note that I thought the same of Obama, based on some of his campaign promises, but was sadly disappointed (I am not holding my breath for Trump). What remains to be seen is whether Trump will actually succeed in that, or whether he will go the route of Obama: expend all his political capital on a single issue, lose the advantage of both House and Senate majorities of the same political party as a result (given the disenchantment of lots of conservatives with lack of progress, this could happen), discard 99% of his campaign promises (Trump already seems headed down this particular path), and then spend the remainder of his time in office trying to shore up the one single accomplishment and then praying his successor doesn't undo it.
That said, pretending that the Trump administration doesn't have serious problems at this point doesn't help anyone: Trump, the administration, or the American people.
This is tricky because most people don't get the issues related to open/closed source. Remember that the majority of people now have smart phones and tablets with their walled garden of app ecosystems. The idea of libre software simply does not occur to them. They likely didn't grow up learning computers in the era when source code commonly shipped with the computer and you could inspect/tweak it if something went wrong.
That said, I firmly believe that any software which is used in determining innocence/guilt, sentencing, criminal culpability, civil liability, etc., should be open source. Sentencing is an interesting one, though, because in that case I think it would be acceptable (assuming there are no other alternatives) to settle for a closed source product with a public specification and comprehensive set of test cases which satisfactorily demonstrate that the software performs in conformance to the written spec.
There also needs to be a contractual commitment on the part of the vendor to update the software (and spec and test suite) in a timely manner when unexpected results are encountered for previously unspecific input conditions or edge cases, etc.
That said, if you have a strong opinion regarding this, then you are welcome to start an open source project, form a lobbying organization, and get your open source solution adopted in as many jurisdictions as you can manage. Given the way that governments work, you can probably form a firm that also provides paid support for the product.
You are opted-in to just about everything by default and have to set hundreds of settings to opt out, even on an Enterprise Windows system. Sometimes multiple settings for the same feature. Most Microsoft documentation discourages opting out and warns of a less optimal experience... But you can't completely opt-out. Windows still tracks too much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this essentially the definition of "defective by design?"
The increasingly hostile and draconian moves by Microsoft simply serve to prove that the majority of Microsoft customers are in a co-dependent relationship with Microsoft: afraid that no matter how bad things are with Microsoft, they will be worse without Microsoft. It must suck to live like that.
I know, I know. Some people cannot ditch Microsoft, but most people can and it would cost them only marginally more effort (and probably less in many cases) than they expend dealing with all the crap Microsoft is throwing at their customers these days.
A misdiagnosis by a human physician can only be analyzed and argued about. A misdiagnosis by an AI physician can be forensically investigated. It can even be perfectly reenacted, both with the same and different inputs. That would allow, for example, a determination of whether the fault was a design flaw or a problem with the supplied inputs.
This would allow for very precise determination of responsibility. Today, if the patient omits some medically relevant detail and a misdiagnosis occurs, the human physician can only argue that he could have possibly come to a different conclusion with the additional information. With an AI, we can feed the updated parameters to it and actually see whether the result would or would not have been different. If the result would have in fact been different and correct, then the fault lies with the patient, or possible whomever was responsible for collecting the input data. If the result would not have changed, then there is a possible design flaw for which the developer/manufacturer may be held liable.
In my mind, this can only mean an improvement from where things currently stand.
So, I read the article and the point completely eludes me. There is no news here. There are no facts. It reads like it is trying to be a think-piece, but contains no actual information. Even a think piece, with a primary purpose of expressing an opinion, needs to have some sort of basis in facts or information.
This "article" reads more like the introduction to a manifest, or some sort of random pontification.
Don't get me wrong, it is sure to prompt a robust discussion here on/., but the piece itself is not really that exciting.
That said, my perspective is that programming (analysis, coding, testing, etc.) is enjoyable, possibly even "fun," for the simple reason that I enjoy solving complex problems. When I was younger I spent lots of time playing videogames. As I got older and more experienced as a software engineer I began to realize that playing video games (good ones) and developing software are actually the same activity. Except that the former rarely results in a lasting benefit, while the latter is easier to get paid to do.
So, to me, it is the functional equivalent of getting paid to play videogames all day. I can count on one hand the number of days I have not looked forward to going to work in the last few years. So, yes it is complex and has an ethical dimension, but is also lots of fun.
There is a reason that we had a Postmaster General (1775) before we had a President: communication is vitally important to both government and the people. That is also why the Postmaster General was a cabinet post for nearly 150 years.
There were and still are strict laws which penalize anyone interfering with the delivery, processing, etc. of the US mail. In 2017, the Internet is even more important to government and the people than the Postal Service.
I am definitely a free market, small government sort of person, but it is absolutely clear that strong net neutrality is desperately needed. Saying we don't need net neutrality would be like someone in the 19th century saying that it was OK for the Pony Express (remember they were a private mail service) rider to interfere with someone else's correspondence sent through the US mail. The fact that private entities provide what has become an absolutely vital public service (in some cases where only a single provider is even an option) is not a reason to try and apply a free market dynamic where it so clearly cannot work. We aren't talking about flower shops or clothing stores. We are talking about the basis of modern daily life. What we really need to consider is whether for every law protecting physical US mail, whether we need an analogous law protecting our packets on the Internet.
I can't believe I actually said/wrote all that, but I recently had an Aha! moment.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of schools scamming veterans. They offer fairly useless courses and the government pays.
At the same time, the rules on what the GI Bill can be used for are really strange in some instances. For example, you can use it toward flight school to get a commercial pilot's license. You can use it for vocational school to get electrical, plumbing, etc., qualified. But you can't use it to get a Ph.D. You also can't use it to get a second degree at the same level as one you already have. Did you get a BA in general studies and now you want an engineering degree? You're on your own. Did you earn a non-technical Master's in a military leadership school and now you want to get a technical Master's in your primary field? Too bad.
The point is that code schools, assuming that they are reputable, should be considered the same as getting certified to fly, or for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc. The reputability problem exists for all of those other fields as well, so it seems disingenuous to say that the GI Bill is OK to use for those other fields, but not for code schools.
It also equally likely that their diversity efforts have resulted in a lower overall experience level for their female engineers. Tech has always had a smaller proportion of women than the general population. If they all of a sudden said "let's hire lots of female engineers," and there are not as many experienced female engineers to poach from other tech companies, then you have to hire newbies and other less experienced folks and train them up.
Have you ever worked with a new or inexperienced engineer or programmer? They tend to write lots of crap code because they lack experience.
Of course, we don't know for sure because the word "experience" appears neither in the WSJ's article nor in The Verge's article. Gee that seems like the sort of basic thing that a study like this would consider.
Don't read a book. Go start a business. "Entrepreneurship" books are largely useless, in my opinion (as a successful entrepreneur).
While I can definitely respect the sentiment, I also like to do a bit of research on things before jumping in. Talking with entrepreneurs (both those are/were successful and those who weren't), I did like The Opportunity Analysis Canvas as a way to help one see the opportunity in the first place (something with which I continually struggle).
Having spent quite a bit of time over the last two years to re-implement in Java a system developed by the government in COBOL, I can tell you that COBOL will probably never die. For example, keeping precise, penny-perfect calculations of dollar amounts in Java is actually quite a pain. This is especially true when the calculations involve dozens of hundreds of steps. My solution in Java has been based around BigDecimal, which makes the code very difficult to read. Aside from that, I have spent the vast majority of the time writing very extensive tests and chasing down really small numeric discrepancies. Guess what, if you decide to replace a COBOL system that does any appreciable amount of math, you would get to do the same thing. Plus, you will never be sure that you found all the bugs.
The project actually considered the possibility of licensing a commercial Cobol runtime for PC-based platforms (e.g., Windows, Linux, etc.), but that was not feasible for several reasons.
COBOL is still remarkably good at quite a few things and leaves out lots of the bells and whistles that tend to become distractions in the hands of undisciplined programmers. My only complaint about COBOL (especially old COBOL) is that the control flow is a real pain. Aside from that, it is definitely a workhorse of a language. No need to go killing it off yet.
If it has a microphone, camera, receives RF, or transmits RF, you can bet that the CIA, NSA, GCHQ, GCSE, ISI, etc., have figured out how to spy on and/or surreptitiously activate the device or have at least given it a serious try.
Why do people continue to be surprised by these revelations?
About the only new information here, I suppose, is the specific devices targeted and the degree of success which they have achieved. Still, if you are concerned about espionage, then treat every electronic device as compromised and you won't have a problem.
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/).
Thanks! I had a look and began reading it last night (when I should have been sleeping). The book is very well written, thorough, and also accessible to students who are still in the early stages of learning about the field.
I am in the process of redesigning a course which I teach on Java and business IT systems and this has inspired me to seek out new materials from the open textbook ecosystem. The current book I use is now quite outdated (the students complain about it and I don't like it) and the new edition removes many of the topics I teach in the course.
This has definitely been a big step in the right direction for me.
I fear that: a) you don't have any experience teaching at the university level; and, b) you don't actually understand the problem. Let me try to educate you.
First, I teach a course at a large public university. I work full time as consultant/developer and I teach a single course as an adjunct. My motivation for doing it, you ask? I thought it would be fun and my fondest memories of my undergraduate education were three adjunct professors who were experienced industry professionals and taught only a single course: their courses were far and away the most enjoyable and relevant to me. I wanted to do something similar, to "give back," if you will.
I was handed an already developed upper division course (the previous professor had retired about the time I was hired) that covers advanced Java programming and business IT system design, so I only had to do some light/moderate updates to the course to suit my preferences and my vision for how the course would go. My total compensation: US$ ~3000/semester, for 3 hours lecture per week + 2-3 hours lecture prep per week + 2-3 hours grading per week + 2-3 hours assisting students per week (call it 10 hours per week for 14 weeks and we won't count the time I spend prior to the start of each semester getting things ready), or 140 hours over 3.5 months, or about $20/hour. As a reference, my consulting rate is right around $200/hour.
That said, I will now address your specific statements.
While this is a good step, the REAL solution is to stop requiring a new edition of the textbook almost annually.
Believe me, I have tried to stick with an older edition of my course text. The course I teach covers Java and I did not like the book the previous professor used. I did a couple of weeks of research prior to my first time teaching the course and found that there were no other decent alternatives that covered all the topics needed for the course. I was unwilling to require two or three books, so I stuck with one mediocre book at $60. That book is only four years old and I have already been getting complaints from students about how outdated it is. It has nothing on JavaFX, nothing on Java 8, etc.
THIS is the huge scam that has created this trap for students. There is almost zero reason for these new additions, however courses often REQUIRE and actually check for them (and often have included coursework, its own scam..).
Well, when I teach we all have to be in agreement about certain things. While some text books do not need to change much (I'm pretty sure algebra is the same now as it was 5 years ago), others do need to change. Java is a great example. A 5 year old Java textbook is not a good fit for my class. Remember, I am not teaching CS fundamentals here (those are probably the same as they were 20 years ago). By the way, every additional hour I spend developing course material lowers the effective hourly rate I am being paid by the university. So, since I am already teaching for 10% of what I normally charge a consulting client, I am not looking to maximize the time I spend doing what amounts to unpaid coursework development.
The problem? This means there is no market for the books second hand!
By allowing a collusion between publishers and courses to effectively kill second hand use of the books, we end up in this situation.
I can tell you that I most certainly do not collude with the publishers. The only "benefit" (if you want to call it that) I get is that as a faculty member I can request a free evaluation copy and they will likely provide it. Their expectation is, I'm sure, that I will select their book and they will get a few hundred sales. Still, for some courses, there is an amazingly limited selection for textbooks, which puts the faculty and students somewhat at the mercy of the publishers and/or authors.
So, just REQUIRE textbooks to have a minimum 5 year life (co
... developer who loves the idea of running a startup, or being one of the ones who got in early. But how exactly does he get there?
Bzzzt! Wrong answer.
Ask yourself this question: could I start a project on SourceForge (or more like GitHub nowadays) and keep it going for 2, 5, 10 years?
The early days are all fun. The company is growing, you are having Nerf gun battles in the conference room, etc. However, after a couple of years the shine starts wear off and it starts to feel more like a job.
Not only that, but if your goal is a "startup" in the Silicon Valley sense of the term (grows quickly and then gets acquired or goes public), you will have deal with most of the following:
spending lots of time shopping your idea to investors
fending off competitors
trying to make payroll
praying to whomever you pray to that Google, MS, and/or Facebook don't decide to blow you away like the speck you are
praying that you will make your revenue targets so that your investors don't step in and replace you with someone who will get them the return they are expecting
the list continues
You will notice that none of those things involve writing software. Don't get me wrong. The core technology that underpins your idea is absolutely critical. However, ideas are a dime a dozen. It is much more difficult to get a working implementation that people are willing to consider investing in is much more difficult. More difficult still is the other 90% of the startup gig that has to happen if you want to be a success.
So, back to my original question. Could you see yourself managing an open source project for the long haul? Open source projects only have to deal with a tiny fraction of the non-programming things that you would have to deal with in a startup environment.
Incidentally my perspective is based on my experience several years ago almost deciding to make a run at it myself. I took some classes at the local Small Business Development Center, talked to some local startup folks, and then promptly decided I don't have what it takes. I stuck with my consulting gig that I've been doing for some years. That suits me much better; someone else gets to deal with all that nonsense and then all I have to do is find companies with problems that match my skill set, which is much easier for me that trying to run a startup.
I get that depending on how you slice and dice the numbers there is anywhere from no pay gap to a full blown social crisis.
However, what I don't get is that while there is always ample representation of gender, race, and ethnicity, there never seems to be anything discussed about longevity in the workforce. Let me explain. If a man starts working right out of college and works continuously to the age of 50 he will have achieved a certain salary, depending upon his career and other factors. If a woman were to do the same I would expect that they would achieve to a comparable level. The same goes for minorities, both men and women. However, if a woman drops out of the fast lane at age 25 or 27 for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, etc., to raise a family (by that I mean either stops working, goes part time, or chooses a different full-time job specifically for the added flexibility or other family-friendly benefits), then at age 50 she simply will not have the same level of experience.
Every time that I hear the gender pay gap brought up I have to wonder if the numbers being analyzed account for that situation. Now, some people advocate making it illegal to be stay at home mom. I don't think that is the right solution. Perhaps we need to encourage fathers to spend more time with their families and less time working.
Either way, boiling it down to a single number: 1) doesn't tell the whole story; and 2) does a disservice to those women who have made a conscious choice to prioritize family above work. My mother did that and I am very happy that she did.
Slashdot Mirror
You lost all non-partisan credibility right there. The Defense of Marriage Act was a special interest proposition by Christians. There is supposed to be a separation of Church and State. Just because you have your beliefs doesn't mean you get to use the government as a vehicle to force your beliefs on everybody. If you think that's the definition of marriage and your community thinks that, great. Support that in your community. Not everyone agrees with you or thinks your belief system is true. Get over it.
I am curious how you inferred my position on the Defense of Marriage Act from what I wrote. I assume you inferred something about my beliefs because you chose to see partisanship where there was none.
What I stated was an objective fact: the Defense of Marriage Act was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Bush. It therefore became the law of the land. If you carefully read the US Constitution it is the legislature's job to make the laws (with the President's signature or overriding a veto) and the executive's job to enforce the laws. We have lots of awful laws on the books and they should be repealed or stricken down whenever possible, but in accordance with the methods set out in the Constitution. However, to say that the executive has latitude to not enforce laws that they don't like threatens the integrity of the entire system of government.
Suppose for a moment that Congress passes a law and the President rejects it with a veto. If Congress successfully overrides the veto and the law goes into effect anyway, can that President or future Presidents choose to ignore the law? Why or why not? If you believe that President Obama did the right thing by ignoring the Defense of Marriage Act, then did he do the right thing by also extra-judicially ordering the assassination of American citizens overseas? You see, I think that the latter was a violation of one or more laws as written (in addition to being an unconstitutional deprivation of the right to life), so it was wrong. Based on that, his decision to ignore the Defense of Marriage Act was also wrong. In the end, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which settled that issue. My personal views on marriage, religion, etc., in no way enter into this.
The problem with your logic is you are putting words in his mouth and then arguing against statements he never made. He never said illegal immigration wasn't a problem. He was I believe inferring it wasn't as big of a problem as it is being made out to be, which is a fair point. Illegal immigration is arguably just an appropriate byproduct of failing immigration policies. Our country needs more workers willing to do jobs US citizens tend to find undesirable but that produce goods US citizens do find desirable at a low cost (like food). Unless we create a legal way to let millions of workers into this country to fill these jobs, we need illegal immigrants. The tragedy is how poorly these immigrants are treated, not that they are here in the first place. The thing to fix is to thank them for the risks they take to improve our country even as our country marginalizes them.
If I put worse in his mount, then that was not my intention. However, I would no more thank someone for violating our immigration laws than I would thank someone for breaking into home and stealing. Also, you have created a false dichotomy the choice is not let in millions of immigrants willing to do undesirable jobs so we can have products or don't let them in and go without. We could let the marketplace figure out how to fill the gaps. Of course, that doesn't appeal to statists (not saying that you are one, just pointing it out).
Thankfully we have people willing to break our laws when they are unjust and harm our country, just like we had people willing to fight against slavery while that was still legal. The thought that the rule of law is more important than human decency is a horrible source of evil in this world. It is a shameful belief to hold.
You can't seriously compare the current immigration situation to slavery. The issue with slavery as an institution and the associated laws was that it removed inalienable rights from certain classes of people. Nobody has a right to enter another country. That sort of thing is a privilege. Now, you may think that we should extend the privilege to more people, slavery and immigration are nowhere close to related in the sense which you have connected them. I am curious what your basis is for declaring current immigration laws unjust? What human right are the violating?
The problem with your logic is that you think this is about illegal immigrants. Your entire rest of your post rests on the presumption that this is all Trump cares about. If that were the case, Slashdotters wouldn't be so excited by the notion he's going to "do something" about H1-Bs. Do you think H1-Bs are illegal? For the matter, look at what Trump is actually doing, to thunderous applause from his supporters: Do you think being a refugee and turning up at an American airport is illegal? Do you think that having a visa issued by an American embassy in a country that's suffering war or terrorism is illega?
I never said or implied any of those things. H-1B is an economic/jobs issue hiding in the immigration debate. Personally, I think H-1B is badly broken, but for economic reasons, not because I dislike immigrants or immigration. In fact, I come from a family of immigrants and I know many immigrants who have come here (legally) and done great things for their families, communities, and for the country. I think that we should help refugees, but I think throwing the doors open without acknowledging that we may in the process allow in those who wish to harm us and without trying to do something about that is disingenuous. Of course, we send lots of foreign aid to war ravaged places, but then that may not be enough and that is part of the debate in the current discourse on immigration policy.
Look again at the words Trump uses. He's not talking about how Mexicans are here without valid visas and making some nuanced point about the consequences of immigration outside of the legal immigration framework that applies to everyone else.
No, he's flat out stating that Mexicans who come to America are rapists, murderers, and drug pushers.
Well, this is in fact true in many cases. How to do you think we end up with such a huge supply of illegal drugs here? Perhaps people order it through Amazon? Seriously, the truth is that many countries export good and bad people. Look at the Cuban community (I know a little something about this). Those who came in the "first wave" after the revolution were mostly educated and hard working. Those who came later (particularly during the Mariel boatlift) were mostly not; there were lots of criminals in the latter group. There are other immigrant communities in the US with similar issues. As much as people argue that Trump's statements make him prejudiced (hint: they are not racist, as Mexican is not a race), the evidence in the form of crime statistics shows that there is some truth to what he says.
You're another variant of the kind of person I'm criticizing, because you've decided to not to care about what Trumps actual reasons are, instead just hoping the fact he's "anti-immigration" means he'll fix an immigration-related issue you care about. He doesn't care about your reasons. He's not doing it for you. He's doing it because immigrants are a convenient scapegoat. His goal is to get you to blame America's problems on immigrants, because it's a hell of a lot easier to ban people from entering America than it is to fix America's problems for real.
See, you have completely missed the mark with me. I come from an immigrant family, have many immigrant friends and colleagues, and am decidedly in favor of immigration. However, I believe that those who seek to come to the US without respect for its laws should not be allowed stay or should not be allowed in to begin with.
You imply that I somehow agree with Trump's position on immigration, when I said no such thing. What I agree with him on is that the government has been dysfunctional and too meddlesome for far too long. (It is interesting to note that Obama made transparency a key component of his campaigns, which I thought was a good thing and a great first step to fixing the dysfunction in the federal government, but then did nothing meaningful to actually deliver; in fact he continued with the dr
Your entire post has left me shaking my head. I have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. Since I can't possibly address everything, I will pick on this:
This is not about jobs. This is about scapegoating immigrants for America's problems, and then "dealing" with immigrants as a substitute for dealing with the actual problems America has.
The problem with your logic is that you don't see people violating our laws and the government not enforcing the laws as a problem. We are going on 20 years of presidents picking and choosing which laws they like/dislike (Obama failing to enforce and vigorously defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Bush deciding that pesky things like the Fourth Amendment were more advisory in nature, and others). In fact it is the only thing the current generation has even seen presidents do.
People have become so accustomed to cheering when their guy ignores the laws they don't like and screaming when the other side's guy ignores the laws they do like, that when somebody comes along and says he wants actually enforce the laws (motivation aside) everybody loses their minds.
Personally, I think our immigration system is a train wreck. However, I believe that the rule of law is more important, so the proper sequence of events is enforce the laws on the books as they stand now so that the executive branch gets to what its like to actually do their jobs. Once that is in order people can start writing their representatives to get the mess fixed. People can even start writing their representatives now and get some work started on fixing that in parallel. What Trump is doing is an attempt to fix the problem. You probably disagree with his approach, but he is still trying to do something.
The crazy thing is that Obama twice campaigned successfully by wooing the immigrant community with his promises of fixing immigration. He had the ability and opportunity to fix this. Both times he didn't lift a finger. Check that, he lifted one finger: his middle finger right in their faces.
Like it or not, lots of people immigrate legally to the US, as much of a pain as it is. The way we have handled illegal immigration for the past few decades is just a slap in the face to people who have come here in a way that respects our laws.
We've understood the basics of the greenhouse effect for over a century; we've had good measurements of infrared absorption spectra for sixty years; we've had good overall models of how it affects temperature for fifty years now; and we've been making detailed measurements of atmospheric profiles and the incident solar forcing factor for thirty years. The overall picture of how human-emitted greenhouse gasses play in climate is understood.
There is still a lot of science being done, but this is is filling in the fine details. The overall picture is not controversial (at least, not by scientists).
We also thought that we knew that the appendix was a useless organ, only now we are beginning to understand that it is in fact useful. For centuries we thought that "humors" were the key to understanding the body and that bleeding was a good treatment for many ailments. After we have improved the science we look back and realize how little we really understood.
If you think that in a couple of centuries humanity will not look back at this period and time and say something like "wow, we really didn't understand the true effect of humanity on the global environment," then you haven't been paying attention to how science has advanced in the last century.
That's OK, though. I am accustomed to being berated for not kowtowing to the accepted orthodox politically correct view of things. It comes with the territory.
Human-induced climate change is real... but this article is alarmism.
Climate change is real, but how much of a role humans play in it is something we will not fully understand for a long time.
That said, this is definitely alarmism. There is a reason why even just a few hundred years ago, even a few decades ago, places like what are today Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, etc. had very few people living there: those places suck without modern air conditioning.
Sure there were wealthy people who wintered in Florida (Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were even next door neighbors during winter on the gulf coast). Sure there were people who lived on the coast year round or in the mountains in the southwest year round, because those were the only tolerable locations in those otherwise intolerable climates. But with things like air conditioning and draining wetlands, very dense populations of people now live year round in places where people simply didn't live before.
Las Vegas is another great example. Imagine a city of 2,000,000 in the middle of the Sahara or some similarly inhospitable place. Of course when temperatures stay mostly in the "normal" range for those places, modern conveniences make them reasonably comfortable. However, our modern conveniences are at times no match for the extremes.
It is the same reason people sometimes freeze to death in cold climates. Though, I don't recall similar alarmism associated with that, even though in the last few winters, in North America at least, most places have experienced much colder than normal temperatures and people have died as a result.
... software takes an increasingly starring role in an expanding range of products whose failure could result in bodily harm and even death. Anything less than such a threat might not be able to budge software engineers into taking greater security precautions.
What you are seeing is the maturing of software engineering as a profession. A few hundred years ago if you needed surgery you would go to your barber. The reason for this was that they were usually in possession of the right tools. The medical profession eventually matured to what we have today, where a surgeon is a specialized physician. But that didn't happen overnight and lots of people died in the process. In fact, we didn't even have a theory of infectious disease until the 1830s.
The point is that right now hardware, including its firmware components, is oftentimes made without the involvement of a software engineer. It wasn't that long ago that software engineers didn't even exist and in time as the profession matures we will get to the point where developing a piece of hardware without the participation of a software engineer will be unthinkable. But we are not there yet.
An important side note is that there is a difference between a coder, a developer, a programmer, a software engineer, and several other specialized disciplines in the software arena. I think that a precondition to solving the problem identified by the article has less to do with things like development methodology (that is not central the problem at hand) and more to do with establishing minimum standards for some who claims to be a software engineer. For instance, a surgeon in 2017 has to meet vastly different minimum qualifications than a surgeon did in 1917. We didn't even have software engineers a hundred years ago, so who knows what it will actually looks like by the time the field really starts to mature.
Name these people, please.
Flynn, for starters.
Look, I think Trump has a chance to drive some good change for our country. Please note that I thought the same of Obama, based on some of his campaign promises, but was sadly disappointed (I am not holding my breath for Trump). What remains to be seen is whether Trump will actually succeed in that, or whether he will go the route of Obama: expend all his political capital on a single issue, lose the advantage of both House and Senate majorities of the same political party as a result (given the disenchantment of lots of conservatives with lack of progress, this could happen), discard 99% of his campaign promises (Trump already seems headed down this particular path), and then spend the remainder of his time in office trying to shore up the one single accomplishment and then praying his successor doesn't undo it.
That said, pretending that the Trump administration doesn't have serious problems at this point doesn't help anyone: Trump, the administration, or the American people.
This is tricky because most people don't get the issues related to open/closed source. Remember that the majority of people now have smart phones and tablets with their walled garden of app ecosystems. The idea of libre software simply does not occur to them. They likely didn't grow up learning computers in the era when source code commonly shipped with the computer and you could inspect/tweak it if something went wrong.
That said, I firmly believe that any software which is used in determining innocence/guilt, sentencing, criminal culpability, civil liability, etc., should be open source. Sentencing is an interesting one, though, because in that case I think it would be acceptable (assuming there are no other alternatives) to settle for a closed source product with a public specification and comprehensive set of test cases which satisfactorily demonstrate that the software performs in conformance to the written spec.
There also needs to be a contractual commitment on the part of the vendor to update the software (and spec and test suite) in a timely manner when unexpected results are encountered for previously unspecific input conditions or edge cases, etc.
That said, if you have a strong opinion regarding this, then you are welcome to start an open source project, form a lobbying organization, and get your open source solution adopted in as many jurisdictions as you can manage. Given the way that governments work, you can probably form a firm that also provides paid support for the product.
You are opted-in to just about everything by default and have to set hundreds of settings to opt out, even on an Enterprise Windows system. Sometimes multiple settings for the same feature. Most Microsoft documentation discourages opting out and warns of a less optimal experience... But you can't completely opt-out. Windows still tracks too much.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this essentially the definition of "defective by design?"
The increasingly hostile and draconian moves by Microsoft simply serve to prove that the majority of Microsoft customers are in a co-dependent relationship with Microsoft: afraid that no matter how bad things are with Microsoft, they will be worse without Microsoft. It must suck to live like that.
I know, I know. Some people cannot ditch Microsoft, but most people can and it would cost them only marginally more effort (and probably less in many cases) than they expend dealing with all the crap Microsoft is throwing at their customers these days.
A misdiagnosis by a human physician can only be analyzed and argued about. A misdiagnosis by an AI physician can be forensically investigated. It can even be perfectly reenacted, both with the same and different inputs. That would allow, for example, a determination of whether the fault was a design flaw or a problem with the supplied inputs.
This would allow for very precise determination of responsibility. Today, if the patient omits some medically relevant detail and a misdiagnosis occurs, the human physician can only argue that he could have possibly come to a different conclusion with the additional information. With an AI, we can feed the updated parameters to it and actually see whether the result would or would not have been different. If the result would have in fact been different and correct, then the fault lies with the patient, or possible whomever was responsible for collecting the input data. If the result would not have changed, then there is a possible design flaw for which the developer/manufacturer may be held liable.
In my mind, this can only mean an improvement from where things currently stand.
So, I read the article and the point completely eludes me. There is no news here. There are no facts. It reads like it is trying to be a think-piece, but contains no actual information. Even a think piece, with a primary purpose of expressing an opinion, needs to have some sort of basis in facts or information.
This "article" reads more like the introduction to a manifest, or some sort of random pontification.
Don't get me wrong, it is sure to prompt a robust discussion here on /., but the piece itself is not really that exciting.
That said, my perspective is that programming (analysis, coding, testing, etc.) is enjoyable, possibly even "fun," for the simple reason that I enjoy solving complex problems. When I was younger I spent lots of time playing videogames. As I got older and more experienced as a software engineer I began to realize that playing video games (good ones) and developing software are actually the same activity. Except that the former rarely results in a lasting benefit, while the latter is easier to get paid to do.
So, to me, it is the functional equivalent of getting paid to play videogames all day. I can count on one hand the number of days I have not looked forward to going to work in the last few years. So, yes it is complex and has an ethical dimension, but is also lots of fun.
Ah, yes, good old machine learning.
Don't you think in the course of human history it would be easier to use our noses than DOMESTICATE AND TRAIN ANOTHER ANIMAL to learn what we want?
From the summary:
One study found that cows have 2,000 such genes - far more than dogs.
Cows were probably domesticated before dogs, so it stands to reason that we could have had bomb sniffing cows and cadaver cows.
There is a reason that we had a Postmaster General (1775) before we had a President: communication is vitally important to both government and the people. That is also why the Postmaster General was a cabinet post for nearly 150 years.
There were and still are strict laws which penalize anyone interfering with the delivery, processing, etc. of the US mail. In 2017, the Internet is even more important to government and the people than the Postal Service.
I am definitely a free market, small government sort of person, but it is absolutely clear that strong net neutrality is desperately needed. Saying we don't need net neutrality would be like someone in the 19th century saying that it was OK for the Pony Express (remember they were a private mail service) rider to interfere with someone else's correspondence sent through the US mail. The fact that private entities provide what has become an absolutely vital public service (in some cases where only a single provider is even an option) is not a reason to try and apply a free market dynamic where it so clearly cannot work. We aren't talking about flower shops or clothing stores. We are talking about the basis of modern daily life. What we really need to consider is whether for every law protecting physical US mail, whether we need an analogous law protecting our packets on the Internet.
I can't believe I actually said/wrote all that, but I recently had an Aha! moment.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of schools scamming veterans. They offer fairly useless courses and the government pays.
At the same time, the rules on what the GI Bill can be used for are really strange in some instances. For example, you can use it toward flight school to get a commercial pilot's license. You can use it for vocational school to get electrical, plumbing, etc., qualified. But you can't use it to get a Ph.D. You also can't use it to get a second degree at the same level as one you already have. Did you get a BA in general studies and now you want an engineering degree? You're on your own. Did you earn a non-technical Master's in a military leadership school and now you want to get a technical Master's in your primary field? Too bad.
The point is that code schools, assuming that they are reputable, should be considered the same as getting certified to fly, or for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc. The reputability problem exists for all of those other fields as well, so it seems disingenuous to say that the GI Bill is OK to use for those other fields, but not for code schools.
It also equally likely that their diversity efforts have resulted in a lower overall experience level for their female engineers. Tech has always had a smaller proportion of women than the general population. If they all of a sudden said "let's hire lots of female engineers," and there are not as many experienced female engineers to poach from other tech companies, then you have to hire newbies and other less experienced folks and train them up.
Have you ever worked with a new or inexperienced engineer or programmer? They tend to write lots of crap code because they lack experience.
Of course, we don't know for sure because the word "experience" appears neither in the WSJ's article nor in The Verge's article. Gee that seems like the sort of basic thing that a study like this would consider.
Don't read a book. Go start a business. "Entrepreneurship" books are largely useless, in my opinion (as a successful entrepreneur).
While I can definitely respect the sentiment, I also like to do a bit of research on things before jumping in. Talking with entrepreneurs (both those are/were successful and those who weren't), I did like The Opportunity Analysis Canvas as a way to help one see the opportunity in the first place (something with which I continually struggle).
Having spent quite a bit of time over the last two years to re-implement in Java a system developed by the government in COBOL, I can tell you that COBOL will probably never die. For example, keeping precise, penny-perfect calculations of dollar amounts in Java is actually quite a pain. This is especially true when the calculations involve dozens of hundreds of steps. My solution in Java has been based around BigDecimal, which makes the code very difficult to read. Aside from that, I have spent the vast majority of the time writing very extensive tests and chasing down really small numeric discrepancies. Guess what, if you decide to replace a COBOL system that does any appreciable amount of math, you would get to do the same thing. Plus, you will never be sure that you found all the bugs.
The project actually considered the possibility of licensing a commercial Cobol runtime for PC-based platforms (e.g., Windows, Linux, etc.), but that was not feasible for several reasons.
COBOL is still remarkably good at quite a few things and leaves out lots of the bells and whistles that tend to become distractions in the hands of undisciplined programmers. My only complaint about COBOL (especially old COBOL) is that the control flow is a real pain. Aside from that, it is definitely a workhorse of a language. No need to go killing it off yet.
News Flash!
If it has a microphone, camera, receives RF, or transmits RF, you can bet that the CIA, NSA, GCHQ, GCSE, ISI, etc., have figured out how to spy on and/or surreptitiously activate the device or have at least given it a serious try.
Why do people continue to be surprised by these revelations?
About the only new information here, I suppose, is the specific devices targeted and the degree of success which they have achieved. Still, if you are concerned about espionage, then treat every electronic device as compromised and you won't have a problem.
I published in 2015 a textbook about operating systems (http://sistop.org/).
Thanks! I had a look and began reading it last night (when I should have been sleeping). The book is very well written, thorough, and also accessible to students who are still in the early stages of learning about the field.
I am in the process of redesigning a course which I teach on Java and business IT systems and this has inspired me to seek out new materials from the open textbook ecosystem. The current book I use is now quite outdated (the students complain about it and I don't like it) and the new edition removes many of the topics I teach in the course.
This has definitely been a big step in the right direction for me.
I fear that: a) you don't have any experience teaching at the university level; and, b) you don't actually understand the problem. Let me try to educate you.
First, I teach a course at a large public university. I work full time as consultant/developer and I teach a single course as an adjunct. My motivation for doing it, you ask? I thought it would be fun and my fondest memories of my undergraduate education were three adjunct professors who were experienced industry professionals and taught only a single course: their courses were far and away the most enjoyable and relevant to me. I wanted to do something similar, to "give back," if you will.
I was handed an already developed upper division course (the previous professor had retired about the time I was hired) that covers advanced Java programming and business IT system design, so I only had to do some light/moderate updates to the course to suit my preferences and my vision for how the course would go. My total compensation: US$ ~3000/semester, for 3 hours lecture per week + 2-3 hours lecture prep per week + 2-3 hours grading per week + 2-3 hours assisting students per week (call it 10 hours per week for 14 weeks and we won't count the time I spend prior to the start of each semester getting things ready), or 140 hours over 3.5 months, or about $20/hour. As a reference, my consulting rate is right around $200/hour.
That said, I will now address your specific statements.
While this is a good step, the REAL solution is to stop requiring a new edition of the textbook almost annually.
Believe me, I have tried to stick with an older edition of my course text. The course I teach covers Java and I did not like the book the previous professor used. I did a couple of weeks of research prior to my first time teaching the course and found that there were no other decent alternatives that covered all the topics needed for the course. I was unwilling to require two or three books, so I stuck with one mediocre book at $60. That book is only four years old and I have already been getting complaints from students about how outdated it is. It has nothing on JavaFX, nothing on Java 8, etc.
THIS is the huge scam that has created this trap for students. There is almost zero reason for these new additions, however courses often REQUIRE and actually check for them (and often have included coursework, its own scam..).
Well, when I teach we all have to be in agreement about certain things. While some text books do not need to change much (I'm pretty sure algebra is the same now as it was 5 years ago), others do need to change. Java is a great example. A 5 year old Java textbook is not a good fit for my class. Remember, I am not teaching CS fundamentals here (those are probably the same as they were 20 years ago). By the way, every additional hour I spend developing course material lowers the effective hourly rate I am being paid by the university. So, since I am already teaching for 10% of what I normally charge a consulting client, I am not looking to maximize the time I spend doing what amounts to unpaid coursework development.
The problem? This means there is no market for the books second hand!
By allowing a collusion between publishers and courses to effectively kill second hand use of the books, we end up in this situation.
I can tell you that I most certainly do not collude with the publishers. The only "benefit" (if you want to call it that) I get is that as a faculty member I can request a free evaluation copy and they will likely provide it. Their expectation is, I'm sure, that I will select their book and they will get a few hundred sales. Still, for some courses, there is an amazingly limited selection for textbooks, which puts the faculty and students somewhat at the mercy of the publishers and/or authors.
So, just REQUIRE textbooks to have a minimum 5 year life (co
... Nightmare Scenario Where AI Runs the Financial World
As opposed to the natural stupidity that currently runs it? How could the AI be worse?
... developer who loves the idea of running a startup, or being one of the ones who got in early. But how exactly does he get there?
Bzzzt! Wrong answer.
Ask yourself this question: could I start a project on SourceForge (or more like GitHub nowadays) and keep it going for 2, 5, 10 years?
The early days are all fun. The company is growing, you are having Nerf gun battles in the conference room, etc. However, after a couple of years the shine starts wear off and it starts to feel more like a job.
Not only that, but if your goal is a "startup" in the Silicon Valley sense of the term (grows quickly and then gets acquired or goes public), you will have deal with most of the following:
You will notice that none of those things involve writing software. Don't get me wrong. The core technology that underpins your idea is absolutely critical. However, ideas are a dime a dozen. It is much more difficult to get a working implementation that people are willing to consider investing in is much more difficult. More difficult still is the other 90% of the startup gig that has to happen if you want to be a success.
So, back to my original question. Could you see yourself managing an open source project for the long haul? Open source projects only have to deal with a tiny fraction of the non-programming things that you would have to deal with in a startup environment.
Incidentally my perspective is based on my experience several years ago almost deciding to make a run at it myself. I took some classes at the local Small Business Development Center, talked to some local startup folks, and then promptly decided I don't have what it takes. I stuck with my consulting gig that I've been doing for some years. That suits me much better; someone else gets to deal with all that nonsense and then all I have to do is find companies with problems that match my skill set, which is much easier for me that trying to run a startup.
I get that depending on how you slice and dice the numbers there is anywhere from no pay gap to a full blown social crisis.
However, what I don't get is that while there is always ample representation of gender, race, and ethnicity, there never seems to be anything discussed about longevity in the workforce. Let me explain. If a man starts working right out of college and works continuously to the age of 50 he will have achieved a certain salary, depending upon his career and other factors. If a woman were to do the same I would expect that they would achieve to a comparable level. The same goes for minorities, both men and women. However, if a woman drops out of the fast lane at age 25 or 27 for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, etc., to raise a family (by that I mean either stops working, goes part time, or chooses a different full-time job specifically for the added flexibility or other family-friendly benefits), then at age 50 she simply will not have the same level of experience.
Every time that I hear the gender pay gap brought up I have to wonder if the numbers being analyzed account for that situation. Now, some people advocate making it illegal to be stay at home mom. I don't think that is the right solution. Perhaps we need to encourage fathers to spend more time with their families and less time working.
Either way, boiling it down to a single number: 1) doesn't tell the whole story; and 2) does a disservice to those women who have made a conscious choice to prioritize family above work. My mother did that and I am very happy that she did.