For sporting purposes there's no need for positive definitions of both "male" and "female", creating a third category for those excluded by both definitions. All we need is a definition of "female" to allow females into the less competitive "women's" category, and everyone else goes in the other category (which is called "men's" only for aesthetic reasons, to be symmetric with the "women's" category).
The simplest and most obvious dividing line is the Y chromosome -- anybody who has them does not qualify for the "women's" category. The number of X chromosomes is irrelevant. (E.g. XXX is female, XXY is male.) Definitions involving sperm, ova, or cultural gender identity are cumbersome, ambiguous, difficult to implement, and lead to absurd results.
If Caster Semenya has a Y chromosome then she's disqualified from the women's sporting categories. How she looks or acts, and whether she "can" produce ova at some time in her life, is irrelevant.
That's a beautiful use of basic reverse psychology to get an article past the Wikipedia gatekeepers. I hope the article included something to the effect of "... prefers to have flaming bee-covered cactus shoved up his ass..."
I encrypt lots of data that I have no "reason" to protect. E.g.: TrueCrypt FDE on my notebook in case it stolen from a hotel room or whatever. I doubt there's anything even as salacious as a lolcat on that machine. E.g.: expensive drives that might have to be returned under warranty -- some failure modes prevent complete erasure before return. Basically there's always something somewhere that I wouldn't want to share with the entire world -- it's not illegal or super-secret or anything, it's just private or confidential -- and I'd rather not have to fret about it should a hard drive go missing for whatever reason.
Effectively unbreakable encryption is so cheap any more that there's no reason to use anything weaker, even when you don't really "need" it.
I have plenty of old hard drives lying around now with forgotten FDE passwords or just dumps of/dev/random (which is good for secure erasure). Fortunately I don't live in the UK so I don't have to keep all my data storage fully browsable for the police at all times.
Obviously the total mass of the bomb puts an upper limit on its "TNT equivalent", assuming that whatever explosives it contains are roughly equivalent to TNT. My point was that this bomb is much less powerful than even the smallest nuke. Its use won't have any global geological or climatic implications.
Women aged 20-29 were nearly 29 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.
Women aged 40-49 were about 25.5 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.
I'm 150 pounds heavier than I was in 1960. Time to diet?
I have a particularly vivid memory of going to the theater to see "Total Recall" (because it was based on a Philip K Dick story) and watching the kids in front of me cheering and howling with laughter when a bystander was graphically ripped apart by gunfire in one of the fight scenes. I pretty much stopped going to the theater after that.
Find Slashdot account settings link, open settings page.
Figure out which subpage controls comment display, open it.
Scroll around hunting for the checkbox that controls sig display, toggle it.
Scroll around to the "save settings" button and push it.
Re-open comment, read sig, discover that it's completely retarded and useless like all other sigs... oh yeah, that's why they were turned off in the first place.
Reverse above process to re-disable sigs.
Thanks, Taco. That's so much better than just showing a member's sig in their user page.
My problem is the number of **attractive** girls taking my class. There are girls, and then there are girls.
How is that a problem? Back when I was a math major in college, there were **attractive** female math majors, but my girlfriend was an **attractive** female bio/chem major.
Thinking back further... some of the girls in my high school math classes were reasonably pretty and pretty brainy... which in my book is **attractive**. Of course, at that age I considered almost all girls **attractive**, so I have a hard time imagining what you're complaining about.
A guy I know well enough to know for certain he's innocent got charged with possession of child pornography because of some crap that got dumped into his pwned PC. He lost his job (university professor) as a result and the case is still slowly grinding through the legal system, though it's looking less and less likely as time goes on that he will ever be convicted. Unfortunately when the stigma of kiddie porn is invoked the damage is done long before the case goes to trial.
I tell his story to anyone who casually dismisses PC security issues, because my friend's life is completely and irrevocably fucked as a result of his naive and by no means extraordinary security lapse.
In the USA no judge can override a jury acquittal. If the jury decide that the defendant shouldn't be punished and declare him "not guilty" then he's free to go, facts and law notwithstanding. The idea that juries cannot "decide matters of law" only applies to setting precedent: such decisions have no bearing on similar cases in the future.
Asking what came before the big bang is like asking what's north of the north pole. There is no such thing as time before the big bang so nothing caused it.
Slashdot Mirror
For sporting purposes there's no need for positive definitions of both "male" and "female", creating a third category for those excluded by both definitions. All we need is a definition of "female" to allow females into the less competitive "women's" category, and everyone else goes in the other category (which is called "men's" only for aesthetic reasons, to be symmetric with the "women's" category).
The simplest and most obvious dividing line is the Y chromosome -- anybody who has them does not qualify for the "women's" category. The number of X chromosomes is irrelevant. (E.g. XXX is female, XXY is male.) Definitions involving sperm, ova, or cultural gender identity are cumbersome, ambiguous, difficult to implement, and lead to absurd results.
If Caster Semenya has a Y chromosome then she's disqualified from the women's sporting categories. How she looks or acts, and whether she "can" produce ova at some time in her life, is irrelevant.
That's a beautiful use of basic reverse psychology to get an article past the Wikipedia gatekeepers. I hope the article included something to the effect of "... prefers to have flaming bee-covered cactus shoved up his ass ..."
I encrypt lots of data that I have no "reason" to protect. E.g.: TrueCrypt FDE on my notebook in case it stolen from a hotel room or whatever. I doubt there's anything even as salacious as a lolcat on that machine. E.g.: expensive drives that might have to be returned under warranty -- some failure modes prevent complete erasure before return. Basically there's always something somewhere that I wouldn't want to share with the entire world -- it's not illegal or super-secret or anything, it's just private or confidential -- and I'd rather not have to fret about it should a hard drive go missing for whatever reason.
Effectively unbreakable encryption is so cheap any more that there's no reason to use anything weaker, even when you don't really "need" it.
I have plenty of old hard drives lying around now with forgotten FDE passwords or just dumps of /dev/random (which is good for secure erasure). Fortunately I don't live in the UK so I don't have to keep all my data storage fully browsable for the police at all times.
Obviously the total mass of the bomb puts an upper limit on its "TNT equivalent", assuming that whatever explosives it contains are roughly equivalent to TNT. My point was that this bomb is much less powerful than even the smallest nuke. Its use won't have any global geological or climatic implications.
30,000 pounds is 15 tons. That's 1000 times less than even a very small nuke.
Then, a few years later, dead. Just like you.
So it goes.
I'm 150 pounds heavier than I was in 1960. Time to diet?
Everybody knows all Perl scripts are generated by Perl scripts.
I have a particularly vivid memory of going to the theater to see "Total Recall" (because it was based on a Philip K Dick story) and watching the kids in front of me cheering and howling with laughter when a bystander was graphically ripped apart by gunfire in one of the fight scenes. I pretty much stopped going to the theater after that.
Yeah, that'll happen any day now. 10,000 generations in a row with no progress ... we're definitely due for it.
To view GP's sig:
Thanks, Taco. That's so much better than just showing a member's sig in their user page.
Did you use expensive medical treatments to overcome infertility, and do you consider such an effort heroic? If not, then no.
No. A professor is someone who professes. Fuck all that ivory-tower academic snobbery bullshit.
Why cordless? So he can do it in the car, on the way to the hospital, just in case?
How is that a problem? Back when I was a math major in college, there were **attractive** female math majors, but my girlfriend was an **attractive** female bio/chem major.
Thinking back further ... some of the girls in my high school math classes were reasonably pretty and pretty brainy ... which in my book is **attractive**. Of course, at that age I considered almost all girls **attractive**, so I have a hard time imagining what you're complaining about.
Aren't they all descended from Abraham? And less immediately, aren't we all descended from Adam and Eve?
Quit your mad-scientist daydreaming and just get a frickin' parrot already. You can teach them to curse in about 10 minutes.
Be sure to avoid the Norwegian Blue variety though -- they are slow learners.
It's not necessarily a lie.
A guy I know well enough to know for certain he's innocent got charged with possession of child pornography because of some crap that got dumped into his pwned PC. He lost his job (university professor) as a result and the case is still slowly grinding through the legal system, though it's looking less and less likely as time goes on that he will ever be convicted. Unfortunately when the stigma of kiddie porn is invoked the damage is done long before the case goes to trial.
I tell his story to anyone who casually dismisses PC security issues, because my friend's life is completely and irrevocably fucked as a result of his naive and by no means extraordinary security lapse.
Yeah, just like we couldn't possibly give a damn about billion year old data archives on Mars. Old news, booooooring!
In the USA no judge can override a jury acquittal. If the jury decide that the defendant shouldn't be punished and declare him "not guilty" then he's free to go, facts and law notwithstanding. The idea that juries cannot "decide matters of law" only applies to setting precedent: such decisions have no bearing on similar cases in the future.
Asking what came before the big bang is like asking what's north of the north pole. There is no such thing as time before the big bang so nothing caused it.
Any adult who can't remember being a 9 year old has some serious memory problems.
"prove a negative"?
Follow any of the links and never use that idiotic phrase again.
Laptops never have ECC memory. There's no way I'd leave a server running 24x7 for months on end without ECC.