It is a question of vested interests and poor incentives. Elected judges and elected prosecutors - how can you not end up with poor decisions? Poorly thought through kneejerk laws, like asset forfeiture and three strike life sentences - how can you have justice with a system like this?
It is, although a lot of the vested interests and poor incentives problem is not arising at that level. Almost everyone working in the system is trying to do a good job with too few resources, but incentives shape behavior and cause problems even when people are trying to do that.
A basic problem with democracies is that they overcriminalize because elected people want to look like they are doing something about crime. We've known this for centuries, going back to Jeremy Bentham, but there is still very little effort done against it.
The Smarter Sentencing Act, which is something both democrats and republicans on the Judiciary Committee have agreed would be a good thing, and would save probably thousands or tens-of-thousands of man-years of prison time, has been approved by the committee for years and still languishes without getting a vote on the floor.
What can technology do? The first thing is that it can help people petition Congress, for one thing--email your Congressman and (Where your voice can do more good) your state legislatures. America leads the developed world in criminals--ask them to make it a real priority to change that, and provide concrete steps such as funding more alternatives to imprisonment, supporting the Smarter Sentencing Act and other reasonable sentencing reductions, and asking them to put together a plan to reduce recidivism and the collateral civil consequences of conviction such as lack of employability.
The second thing is technology--more accurately, science--can inform the jury. No jury should sit without learning about the reliability and lack of reliability of eyewitness testimony.
Any race advanced enough to travel here to invade will have capabilities way beyond anything we could hope to combat or detect. I would imagine the first sign you would have would be if you were one of the lucky ones to see half the world wiped out a few seconds before you yourself were removed from this mortal realm.
Well, I think when they start posting on slashdot asking about the possibility of detection, that's a pretty good first sign.
> Would their "old" technology do them a lick of good when a thousand M1 tanks rolled across the field at them? What about when Predator drones are flying overhead launching missiles at their supply depots behind the lines?
Just like the US military in Iraq, right? Or the British, Russian, and now US armies in Afghanistan for the last 150 years? Or both Napoleon and Hitler invading Moscow? While a thousand armored vehicles would flatten any native standing army any interstellar military force has _incredibly_ long supply lines. If transportation and communications are cheap and quick, and the invader's resources large enough, natives can be conquered quickly and thoroughly. But if the supply lines are long, slow, and expensive as we've seen in Terran warfare, we've seen amazing feats of local defenders against invading armies.
If the natives weapons have _any_ effect, home turf advantage and guerrilla warfare are well established and critical factors. One of the critical keys to warfare is the _economics_. Is it worth the resources to commit the invasion justified by the gain? And at interstellar ranges, what does the supply line cost?
It depends on the objectives. If the objective is to obliterate us and there are no rules of engagement, that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to subjugate us or change our government to a functioning democracy while trying not to kill many civilians.
This. There is also an element of randomness, but the quality of the lawyers matters a lot.
If there was no language or contract saying otherwise, then the school's offer created a power of acceptance among the students at the least, and anyone who told the school they would go in that time now has a contract with the school.
If there were early decision applicants, then the school's acceptance likewise created the contract.
Finally, if there were students who materially changed their position in reasonable reliance on the acceptance, they likely also have a contract.
This proves that all the whining about the NSA has little to do with actual worries (as if anyone in the government actually cares about their porn viewing habits), and more to do with overwrought anti-Americanism.
No, it doesn't.
We are more concerned about the NSA doing it because it has a bigger budget and because, for a lot of slashdotters, it's our government that's doing it. It's still a subject for humor, but nevertheless a real social policy concern. I've met a lot of great guys who work in law enforcement whom I would generally trust not to abuse the powers created by massive surveillance, but the problem arises when too much trust is given and there isn't enough oversight of how it is used. As it is, the public is not given any believable claim to even the existence of meaningful oversight.
That means bad actors within the system can use it to spy on people they know, on their own ex-wives, for example. And while they might get severely disciplined if they're caught, the public hasn't been told how likely it is that they're caught.
It also means the system can be used to blackmail VIPs, power-brokers, reporters, and legislators. While most of the people involved would not use it for that, it only takes one or two people to be willing to do that and a lack of *perfect* oversight and reporting for a system like this to utterly threaten and destroy any notion of representative government.
Imagine you have a database of every Congressman's phone calls, or even every third or fourth phone call that happens to be to someone within a three-hop warrant of a terrorist.
I vilify Marijuana because it smells really awful.
So long as you smoke it where that scent doesn't regularly affect your neighbors, though, let's just look at studies--like this one--to decide whether and where it's acceptable to use.
I think the intelligence community has done more harm than good more often than not.
I think American foreign policy has done more harm than good to America more often than not.
Throughout history, it has been the use of power which has undermined empires, and the threat of the use of power which makes them most effective. Wars are costly and can be unpredictable; they have almost always much more expensive than planned and almost always much less useful, except at certain very defined tasks. (Giving someone a temporary boost to poll numbers, uniting a country against a perceived threat, acting as a salve to respond to demand for war that leaders are afraid to turn down).
There are also other risks inherent in war. You train a large number of soldiers and give them weapons and training, which means that every day, your nation is fundamentally dependent upon their loyalty to survive--sometimes to defend it, but ALWAYS to not change the government or take over the government or turn on the country.
Getting sued for being honest about not doing something is a bit much though, even for USA.
According to the plaintiffs, she was not being honest. There is also the matter that, according to the plaintiffs, she was paid (indirectly through her husband's estate) and contractually bound to keep her mouth shut. I have no idea what "the truth" is, but I don't think it is black and white. If she doesn't want to abide by the terms of the contract, she should at least be compelled to disgorge the money she was paid.
They may just be trying to sue her as a negotiating tactic, in the hope of forcing a settlement over the rights, or something.
If she has tucked away the money the series made over the years, she should have at least a couple of million available and be able to cover the 50-200K in lawyer fees.
A lawyer is paid to defend his client no matter what. What he says to the public really doesn't mean anything.
First, that's not *entirely* true--there are rules on how the lawyer is allowed to defend the client.
Shouldn't the same be true of the DA?
From the Summary: "This conviction is a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history," said assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell."
For instance, I make a point of using grep to search for snippets of code in a project. My IDE may be dead 3 years from now, as may be the system I'm using. grep will be around until I die.
The theory behind "not naming banks" is that if named, people would leave the bank and go to another one.
Why are banks allowed to do this? This completely negates the "vote with your wallet" power that the public should have.
Because they signed a nondisclosure agreement, and because people are afraid of defamation lawsuits.
It is worth noting that Bank of America just had a five-day IT outage/upgrade/etc... during which their credit card interfaces had limited data, etc... It may be unrelated, but... it was for *five days*.
It may well be unrelated--credit cards v. bank accounts and all that--but it may not be. That's a *really* long time to do the public part of upgrading a system.
Anyway, it's all insured (don't read the stuff about losing your online banking password too closely), and you can always sue if they tried not to cover you, so it's not worth a run on any banks unless they start losing a lot more. At least they're paying attention.
closes its API . How many slashdotters have a linkedin / facebook account ? just wondering..
It's not Facebook, or at least not Facebook for standard users.
Facebook is social, although it can be used for business. LinkedIn is primarily business--basically publishing to the world some parts of your resume so that someone interested in hiring you to do a job can see that you're awesome. That, plus auto-updated list of contacts' phone numbers and emails.
Seems like Seoul has missed the point. I don't think Uber is upending taxis worldwide because they are luxury! It's because they are cheaaaap!
How will a luxury taxi service in Seoul affect the traction that a car-sharing service could gain by undercutting standard, economy taxi pricing? (Except that apparently they have banned them from operating. That sounds like an effective obstacle.)
Is it Seoul, Seoul City, or are either acceptable? It sounds like saying Chicago City to me (i.e. the wrong proper noun), but maybe City is a part of the English name of it.
Also, Uber won by not being unpleasant, not by being cheap. Cheap helps, but regular cabs often suck. Uber cars are clean, most of the drivers are nice-ish, they almost never give the customers a hard time, you don't have to wait long for them...
There is a segment of the market that will buy by price--but most of the market that shifted to Uber did it because service quality is better.
I disagree. Having spent a lifetime around pig headed engineers (including myself), this is my reasoning:
I think it has everything to do with intelligence, or, at least self perceived intelligence. The smarter someone thinks they are, the less likely they are to listen to others who they think are somehow less intelligent. They consider it a personal affront that someone else would tell them they're wrong about vaccines. They consider only the superiority of their own intellect when deciding that they will either accept or reject the established science. That kind of hubris is concentrated in certain professions, many of which are concentrated in Silicon Valley. Politics doesn't enter into it at all. This kind of self righteous thinking permeates the self declared intellectual elite in every party, including the independents who tend to be the most effete among them ("anyone who is dumb enough to let a party tell them how to think is inferior"). They have considered whatever they consider to be important in their own mind and have come to a conclusion that you dare not question.
Yes; it takes a long time to learn the difference between intelligence and experience, and when to delegate important decisions about your children to people who might not be as smart as you, or whom you don't know terribly well, who still have a lot more experience in an area.
It's also harder if you've had exposure to people in those fields. When looking for medical help, for example, at some point you usually have to make a decision on faith to trust someone's surgical skill even though you know that some people with great reputations really suck with a scalpel. Like trusting a bank's electronic security even though you know how frequently they do it really, really badly, only maybe someone's life is on the line. It's not because the faith in their skill is justified, it's just an appeal to authority that you hope works that hasn't been disproven.
Fundamentally appeals to authority (or at least experience) are inferior to meaningful data, but are superior in most cases to anecdotal data or in-head reasoning.
But there's also a filtering function--the trick is finding the person with both experience and practical skill. It's really hard to find a good high school guidance counselor, for example, and a really hard job to do well... Mmm...
I'm sure that if I were a child today I would be diagnosed with all kinds of disorders ADD, ADHD, ASD, OCD, etc... Today kids are diagnosed with those type disorders at the drop of a hat and often times by school teachers and school counselors based on one or two incidents that happen in a.the classroom. I have five sons and every last one of them had a teacher like that. They all grew up to be normal and healthy.
When you talk to people about this stuff, you realize that almost everyone is medicated to change psychological function.
To the extent where you realize you are the only adult in the community that people encounter who is not on mind-altering drugs.
The world we live in and the behaviors of the people around us are radically different than what they might be if we were not medicating as heavily as we do.
FALSE!!! The answer is not encryption because they will simply ban encryption. The TRUE answer is YOU engaging in direct POLITICAL action to bring the laws and candidates YOU want into place. Then you can encrypt all you want forever. You can even outlaw wiretaps.
The answer is not political action with candidates, because the people *don't care*.
The answer is getting people to care.
That means schools and media campaigns, and exposing abuses of the system. Right now the system works in secret, so misuses of it don't come to light much, but I doubt very much there are none. You're handing a bunch of well-meaning people something of a ring of power--a way to invisibly steal into everyone's life. Some of them are going to misuse that power, most trivially with simple voyeurism and most seriously by effective blackmail. The FBI has *never* demonstrated that it is serious about rooting out government corruption outside of a few very limited cases (e.g. bid rigging, bribable prison guards, the rare elected official), and this would be a *great* and important place to have an effective organization doing that.
Color me paranoid but this sounds like Google is going out of there weigh too weeken encryption in transport. For "national security" in homeland, amirite? God save the homeland!
I feel a great disturbance in the internet, as if millions of spellcheckers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
The emergency language is probably just there for a legal reason--it's going to either free up certain funds for it, allow a body to act that otherwise wouldn't be able to, allow applications for certain funds, allow some other kind of budgeting change, or change the timeline determining when the legislation can become effective.
Is Arkansas unusual in having 6 CS teachers? Do non-magnet high schools regular teach the Comp Sci AP these days?
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business. Why this is even an issue is beyond me. How is it considered a good idea to encourage more people to work in fields they're not interested in? Why is tech singled out as the one and only important field?
Because there's more money in it.
Law is another field where "diversity" primarily means women instead of minorities.
Slashdot Mirror
this is an "ultrabook" class machine that weighs in at much more palatable $700 price tag.
(1) Editing error. English requires an indefinite article between "at" and "much."
(2) Palatable to some. $700 isn't much to spend on a computer by the standards of the upper middle class, but it's still a pretty big chunk of change.
It is a question of vested interests and poor incentives. Elected judges and elected prosecutors - how can you not end up with poor decisions? Poorly thought through kneejerk laws, like asset forfeiture and three strike life sentences - how can you have justice with a system like this?
It is, although a lot of the vested interests and poor incentives problem is not arising at that level. Almost everyone working in the system is trying to do a good job with too few resources, but incentives shape behavior and cause problems even when people are trying to do that.
A basic problem with democracies is that they overcriminalize because elected people want to look like they are doing something about crime. We've known this for centuries, going back to Jeremy Bentham, but there is still very little effort done against it.
The Smarter Sentencing Act, which is something both democrats and republicans on the Judiciary Committee have agreed would be a good thing, and would save probably thousands or tens-of-thousands of man-years of prison time, has been approved by the committee for years and still languishes without getting a vote on the floor.
What can technology do? The first thing is that it can help people petition Congress, for one thing--email your Congressman and (Where your voice can do more good) your state legislatures. America leads the developed world in criminals--ask them to make it a real priority to change that, and provide concrete steps such as funding more alternatives to imprisonment, supporting the Smarter Sentencing Act and other reasonable sentencing reductions, and asking them to put together a plan to reduce recidivism and the collateral civil consequences of conviction such as lack of employability.
The second thing is technology--more accurately, science--can inform the jury. No jury should sit without learning about the reliability and lack of reliability of eyewitness testimony.
What a load of crap. In Canada we have a healthcare "system", I can go to a hospital without mortgaging my house.
What happens to you once you get there, on the other hand...
Any race advanced enough to travel here to invade will have capabilities way beyond anything we could hope to combat or detect. I would imagine the first sign you would have would be if you were one of the lucky ones to see half the world wiped out a few seconds before you yourself were removed from this mortal realm.
Well, I think when they start posting on slashdot asking about the possibility of detection, that's a pretty good first sign.
> Would their "old" technology do them a lick of good when a thousand M1 tanks rolled across the field at them? What about when Predator drones are flying overhead launching missiles at their supply depots behind the lines?
Just like the US military in Iraq, right? Or the British, Russian, and now US armies in Afghanistan for the last 150 years? Or both Napoleon and Hitler invading Moscow? While a thousand armored vehicles would flatten any native standing army any interstellar military force has _incredibly_ long supply lines. If transportation and communications are cheap and quick, and the invader's resources large enough, natives can be conquered quickly and thoroughly. But if the supply lines are long, slow, and expensive as we've seen in Terran warfare, we've seen amazing feats of local defenders against invading armies.
If the natives weapons have _any_ effect, home turf advantage and guerrilla warfare are well established and critical factors. One of the critical keys to warfare is the _economics_. Is it worth the resources to commit the invasion justified by the gain? And at interstellar ranges, what does the supply line cost?
It depends on the objectives. If the objective is to obliterate us and there are no rules of engagement, that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to subjugate us or change our government to a functioning democracy while trying not to kill many civilians.
Depends on how good lawyers they have
This. There is also an element of randomness, but the quality of the lawyers matters a lot.
If there was no language or contract saying otherwise, then the school's offer created a power of acceptance among the students at the least, and anyone who told the school they would go in that time now has a contract with the school.
If there were early decision applicants, then the school's acceptance likewise created the contract.
Finally, if there were students who materially changed their position in reasonable reliance on the acceptance, they likely also have a contract.
This proves that all the whining about the NSA has little to do with actual worries (as if anyone in the government actually cares about their porn viewing habits), and more to do with overwrought anti-Americanism.
No, it doesn't.
We are more concerned about the NSA doing it because it has a bigger budget and because, for a lot of slashdotters, it's our government that's doing it. It's still a subject for humor, but nevertheless a real social policy concern. I've met a lot of great guys who work in law enforcement whom I would generally trust not to abuse the powers created by massive surveillance, but the problem arises when too much trust is given and there isn't enough oversight of how it is used. As it is, the public is not given any believable claim to even the existence of meaningful oversight.
That means bad actors within the system can use it to spy on people they know, on their own ex-wives, for example. And while they might get severely disciplined if they're caught, the public hasn't been told how likely it is that they're caught.
It also means the system can be used to blackmail VIPs, power-brokers, reporters, and legislators. While most of the people involved would not use it for that, it only takes one or two people to be willing to do that and a lack of *perfect* oversight and reporting for a system like this to utterly threaten and destroy any notion of representative government.
Imagine you have a database of every Congressman's phone calls, or even every third or fourth phone call that happens to be to someone within a three-hop warrant of a terrorist.
I vilify Marijuana because it smells really awful.
So long as you smoke it where that scent doesn't regularly affect your neighbors, though, let's just look at studies--like this one--to decide whether and where it's acceptable to use.
My $0.02
I think the intelligence community has done more harm than good more often than not.
I think American foreign policy has done more harm than good to America more often than not.
Throughout history, it has been the use of power which has undermined empires, and the threat of the use of power which makes them most effective. Wars are costly and can be unpredictable; they have almost always much more expensive than planned and almost always much less useful, except at certain very defined tasks. (Giving someone a temporary boost to poll numbers, uniting a country against a perceived threat, acting as a salve to respond to demand for war that leaders are afraid to turn down).
There are also other risks inherent in war. You train a large number of soldiers and give them weapons and training, which means that every day, your nation is fundamentally dependent upon their loyalty to survive--sometimes to defend it, but ALWAYS to not change the government or take over the government or turn on the country.
Getting sued for being honest about not doing something is a bit much though, even for USA.
According to the plaintiffs, she was not being honest. There is also the matter that, according to the plaintiffs, she was paid (indirectly through her husband's estate) and contractually bound to keep her mouth shut. I have no idea what "the truth" is, but I don't think it is black and white. If she doesn't want to abide by the terms of the contract, she should at least be compelled to disgorge the money she was paid.
They may just be trying to sue her as a negotiating tactic, in the hope of forcing a settlement over the rights, or something.
If she has tucked away the money the series made over the years, she should have at least a couple of million available and be able to cover the 50-200K in lawyer fees.
A lawyer is paid to defend his client no matter what. What he says to the public really doesn't mean anything.
First, that's not *entirely* true--there are rules on how the lawyer is allowed to defend the client.
Shouldn't the same be true of the DA?
From the Summary: "This conviction is a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history," said assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell."
For instance, I make a point of using grep to search for snippets of code in a project. My IDE may be dead 3 years from now, as may be the system I'm using. grep will be around until I die.
Okay. We'd better fix this mortality thing.
The theory behind "not naming banks" is that if named, people would leave the bank and go to another one.
Why are banks allowed to do this? This completely negates the "vote with your wallet" power that the public should have.
Because they signed a nondisclosure agreement, and because people are afraid of defamation lawsuits.
It is worth noting that Bank of America just had a five-day IT outage/upgrade/etc... during which their credit card interfaces had limited data, etc... It may be unrelated, but... it was for *five days*.
It may well be unrelated--credit cards v. bank accounts and all that--but it may not be. That's a *really* long time to do the public part of upgrading a system.
Anyway, it's all insured (don't read the stuff about losing your online banking password too closely), and you can always sue if they tried not to cover you, so it's not worth a run on any banks unless they start losing a lot more. At least they're paying attention.
closes its API . How many slashdotters have a linkedin / facebook account ? just wondering ..
It's not Facebook, or at least not Facebook for standard users.
Facebook is social, although it can be used for business. LinkedIn is primarily business--basically publishing to the world some parts of your resume so that someone interested in hiring you to do a job can see that you're awesome. That, plus auto-updated list of contacts' phone numbers and emails.
Seems like Seoul has missed the point. I don't think Uber is upending taxis worldwide because they are luxury! It's because they are cheaaaap!
How will a luxury taxi service in Seoul affect the traction that a car-sharing service could gain by undercutting standard, economy taxi pricing? (Except that apparently they have banned them from operating. That sounds like an effective obstacle.)
Is it Seoul, Seoul City, or are either acceptable? It sounds like saying Chicago City to me (i.e. the wrong proper noun), but maybe City is a part of the English name of it.
Also, Uber won by not being unpleasant, not by being cheap. Cheap helps, but regular cabs often suck. Uber cars are clean, most of the drivers are nice-ish, they almost never give the customers a hard time, you don't have to wait long for them...
There is a segment of the market that will buy by price--but most of the market that shifted to Uber did it because service quality is better.
I disagree. Having spent a lifetime around pig headed engineers (including myself), this is my reasoning:
I think it has everything to do with intelligence, or, at least self perceived intelligence. The smarter someone thinks they are, the less likely they are to listen to others who they think are somehow less intelligent. They consider it a personal affront that someone else would tell them they're wrong about vaccines. They consider only the superiority of their own intellect when deciding that they will either accept or reject the established science. That kind of hubris is concentrated in certain professions, many of which are concentrated in Silicon Valley. Politics doesn't enter into it at all. This kind of self righteous thinking permeates the self declared intellectual elite in every party, including the independents who tend to be the most effete among them ("anyone who is dumb enough to let a party tell them how to think is inferior"). They have considered whatever they consider to be important in their own mind and have come to a conclusion that you dare not question.
Yes; it takes a long time to learn the difference between intelligence and experience, and when to delegate important decisions about your children to people who might not be as smart as you, or whom you don't know terribly well, who still have a lot more experience in an area.
It's also harder if you've had exposure to people in those fields. When looking for medical help, for example, at some point you usually have to make a decision on faith to trust someone's surgical skill even though you know that some people with great reputations really suck with a scalpel. Like trusting a bank's electronic security even though you know how frequently they do it really, really badly, only maybe someone's life is on the line. It's not because the faith in their skill is justified, it's just an appeal to authority that you hope works that hasn't been disproven.
Fundamentally appeals to authority (or at least experience) are inferior to meaningful data, but are superior in most cases to anecdotal data or in-head reasoning.
But there's also a filtering function--the trick is finding the person with both experience and practical skill. It's really hard to find a good high school guidance counselor, for example, and a really hard job to do well... Mmm...
I'm sure that if I were a child today I would be diagnosed with all kinds of disorders ADD, ADHD, ASD, OCD, etc... Today kids are diagnosed with those type disorders at the drop of a hat and often times by school teachers and school counselors based on one or two incidents that happen in a.the classroom. I have five sons and every last one of them had a teacher like that. They all grew up to be normal and healthy.
When you talk to people about this stuff, you realize that almost everyone is medicated to change psychological function.
To the extent where you realize you are the only adult in the community that people encounter who is not on mind-altering drugs.
The world we live in and the behaviors of the people around us are radically different than what they might be if we were not medicating as heavily as we do.
Having the inmates be punished for something someone does on the outside seems ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous at all.
The family member is being used as a courier.
The family member can be used as a courier.
It is ridiculous in some situations and not others.
And why does the FBI need to hide this?
Because they are doing it everywhere.
This is the most likely reason.
By withholding details they let what seems to be a relatively small program expand until it covers the vast majority of cell traffic.
FALSE!!! The answer is not encryption because they will simply ban encryption. The TRUE answer is YOU engaging in direct POLITICAL action to bring the laws and candidates YOU want into place. Then you can encrypt all you want forever. You can even outlaw wiretaps.
The answer is not political action with candidates, because the people *don't care*.
The answer is getting people to care.
That means schools and media campaigns, and exposing abuses of the system. Right now the system works in secret, so misuses of it don't come to light much, but I doubt very much there are none. You're handing a bunch of well-meaning people something of a ring of power--a way to invisibly steal into everyone's life. Some of them are going to misuse that power, most trivially with simple voyeurism and most seriously by effective blackmail. The FBI has *never* demonstrated that it is serious about rooting out government corruption outside of a few very limited cases (e.g. bid rigging, bribable prison guards, the rare elected official), and this would be a *great* and important place to have an effective organization doing that.
Color me paranoid but this sounds like Google is going out of there weigh too weeken encryption in transport. For "national security" in homeland, amirite? God save the homeland!
I feel a great disturbance in the internet, as if millions of spellcheckers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
The emergency language is probably just there for a legal reason--it's going to either free up certain funds for it, allow a body to act that otherwise wouldn't be able to, allow applications for certain funds, allow some other kind of budgeting change, or change the timeline determining when the legislation can become effective.
Is Arkansas unusual in having 6 CS teachers? Do non-magnet high schools regular teach the Comp Sci AP these days?
You'll have the choice of paying extra for Windows 366 on those years, or else leaving your computer off for an entire day.
Nah, they just rewrote time.h to avoid future leap-years.
We're not agrarian any more, so our years don't need to be synchronized to the seasons.
If women don't want to work in tech fields, that's their business. Why this is even an issue is beyond me. How is it considered a good idea to encourage more people to work in fields they're not interested in? Why is tech singled out as the one and only important field?
Because there's more money in it.
Law is another field where "diversity" primarily means women instead of minorities.
You can't force choices onto people because it becomes an obligation when you are forcing it.
Counterpoint: in real life, you sometimes have obligations to do stuff you don't wanna do or choose between less than optimal options.