Of course we're indifferent. Why wouldn't we be? I'm an adult and I comprehend that there is project that allows anyone with a computer and a keyboard to contribute, regardless of sex and if one sex doesn't participate as much as another, I really could not fucking care less.
Nursing is a female dominated career. There are some men in the career and men are not in any way restricted or held back from pursuing that career. They just don't seem to want to be nurses in the same numbers that women do. Now, ask me if I care. Go ahead. Ask me. Do I? Nope. Because if I wanted to be a nurse, I would go be a nurse. There's nothing stopping me other than my lack of interests. It's not the failure of the nursing field or sexist females in nursing that I don't have an interest. I just don't. And neither do most men. Just like most women don't get excited about being an electrical engineer, mechanic, or editing Wikipedia articles.
Now, with the "IT'S THOSE EVIL SEXIST MEN!" bullshit out of the way, let's consider that maybe bringing more women into the project is beneficial to the project in sort of the way bringing more women into a bar is beneficial to the bar. Well, why stop there? Shouldn't we make sure that there is a fair representation of contributors from all ethnic, social, religious, economic, and academic backgrounds? Also, since a fact is a fact and the determining factor for a Wikipedia citation is that you have a reputable source of the information in some linkable form, what do any of those labels have to do with one another? Does the mass of Jupiter vary depending on your sex or race?
But it makes me feel bad when you get to be the alpha-male, so I demand that you modify your behavior to make me comfortable or I'm going to leave and go sulk in a corner.
More importantly, why would the wikipedia environment be obligated to coddle them? We're talking about a project that is open to anyone and contributors are self-selective; not grade school math class. If you're too intimidated to work alongside other adults of both sexes unless there is some institutional intermediary moderating your interactions so that you don't have a panic attack, then how do you handle life? How do you hold down a job, go to the store, go to the DMV, participate on your school board or PTA, get through college, apply for a job, attend community meetings, play in MMOs (which make wikipedia look like the land of lollipops and yet are increasingly populated with women)?
I think that what you mean is "women might be more prone to see their contribution criticized, edited, modified, corrected, or deleted as some sort of a personal attack that the can't cope with and therefore Wikipedia is not appealing to them and in order to appeal to the fairer sex, we need to change the way Wikipedia operates, so that rather than just deleting an inaccurate or bad edit to an article, you call the person up and invite them out to coffee and break the news softly and gently to them that you're going to have to make an edit to their content, but that it in no way reflects on them as a person and you still like them and hope they'll continue to make the wonderful contributions they have always made".
And yet the rest of us manage to find a way to work with or ignore those types and contribute to the project.
If you can't handle that your contributions may be read, reviewed, edited, criticized, corrected, or even deleted, then don't contribute. It isn't kindergarten and the world is full of moments where you are in some way judged. Don't take it personal. The world is full of jerks or people that you just don't like, too. Find a way to deal with it. You don't have to excuse the jerks that you run into, but you do have to find a way to cope, because they're not going to magically vanish.
And here is the problem, you say: "You are putting the blame on the woman, instead of figuring out what is wrong with the process."
If you have every opportunity that everyone else has to do something and you don't want to do it, the blame IS yours. Or . . . not even blame. What is there to be blamed, in the first place? You can contribute or you can not contribute. It's your choice. Are we really somehow obligated to go around figuring out what we're doing "wrong", because 54% (the percentage of women in the population) of every single endeavor and activity and career isn't made up of women?
If women wanted to edit Wikipipedia articles, they would. It's like, two clicks away and requires far less involvement and investment than even playing an MMO, which they do in great numbers despite some perceived "women-hating" and "sexism".
Is it society's fault that you're doing whatever you do for a living rather than being a make-up artist or graphic designer or dog groomer? Is it women's fault? Or do you just not have an interest in those things? If you don't have an interest in those things, is that because of your personal preference, or is it because of some narrow-minded neglect to find a way to appeal to you, based on the sexist mindset of those in those communities?
Wait, what were the obvious reasons that female enrollment in EE needed to be increased? I think I missed something.
Also . . . yeah. Men and women are different and have different interests. How shocking is that? It's absurd that we're still having to explain this repeatedly in 2011. Obstetrics is kind of dominated by women and EE is kind of dominated by men. So what? I guess maybe we need to genetically modify people in the womb so that more women will want to go into engineering and more men will want to deliver babies or something?
It's certainly sexist for people to draw the conclusion that if women don't want to do something in the same number as a man, it has to be because men are vile, evil, woman-hating, rapists-in-waiting rather than maybe they just don't want to participate in as great of a number as men (by the way, don't forget that women dominate the population by something like 54% to 46%).
There are huge numbers of women playing online games and MMOs and it's hard to argue that the Wikipedia community at its lowest could be any worse than most MMO communities lowest. If they can cope with whatever supposed issue there is to play a videogame, I'm sure they can do the same to contribute to an encyclopedia.
Unless . . . they just don't give a fuck.
Do women make the same push to get men to work in fields dominated by women? Or is it just accepted that, hey, men don't want to everything women do and in the same percentages and that's just fucking fine, because people have the *opportunity*, if they want. Even if they don't take it?
There's no barrier to contributing to Wikipedia. If women want to contribute more, they will. They have internet connections and keyboards, just like everyone else.
Wow, in all the years I used Debian, I barely ever used a window manager. To the point that when you sai d"here are some screenshots", I was expecting a page full of screenshots of the command line (which is where I literally spent 99.9% of my twelve years with Debian). Seeing Debian used with a window manager like that almost feels like going to a strip club and seeing your sister come out on the stage!
Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).
Ubuntu is especially great if you're an older geek and you need to be doing actual work rather than spending two entire weeks figuring out why an obvious LineMode configuration isn't working and your screen resolution is still totally screwed despite it and fighting against countless hurdles to get sound cards working properly with all of your applications, etc.
Both are entirely valid and I wish I had more time in my life to keep being the first guy, but many (and it's growing every day) need to spend less time configuring and tweaking and working around bugs in linux and more time doing our actual work or projects (or working on our own bugs in our own software).
Debian was my first real linux, about twelve years ago. It powered a really big project that I ran for more than a decade, almost flawlessly. Development can be glacial and Debian foundation bureaucracy can be navel-gazing and counter-productive . . . but god damn, the outcome is something to aspire to. And now, I can get a lot of that with someone else's spit and polish in Ubuntu.
Gentoo, on the other hand. Well, it's good that there's a linux-based outlet for obsessive compulsives.:P
While it's possible that private industry could get us into space in my life time, I won't be surprised if I die before we've even mastered trips to the moon. It's depressing to think I'll have lived my entire life without having anything on the level of the experience my parents' generation had with the moon landing. And it won't be enough to just get back to the moon (which seems iffy, itself, currently). To me, minimal progress would be the ability to regularly travel from earth to the moon. Maybe not you and me, but at least astronauts in general. Feels like an entire generation of wasted space exploration.
On the other hand, advancements in science and technology have exponential impact. Therefore, it's quite likely that we could cease 95% of all NASA-related endeavors and while not making big jumps in the near future, combine the advances in the rest of the fields to make a significant leap farther in the future. Sort of like how you could have started a calculation with your computer in 1990 and just now be finishing it, while I could have waited until today to perform the same calculation with a modern computer and finish in two minutes.
Though I've always admired Gates in the same sort of way I've admired Jobs, I was never a big fan, either. Especially since some of his shady and illegal practices directly affected my career once upon a time. However, you absolutely can't deny the amount of good someone with ridiculous funding and knowledge and no use for ulterior motives can do. While politicians and celebrities spin their wheels on things that are sexy and politically correct, Gates and the friends who have gathered their funds together focus on things like clean water and simple infectious diseases in places that politicians and celebrities don't even know exist.
It is quite possible that, by the end of his life, Gates could be responsible for almost as many saved lives as my favorite hero, Dr. Norman Borlaug. It makes me feel the slashdot "borg-gates" icon is a little less applicable every passing year.
You're right. It would be much more ethical to have just tossed the aborted fetus (children are young people) in the biological waste bin. Good thinking.
Right, but we're not talking about "mass numbers of people" refusing vaccinations.
Personally, I have a tough time with this topic. Common good of society versus right of the individual. I can't think of anything much more valuable than the right to determine whether or not someone is allowed to inject your body full of something. Even if it's for a more general good.
Yeah, anti-vacs are tards, but don't you find it a little curious that things like Gaurdisil keep moving what they're aiming at? They eventually decide it's a vaccination against cervical cancer and should be given to all little girls as early as possible and when that doesn't work out so well and there are reports questioning the real risks versus advantages of administering it (especially to girls at the youngest range of the spectrum in which it is reasonable to give it), they say "oh, wait - we change our minds! now it's a vaccination for ANAL cancer in little boys!". I mean, come on. It's a clear fucking money-grab and I doubt it's the only vaccination to be such. You have to reap a profit on the outcome of all that R&D, after all. Why would we think that vaccinations are any different than other forms of pharmaceuticals and are somehow unwaveringly altruistic from creation to administration?
I'm more offended at the idiots who gave what's-her-name serious air-time than the woman herself. When you're a stupid ditz and your kid has problems, I can see how you might cling to any irrational "answer". But for the media to give her a platform and credibility to spew her ignorant bullshit was ridiculous. I have big boobies and I'm a mommy, so listen to me! I know everything! It's like people who let their kid drown in a bucket and then go on a nation-wide crusade to label every bucket with a warning or outlaw buckets or require a license to own a bucket.
You'd have to be an idiot to say that there isn't crass commercialism and profit motive behind vaccinations and that alone may drive some questionable government purchases of mass quantities of vaccinations and distributions or encouragement of some vaccinations. And you'd have to be an idiot to say that there are no side-effects or potential dangers or that there isn't or won't be one that completely fucks it up and kills a bunch of people (or otherwise harms them) as a result. You'd probably have to be an idiot to say that there isn't any chance that a government would use vaccinations as a carrier for some sort of ulterior ingredient. Governments are evil and they've done worse. Even to their own populations.
But you'd also have to be an idiot not to recognize the good that vaccinations have done and the overwhelming evidence of positive outcome, overall.
One thing I've never understood, however . . . is why we care so much about ensuring that EVERYONE gets a series of vaccinations? I mean, as long as I'm vaccinated and I vaccinate my kid, what the fuck does it matter if five kids in their class don't get vaccinated? If I'm the only person in my neighborhood with locked doors and an alarm system, my neighbors will get robbed. How does that affect me? Or is it that those five kids might somehow get sick and breed some super-death version of sickness that will be able to overcome our vaccinations and they'll get to us, anyway?
Anyway, are you seriously surprised that people are so against vaccines (and with dumb reasons, at that)? I mean, there are plenty of people who don't believe in hospitals and sit by their four year old child's bed-side "praying" the sickness away while they die right before their eyes of something that a doctor could have cured with five dollars worth of medicine.
With his logic, my tax dollars should also not be going to my county, city, state, federal government. It should be going overseas. After all, just because I live on my street and in my neighborhood doesn't mean that the safety of my roads and the staffing of my police department are any more important than someone on the other side of the globe. What kind of selfish protectionist prick puts spending his own tax dollars on improving his own region above that of helping improve roads and police departments and schools overseas?!
So with this whole new globalism thing -- if you're obligated to sacrifice your job for it, why can't you also get your milk for a nickel and pay $50/mo rent? It seems it's often a very one-way door (yadda yadda cheap chinese Walmart products help America blah blah yadda yadda).
Anyway, we can keep spending money on the girl and buying her gifts and fancy dinners, but at the end of it, she's not going to fuck us. She's going to say "thanks for all the stuff!" and go away.
I'd like to see numbers on the cost of all the "spot the terrorist" cameras and facial identification and over-head blimp/uav monitoring stuff the DHS/FBI/whatever does at this event.
Slashdot Mirror
And if this story was about a guy, it would be about a frightning stalker who might murder her rather than fodder for lighthearted joking.
Of course we're indifferent. Why wouldn't we be? I'm an adult and I comprehend that there is project that allows anyone with a computer and a keyboard to contribute, regardless of sex and if one sex doesn't participate as much as another, I really could not fucking care less.
Nursing is a female dominated career. There are some men in the career and men are not in any way restricted or held back from pursuing that career. They just don't seem to want to be nurses in the same numbers that women do. Now, ask me if I care. Go ahead. Ask me. Do I? Nope. Because if I wanted to be a nurse, I would go be a nurse. There's nothing stopping me other than my lack of interests. It's not the failure of the nursing field or sexist females in nursing that I don't have an interest. I just don't. And neither do most men. Just like most women don't get excited about being an electrical engineer, mechanic, or editing Wikipedia articles.
Now, with the "IT'S THOSE EVIL SEXIST MEN!" bullshit out of the way, let's consider that maybe bringing more women into the project is beneficial to the project in sort of the way bringing more women into a bar is beneficial to the bar. Well, why stop there? Shouldn't we make sure that there is a fair representation of contributors from all ethnic, social, religious, economic, and academic backgrounds? Also, since a fact is a fact and the determining factor for a Wikipedia citation is that you have a reputable source of the information in some linkable form, what do any of those labels have to do with one another? Does the mass of Jupiter vary depending on your sex or race?
But it makes me feel bad when you get to be the alpha-male, so I demand that you modify your behavior to make me comfortable or I'm going to leave and go sulk in a corner.
More importantly, why would the wikipedia environment be obligated to coddle them? We're talking about a project that is open to anyone and contributors are self-selective; not grade school math class. If you're too intimidated to work alongside other adults of both sexes unless there is some institutional intermediary moderating your interactions so that you don't have a panic attack, then how do you handle life? How do you hold down a job, go to the store, go to the DMV, participate on your school board or PTA, get through college, apply for a job, attend community meetings, play in MMOs (which make wikipedia look like the land of lollipops and yet are increasingly populated with women)?
I think that what you mean is "women might be more prone to see their contribution criticized, edited, modified, corrected, or deleted as some sort of a personal attack that the can't cope with and therefore Wikipedia is not appealing to them and in order to appeal to the fairer sex, we need to change the way Wikipedia operates, so that rather than just deleting an inaccurate or bad edit to an article, you call the person up and invite them out to coffee and break the news softly and gently to them that you're going to have to make an edit to their content, but that it in no way reflects on them as a person and you still like them and hope they'll continue to make the wonderful contributions they have always made".
And yet the rest of us manage to find a way to work with or ignore those types and contribute to the project.
If you can't handle that your contributions may be read, reviewed, edited, criticized, corrected, or even deleted, then don't contribute. It isn't kindergarten and the world is full of moments where you are in some way judged. Don't take it personal. The world is full of jerks or people that you just don't like, too. Find a way to deal with it. You don't have to excuse the jerks that you run into, but you do have to find a way to cope, because they're not going to magically vanish.
And here is the problem, you say: "You are putting the blame on the woman, instead of figuring out what is wrong with the process."
If you have every opportunity that everyone else has to do something and you don't want to do it, the blame IS yours. Or . . . not even blame. What is there to be blamed, in the first place? You can contribute or you can not contribute. It's your choice. Are we really somehow obligated to go around figuring out what we're doing "wrong", because 54% (the percentage of women in the population) of every single endeavor and activity and career isn't made up of women?
If women wanted to edit Wikipipedia articles, they would. It's like, two clicks away and requires far less involvement and investment than even playing an MMO, which they do in great numbers despite some perceived "women-hating" and "sexism".
Is it society's fault that you're doing whatever you do for a living rather than being a make-up artist or graphic designer or dog groomer? Is it women's fault? Or do you just not have an interest in those things? If you don't have an interest in those things, is that because of your personal preference, or is it because of some narrow-minded neglect to find a way to appeal to you, based on the sexist mindset of those in those communities?
Wait, what were the obvious reasons that female enrollment in EE needed to be increased? I think I missed something.
Also . . . yeah. Men and women are different and have different interests. How shocking is that? It's absurd that we're still having to explain this repeatedly in 2011. Obstetrics is kind of dominated by women and EE is kind of dominated by men. So what? I guess maybe we need to genetically modify people in the womb so that more women will want to go into engineering and more men will want to deliver babies or something?
It's certainly sexist for people to draw the conclusion that if women don't want to do something in the same number as a man, it has to be because men are vile, evil, woman-hating, rapists-in-waiting rather than maybe they just don't want to participate in as great of a number as men (by the way, don't forget that women dominate the population by something like 54% to 46%).
There are huge numbers of women playing online games and MMOs and it's hard to argue that the Wikipedia community at its lowest could be any worse than most MMO communities lowest. If they can cope with whatever supposed issue there is to play a videogame, I'm sure they can do the same to contribute to an encyclopedia.
Unless . . . they just don't give a fuck.
Do women make the same push to get men to work in fields dominated by women? Or is it just accepted that, hey, men don't want to everything women do and in the same percentages and that's just fucking fine, because people have the *opportunity*, if they want. Even if they don't take it?
Sorry, I stopped reading at the meaningless label "male feminist".
There's no barrier to contributing to Wikipedia. If women want to contribute more, they will. They have internet connections and keyboards, just like everyone else.
Wow, in all the years I used Debian, I barely ever used a window manager. To the point that when you sai d"here are some screenshots", I was expecting a page full of screenshots of the command line (which is where I literally spent 99.9% of my twelve years with Debian). Seeing Debian used with a window manager like that almost feels like going to a strip club and seeing your sister come out on the stage!
It has been awhile since I last visited it, but it looks like the same old site, with a different banner at the top.
In other words (from personal experience):
Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).
Ubuntu is especially great if you're an older geek and you need to be doing actual work rather than spending two entire weeks figuring out why an obvious LineMode configuration isn't working and your screen resolution is still totally screwed despite it and fighting against countless hurdles to get sound cards working properly with all of your applications, etc.
Both are entirely valid and I wish I had more time in my life to keep being the first guy, but many (and it's growing every day) need to spend less time configuring and tweaking and working around bugs in linux and more time doing our actual work or projects (or working on our own bugs in our own software).
Debian was my first real linux, about twelve years ago. It powered a really big project that I ran for more than a decade, almost flawlessly. Development can be glacial and Debian foundation bureaucracy can be navel-gazing and counter-productive . . . but god damn, the outcome is something to aspire to. And now, I can get a lot of that with someone else's spit and polish in Ubuntu.
Gentoo, on the other hand. Well, it's good that there's a linux-based outlet for obsessive compulsives. :P
Don't get your hopes up.
While it's possible that private industry could get us into space in my life time, I won't be surprised if I die before we've even mastered trips to the moon. It's depressing to think I'll have lived my entire life without having anything on the level of the experience my parents' generation had with the moon landing. And it won't be enough to just get back to the moon (which seems iffy, itself, currently). To me, minimal progress would be the ability to regularly travel from earth to the moon. Maybe not you and me, but at least astronauts in general. Feels like an entire generation of wasted space exploration.
On the other hand, advancements in science and technology have exponential impact. Therefore, it's quite likely that we could cease 95% of all NASA-related endeavors and while not making big jumps in the near future, combine the advances in the rest of the fields to make a significant leap farther in the future. Sort of like how you could have started a calculation with your computer in 1990 and just now be finishing it, while I could have waited until today to perform the same calculation with a modern computer and finish in two minutes.
So . . . maybe do get your hopes up.
God damn gemini.
Though I've always admired Gates in the same sort of way I've admired Jobs, I was never a big fan, either. Especially since some of his shady and illegal practices directly affected my career once upon a time. However, you absolutely can't deny the amount of good someone with ridiculous funding and knowledge and no use for ulterior motives can do. While politicians and celebrities spin their wheels on things that are sexy and politically correct, Gates and the friends who have gathered their funds together focus on things like clean water and simple infectious diseases in places that politicians and celebrities don't even know exist.
It is quite possible that, by the end of his life, Gates could be responsible for almost as many saved lives as my favorite hero, Dr. Norman Borlaug. It makes me feel the slashdot "borg-gates" icon is a little less applicable every passing year.
You're right. It would be much more ethical to have just tossed the aborted fetus (children are young people) in the biological waste bin. Good thinking.
Right, but we're not talking about "mass numbers of people" refusing vaccinations.
Personally, I have a tough time with this topic. Common good of society versus right of the individual. I can't think of anything much more valuable than the right to determine whether or not someone is allowed to inject your body full of something. Even if it's for a more general good.
Yeah, anti-vacs are tards, but don't you find it a little curious that things like Gaurdisil keep moving what they're aiming at? They eventually decide it's a vaccination against cervical cancer and should be given to all little girls as early as possible and when that doesn't work out so well and there are reports questioning the real risks versus advantages of administering it (especially to girls at the youngest range of the spectrum in which it is reasonable to give it), they say "oh, wait - we change our minds! now it's a vaccination for ANAL cancer in little boys!". I mean, come on. It's a clear fucking money-grab and I doubt it's the only vaccination to be such. You have to reap a profit on the outcome of all that R&D, after all. Why would we think that vaccinations are any different than other forms of pharmaceuticals and are somehow unwaveringly altruistic from creation to administration?
I'm more offended at the idiots who gave what's-her-name serious air-time than the woman herself. When you're a stupid ditz and your kid has problems, I can see how you might cling to any irrational "answer". But for the media to give her a platform and credibility to spew her ignorant bullshit was ridiculous. I have big boobies and I'm a mommy, so listen to me! I know everything! It's like people who let their kid drown in a bucket and then go on a nation-wide crusade to label every bucket with a warning or outlaw buckets or require a license to own a bucket.
You'd have to be an idiot to say that there isn't crass commercialism and profit motive behind vaccinations and that alone may drive some questionable government purchases of mass quantities of vaccinations and distributions or encouragement of some vaccinations. And you'd have to be an idiot to say that there are no side-effects or potential dangers or that there isn't or won't be one that completely fucks it up and kills a bunch of people (or otherwise harms them) as a result. You'd probably have to be an idiot to say that there isn't any chance that a government would use vaccinations as a carrier for some sort of ulterior ingredient. Governments are evil and they've done worse. Even to their own populations.
But you'd also have to be an idiot not to recognize the good that vaccinations have done and the overwhelming evidence of positive outcome, overall.
One thing I've never understood, however . . . is why we care so much about ensuring that EVERYONE gets a series of vaccinations? I mean, as long as I'm vaccinated and I vaccinate my kid, what the fuck does it matter if five kids in their class don't get vaccinated? If I'm the only person in my neighborhood with locked doors and an alarm system, my neighbors will get robbed. How does that affect me? Or is it that those five kids might somehow get sick and breed some super-death version of sickness that will be able to overcome our vaccinations and they'll get to us, anyway?
Anyway, are you seriously surprised that people are so against vaccines (and with dumb reasons, at that)? I mean, there are plenty of people who don't believe in hospitals and sit by their four year old child's bed-side "praying" the sickness away while they die right before their eyes of something that a doctor could have cured with five dollars worth of medicine.
With his logic, my tax dollars should also not be going to my county, city, state, federal government. It should be going overseas. After all, just because I live on my street and in my neighborhood doesn't mean that the safety of my roads and the staffing of my police department are any more important than someone on the other side of the globe. What kind of selfish protectionist prick puts spending his own tax dollars on improving his own region above that of helping improve roads and police departments and schools overseas?!
So with this whole new globalism thing -- if you're obligated to sacrifice your job for it, why can't you also get your milk for a nickel and pay $50/mo rent? It seems it's often a very one-way door (yadda yadda cheap chinese Walmart products help America blah blah yadda yadda).
Anyway, we can keep spending money on the girl and buying her gifts and fancy dinners, but at the end of it, she's not going to fuck us. She's going to say "thanks for all the stuff!" and go away.
I'm going to go rob your house. But don't worry, it's just a prank to teach you about alarm systems.
There *is*. We call it religion.
I'd like to see numbers on the cost of all the "spot the terrorist" cameras and facial identification and over-head blimp/uav monitoring stuff the DHS/FBI/whatever does at this event.