It also lets them reject people for arbitrary reasons, citing insufficient qualifications as the overt cause. After all, you tend to lose lawsuits if you tell people that you're rejecting them because they mentioned they're married to someone of their own gender, or because the person is capable of becoming pregnant, or their skin color is an unpopular one.
On the assumption that a developer is trying to create an application for this sandbox environment, they get a very fast indication that they did something that isn't allowed instead of potentially mysterious errors. On the assumption that you're running malicious code, it means that that code can't continue probing your system.
It does mean that portable code can't probe for what features are enabled and you instead must tell it in advance. Ideally there would be a way to query for which APIs are allowed and which aren't.
It's a power generation plant. I don't see how this is any worse than having a giant coal generator, except that the coal generator poisons the area around it slowly during normal operation rather than suddenly during catastrophic failure.
Religions served to concentrate wealth, historically. Furthermore, several of them offered strong reasons to tend the sick, investigate the natural world, and so forth -- probably more so than a typical local lord would have.
Religions also served to unite farflung lands. A researcher in Isfahan could correspond with one in Marrakech. A monk studying flowers in Edinburgh could share his findings with a nun in Osel. Without religions, you need another set of well-funded institutions with a tradition of correspondence and interaction to provide the same benefits. Today we have universities and research organizations like Oxford and Brookhaven National Labs. The concept of a university grew out of the Muslim monastic tradition, though, starting with the University of al-Qarawiyyin, founded in the 800s.
Of course, you can still get the same benefits without religions. But we have no reason to think we'd be even this advanced without the monastic traditions of Islam and Christianity.
> Any women claim they are unfairly treated in education? BS. They ARE education now, if they are unfairly treated it is by themselves.
87% of public school teachers are women. 44% of public school principals are women. Women's political representation is even lower. So anything institutionalized needs to come from men as well as women -- and we know there's institutionalized discrimination with so few women at higher levels in education.
In college education, women are roughly even with men in part-time positions. At the higher levels in full-time positions, though, women only comprise a third of university faculty.
Women can exhibit misogyny. This is especially true with unconscious bias; however, unconscious bias affects everyone in society. Saying "they're doing it to themselves" might have an element of truth in it, but the thrust of the statement is to deflect blame onto the injured party and avoid having to do anything about the problem. It's a combination of laziness and misogyny.
> Want equality? Show me the push for more men in teaching!
Eliminating the impact of gender roles on employment opportunities is an explicit goal of feminism.
Do you have any idea why most grade school and elementary teachers are women? It was introduced as a way of reducing costs when introducing public education. Women could be paid half as much, you see, to do the same work. That's why schoolteachers are paid so little today. That combined with the expectation that men must be the primary wageearners in a family prevents most men from becoming schoolteachers. If we paid schoolteachers a decent salary for something as important as educating entire generations of our citizens, the women in that field would have better quality of living, and more men would be attracted to the field.
People can have multiple real names. The artist is using the name Yoon Mi-rae as her primary professional name; call her that. It's rather insulting otherwise.
There is a huge number of rapists in the world (1 in 16 college men, according to Lisak and Miller, 2002, will admit to having raped someone if you ask them anonymously and don't use the word "rape"), and I have no particular reason to doubt the accusations leveled against Assange.
You mean a rocky start, stability within two or three years, better user interface options, and a few features that are really awesome but I don't use all that often, for an overall moderate improvement?
You don't want to continue aging forever. You would likely be happy to be in a permanently youthful, healthy, pain-free body for many decades to come. You just don't have that option right now.
It's likely because of different people being involved. School officials asking a police officer to arrest someone have a lot more weight behind their requests, and it's not the same police officers in each case anyway. Not to mention it's easier to identify the kid when you have a vice principle pointing them out to you than when you just have a twitter handle.
> I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
Is one case of a "saving the princess" game worth outrage? No.
Are there any "saving the prince" games? Are there any games where you *are* the princess, and you have to save anything at all? A few. Many fewer than the reverse.
If it were *only* an issue of bad writing and not of sexism, you'd expect as many "save the prince" games as "save the princess" games.
More like choose a successor. The odds are good that he has raped someone, and even if he hasn't, it's not a good thing for Wikileaks that its public face has such a charge hanging over his head. Really, he should have stepped down a while ago. On the other hand, his position is probably one of the major things keeping him in that embassy -- he's tarnishing the reputation of Wikileaks to save himself a few years in prison in favor of those same years trapped in an embassy.
The person was clearly listing out multiple steps to take. Use Calibre (to manage your ebooks, maybe with plugins to strip DRM). Root your Kindle (to prevent it from communicating with Amazon in ways you don't control).
Similar reasons. Media discourages women from doing anything unladylike. Women internalize this. If one highschool girl tries to defect, the girls surrounding her will helpfully step in to enforce these rules. Unfortunately, there's little chance for a normal highschool student to avoid problematic people.
When in shop class with two girls and twenty boys, the two girls will feel quite out of place -- we're told constantly that gender is one of the core parts of our identity, and they have relatively few allies on that front in the classroom. This is true even if the boys there are all don't make an issue of gender, as befitting any human.
Then, for those who want to get a career in something tech-oriented, they need to get into the relevant guild. If those guilds have a strong reputation of gender discrimination, that will serve as a disincentive to people to start the initial training in that line of work.
Let's see. I can take a class that's entirely optional. I know I'm likely to be picked on. I have no one there similar to me on an axis that I am constantly told is all-important, so I will feel out of place. Other people who seem more like me eschew that course and will make me feel as if I am abnormal and therefore bad even when I'm not at that class.
Whereas if I am passionate about the subject, I can learn on my own, online, where nobody can discern many personal details about me, nobody who can pester me (constantly in myriad ways, where I can't escape) about my decisions and pastimes, and the biggest downsides are not being able to skip a 3-credit college course and not having anyone to answer questions in person. Guess I'll have to go to IRC and pastebin and Google and Stack Overflow instead.
You expect me not to factor that into my decision...why?
Is the percentage of female senior software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female software engineers? That's a red flag for discrimination.
Is the percentage of recently graduated female software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female CS students? That's a red flag for discrimination.
Is the percentage of female CS graduates appreciably smaller than the percentage of incoming female CS freshmen? That's a red flag for discrimination.
None of it is absolute proof of discrimination, but it's enough evidence to investigate. Discrimination can take a number of forms -- maybe your high school had a CS class, and the teacher and the guidance counselor were both solid feminists, but they weren't able to enforce a non-hostile environment for women. Or maybe inertia is at play, and if there were two or three solid years with at least 30% female representation in that class it would self-perpetuate. Or maybe there are more general media and marketing forces at work telling women and girls that they cannot be nerdy and cannot be interested in computers, that they are broken and wrong without a husband and that having these skills will prevent them from getting one, that they must focus on family and not on a career, that they will end up being homemakers for half a decade or more so they shouldn't bother getting a high-skill job or worry about education overmuch.
Just saying "people are different -- who cares?" hides these problems.
The Subsurface developers failed to accomplish things that are common in many GTK+ applications. I'm not sure if that means the various GTK+ language bindings are a lot better than the native C library or what, but it looks like the main benefit of switching to QT was a forced rewrite of the UI.
In-place editing? Not that hard.
The ratings stars? Banshee has it. So does Rhythmbox.
Native look-and-feel is a valid complaint. If GTK+ used the native file dialogs in Windows and OSX, that would help a lot. Adding default themes for those platforms that better mimic native controls (and such themes exist) would also help.
Granted, that says nothing about the community, but from a technical perspective, that talk was worthless.
You give one friend a piece of paper that says "XOR the bitstrings and interpret as UTF-32". You give three friends randomly generated bitstrings of the appropriate length. You give the fourth friend the password XOR'd with each of those random bitstrings.
Or you just write down your master password and put it in your safe and a deposit box at your bank.
It's "danegeld". Geld (also gild) means tax or fine; for instance, a weregild is a fine paid for having murdered someone ("were-" meaning "man"). The danegeld was a more efficient and universally better alternative to Viking raids -- the Vikings would extort money from a town in exchange for not attacking. This meant they assumed less risk, and the town had fewer casualties and kept more of their possessions.
This works out fine for towns that can't hope to fight off the Vikings. For towns that can reliably fight off the Vikings, they can refuse to pay, which leads to battle; eventually the Vikings will learn to concentrate on other towns because it's safer.
You live two lives. One is an ordinary, boring life that you don't mind the NSA finding out about. The other is as secretive as possible. No using credit cards. Nothing that requires ID. No flying, no buying alcohol.
One obvious problem with this is withdrawing cash. You have your public life, and the NSA sees you going to an ATM and grabbing $450, then it sees a transaction for $447 with an unknown person -- that's evidence linking your private identity to your public one. This is ameliorated if your public identity has a habit of withdrawing extra cash and a means of disposing of extra cash in a publicly acceptable way, like giving it to beggars, but it's still present. If your private identity has an income, though, and that income is sufficient for its expenses, then you can have wholly separate finances for both, which severs that link entirely.
A weaker link is one of location over time. Let's say the NSA can plot your public identity's location over time using things like bus pass usage, credit cards, phone calls, and security cameras with facial recognition, and they can plot your private identity's location over time using phone calls and security cameras. Eventually they'll realize that your private and public identities are occasionally colocated, or that whenever your public identity is in use your private has gone dark and vice versa.
Of course, that only matters if it's worse for you if the NSA has linked your public and private lives than if they merely have the ability to detain you during the course of your private affairs.
What could you do with computers that functioned like standard x86 family computers with attached fast, parallel floating point processors like modern GPUs? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances.
Whereas if we have processors modeled on human brains -- well, let's just say I don't want to be the one to write real-time algorithms targeted toward a billion networked processors each running at 100Hz.
32-bit x86 processors can address more than 4GB of RAM. The ARM specification allows for 40-bit PAE, which should support up to a terabyte of RAM. So we could get an iOS device with a 32-bit ARM processor that has 8GB of RAM; that's not an issue.
Each process will only be able to see 4GB of RAM, but right now, iOS apps get killed after using more than 256MB of RAM or so. The policy seems to be that each application can use about a quarter of the machine's RAM, so if they're keeping that trend and want a device with 16GB of RAM, they'll want a 64-bit processor, but I think that's a ways off.
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It also lets them reject people for arbitrary reasons, citing insufficient qualifications as the overt cause. After all, you tend to lose lawsuits if you tell people that you're rejecting them because they mentioned they're married to someone of their own gender, or because the person is capable of becoming pregnant, or their skin color is an unpopular one.
On the assumption that a developer is trying to create an application for this sandbox environment, they get a very fast indication that they did something that isn't allowed instead of potentially mysterious errors. On the assumption that you're running malicious code, it means that that code can't continue probing your system.
It does mean that portable code can't probe for what features are enabled and you instead must tell it in advance. Ideally there would be a way to query for which APIs are allowed and which aren't.
It's a power generation plant. I don't see how this is any worse than having a giant coal generator, except that the coal generator poisons the area around it slowly during normal operation rather than suddenly during catastrophic failure.
Religions served to concentrate wealth, historically. Furthermore, several of them offered strong reasons to tend the sick, investigate the natural world, and so forth -- probably more so than a typical local lord would have.
Religions also served to unite farflung lands. A researcher in Isfahan could correspond with one in Marrakech. A monk studying flowers in Edinburgh could share his findings with a nun in Osel. Without religions, you need another set of well-funded institutions with a tradition of correspondence and interaction to provide the same benefits. Today we have universities and research organizations like Oxford and Brookhaven National Labs. The concept of a university grew out of the Muslim monastic tradition, though, starting with the University of al-Qarawiyyin, founded in the 800s.
Of course, you can still get the same benefits without religions. But we have no reason to think we'd be even this advanced without the monastic traditions of Islam and Christianity.
> Any women claim they are unfairly treated in education? BS. They ARE education now, if they are unfairly treated it is by themselves.
87% of public school teachers are women. 44% of public school principals are women. Women's political representation is even lower. So anything institutionalized needs to come from men as well as women -- and we know there's institutionalized discrimination with so few women at higher levels in education.
In college education, women are roughly even with men in part-time positions. At the higher levels in full-time positions, though, women only comprise a third of university faculty.
Women can exhibit misogyny. This is especially true with unconscious bias; however, unconscious bias affects everyone in society. Saying "they're doing it to themselves" might have an element of truth in it, but the thrust of the statement is to deflect blame onto the injured party and avoid having to do anything about the problem. It's a combination of laziness and misogyny.
> Want equality? Show me the push for more men in teaching!
Eliminating the impact of gender roles on employment opportunities is an explicit goal of feminism.
Do you have any idea why most grade school and elementary teachers are women? It was introduced as a way of reducing costs when introducing public education. Women could be paid half as much, you see, to do the same work. That's why schoolteachers are paid so little today. That combined with the expectation that men must be the primary wageearners in a family prevents most men from becoming schoolteachers. If we paid schoolteachers a decent salary for something as important as educating entire generations of our citizens, the women in that field would have better quality of living, and more men would be attracted to the field.
People can have multiple real names. The artist is using the name Yoon Mi-rae as her primary professional name; call her that. It's rather insulting otherwise.
There is a huge number of rapists in the world (1 in 16 college men, according to Lisak and Miller, 2002, will admit to having raped someone if you ask them anonymously and don't use the word "rape"), and I have no particular reason to doubt the accusations leveled against Assange.
You mean a rocky start, stability within two or three years, better user interface options, and a few features that are really awesome but I don't use all that often, for an overall moderate improvement?
You don't want to continue aging forever. You would likely be happy to be in a permanently youthful, healthy, pain-free body for many decades to come. You just don't have that option right now.
It's likely because of different people being involved. School officials asking a police officer to arrest someone have a lot more weight behind their requests, and it's not the same police officers in each case anyway. Not to mention it's easier to identify the kid when you have a vice principle pointing them out to you than when you just have a twitter handle.
> I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
Is one case of a "saving the princess" game worth outrage? No.
Are there any "saving the prince" games? Are there any games where you *are* the princess, and you have to save anything at all? A few. Many fewer than the reverse.
If it were *only* an issue of bad writing and not of sexism, you'd expect as many "save the prince" games as "save the princess" games.
More like choose a successor. The odds are good that he has raped someone, and even if he hasn't, it's not a good thing for Wikileaks that its public face has such a charge hanging over his head. Really, he should have stepped down a while ago. On the other hand, his position is probably one of the major things keeping him in that embassy -- he's tarnishing the reputation of Wikileaks to save himself a few years in prison in favor of those same years trapped in an embassy.
The person was clearly listing out multiple steps to take. Use Calibre (to manage your ebooks, maybe with plugins to strip DRM). Root your Kindle (to prevent it from communicating with Amazon in ways you don't control).
Similar reasons. Media discourages women from doing anything unladylike. Women internalize this. If one highschool girl tries to defect, the girls surrounding her will helpfully step in to enforce these rules. Unfortunately, there's little chance for a normal highschool student to avoid problematic people.
When in shop class with two girls and twenty boys, the two girls will feel quite out of place -- we're told constantly that gender is one of the core parts of our identity, and they have relatively few allies on that front in the classroom. This is true even if the boys there are all don't make an issue of gender, as befitting any human.
Then, for those who want to get a career in something tech-oriented, they need to get into the relevant guild. If those guilds have a strong reputation of gender discrimination, that will serve as a disincentive to people to start the initial training in that line of work.
Let's see. I can take a class that's entirely optional. I know I'm likely to be picked on. I have no one there similar to me on an axis that I am constantly told is all-important, so I will feel out of place. Other people who seem more like me eschew that course and will make me feel as if I am abnormal and therefore bad even when I'm not at that class.
Whereas if I am passionate about the subject, I can learn on my own, online, where nobody can discern many personal details about me, nobody who can pester me (constantly in myriad ways, where I can't escape) about my decisions and pastimes, and the biggest downsides are not being able to skip a 3-credit college course and not having anyone to answer questions in person. Guess I'll have to go to IRC and pastebin and Google and Stack Overflow instead.
You expect me not to factor that into my decision...why?
Trace it back to each dropoff point.
Is the percentage of female senior software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female software engineers? That's a red flag for discrimination.
Is the percentage of recently graduated female software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female CS students? That's a red flag for discrimination.
Is the percentage of female CS graduates appreciably smaller than the percentage of incoming female CS freshmen? That's a red flag for discrimination.
None of it is absolute proof of discrimination, but it's enough evidence to investigate. Discrimination can take a number of forms -- maybe your high school had a CS class, and the teacher and the guidance counselor were both solid feminists, but they weren't able to enforce a non-hostile environment for women. Or maybe inertia is at play, and if there were two or three solid years with at least 30% female representation in that class it would self-perpetuate. Or maybe there are more general media and marketing forces at work telling women and girls that they cannot be nerdy and cannot be interested in computers, that they are broken and wrong without a husband and that having these skills will prevent them from getting one, that they must focus on family and not on a career, that they will end up being homemakers for half a decade or more so they shouldn't bother getting a high-skill job or worry about education overmuch.
Just saying "people are different -- who cares?" hides these problems.
The Subsurface developers failed to accomplish things that are common in many GTK+ applications. I'm not sure if that means the various GTK+ language bindings are a lot better than the native C library or what, but it looks like the main benefit of switching to QT was a forced rewrite of the UI.
In-place editing? Not that hard.
The ratings stars? Banshee has it. So does Rhythmbox.
Native look-and-feel is a valid complaint. If GTK+ used the native file dialogs in Windows and OSX, that would help a lot. Adding default themes for those platforms that better mimic native controls (and such themes exist) would also help.
Granted, that says nothing about the community, but from a technical perspective, that talk was worthless.
You can use the Google+ API for tha-- oh wait. That's readonly.
Well, you can use a greasemonkey script, probably.
You give one friend a piece of paper that says "XOR the bitstrings and interpret as UTF-32". You give three friends randomly generated bitstrings of the appropriate length. You give the fourth friend the password XOR'd with each of those random bitstrings.
Or you just write down your master password and put it in your safe and a deposit box at your bank.
I've lived here for several years and like the weather. It doesn't rain as hard as New York. I just wish I got a bit more snow.
It's "danegeld". Geld (also gild) means tax or fine; for instance, a weregild is a fine paid for having murdered someone ("were-" meaning "man"). The danegeld was a more efficient and universally better alternative to Viking raids -- the Vikings would extort money from a town in exchange for not attacking. This meant they assumed less risk, and the town had fewer casualties and kept more of their possessions.
This works out fine for towns that can't hope to fight off the Vikings. For towns that can reliably fight off the Vikings, they can refuse to pay, which leads to battle; eventually the Vikings will learn to concentrate on other towns because it's safer.
You live two lives. One is an ordinary, boring life that you don't mind the NSA finding out about. The other is as secretive as possible. No using credit cards. Nothing that requires ID. No flying, no buying alcohol.
One obvious problem with this is withdrawing cash. You have your public life, and the NSA sees you going to an ATM and grabbing $450, then it sees a transaction for $447 with an unknown person -- that's evidence linking your private identity to your public one. This is ameliorated if your public identity has a habit of withdrawing extra cash and a means of disposing of extra cash in a publicly acceptable way, like giving it to beggars, but it's still present. If your private identity has an income, though, and that income is sufficient for its expenses, then you can have wholly separate finances for both, which severs that link entirely.
A weaker link is one of location over time. Let's say the NSA can plot your public identity's location over time using things like bus pass usage, credit cards, phone calls, and security cameras with facial recognition, and they can plot your private identity's location over time using phone calls and security cameras. Eventually they'll realize that your private and public identities are occasionally colocated, or that whenever your public identity is in use your private has gone dark and vice versa.
Of course, that only matters if it's worse for you if the NSA has linked your public and private lives than if they merely have the ability to detain you during the course of your private affairs.
When I have a phone conversation, I do it by recording MP3s, putting them in encrypted form on microSD cards, and leaving them at dead drops.
What could you do with computers that functioned like standard x86 family computers with attached fast, parallel floating point processors like modern GPUs? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances.
Whereas if we have processors modeled on human brains -- well, let's just say I don't want to be the one to write real-time algorithms targeted toward a billion networked processors each running at 100Hz.
32-bit x86 processors can address more than 4GB of RAM. The ARM specification allows for 40-bit PAE, which should support up to a terabyte of RAM. So we could get an iOS device with a 32-bit ARM processor that has 8GB of RAM; that's not an issue.
Each process will only be able to see 4GB of RAM, but right now, iOS apps get killed after using more than 256MB of RAM or so. The policy seems to be that each application can use about a quarter of the machine's RAM, so if they're keeping that trend and want a device with 16GB of RAM, they'll want a 64-bit processor, but I think that's a ways off.