While his writing style is a bit too conceited for my tastes, and you have to take things he says with a hefty block of salt, according to Winston Chruchil's history of WW2, in 1942 the japanese were unsure whether to pursue a policy of holding what they had obtained and defending it well, versus expanding even further outward past their original planned expansion. According to his history (which, again, I don't know how much accuracy I would give it) the Doolittle raid is what made the Japanese choose the policy of further expansion - to try to hold a frontier out past aircraft range. And it was this policy of further expansion that made them push into terrirtory that the US was still strong in, and thus it led to the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, which pretty much threw away their naval dominance.
One of the funnier bits of evidence was the general lack of ridicule some years back when Nixon told us that he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.
The War of 1812 was a draw. The attempts by the US to take over land in what later became Canada didn't get far. The attempts by the British to take over cities in the US also didn't get far. The reason they burned the white house was because they knew they had to make the operation a hit-and-run and they would be driven out once the armies were gathered if they tried to stay in the capitol.
In the end, Britain signed a treaty that gave the US the area that was to become Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and the US agreed to stay out of Canada. It was very much a draw.
The war wasn't over control, but over (believe it or not) trade rights. Remember the complaints the colonists had with the trade policies of the British Empire - that finished goods manufacturing was the provedence of Britain only, and that materials had to be traded with Britain only? Basically, after becoming a seperate nation, the new USA found that it was disallowed from trading with the British colonies that still remained under British control - in other words, "Canada". Faced with similar policies from other European mother countries, the US wasn't being allowed to trade with any neighboring countries, because they were all still colonies of European powers. This was the complaint that was being used to spark the war. The thought was that the only way to have any ability to have a functioning economy for the new USA was for was to break the control of Europe over its other colonies. Since there was still resentment with Britain, the British colonies to the north seemed like the place to start this practice. (Whether it's the real reason or not is, of course, the sort of thing that pundits will argue about back and forth. It became moot after 1812 because the European powers started relaxing their imperial trade policies, under the realization that they wouldn't be able to excercise tight control over them anyway, as the colonies became more built-up and more eager to trade with each other.)
Zero. It was soldiers of the British Empire that burned down the white house in 1812. Yes, they were operating out of Canada, but Canada was still a British colony, and every person living there was still therefore a British subject.
What?? Okay, so you see a post that mentions Canada was at war with Japan, and mentions that therefore a baloon bomb landing in Canada is just as successful as one landing in the US (in reaction to the post that came before it which implied it wasn't), and you use accuse that poster of being US-centric??? Why?
Misplaced accusations of national jingoism are sometimes themselves another form of national jingoism.
Yes, you do. For example, there are two constitutional amendments about alchohol prohibition on the record - the one that instituted it and the one that repealed it later. If what you say was true, then the old one would have been striken from the constituion, instead of being left in place to be contradicted later in the document.
Yes, new laws superceed old ones - if the new law is of equal or higher jursidictional level. Only if the new law is of a lower jurisdictional level than the old one, then and only then does the old one superceed it. (i.e. a law can only superceed a constitutional amendment by being a constitutional amendment itself.)
gcc is also the most compliant C++ compiler. It is actually perfectly compliant. It also generates very clear compiler messages, while microsoft's are often cryptic.
Not necessarily. I spent quite a bit of time once trying to figure out why g++ was bitching at me for the error "choosing over because that is the closest match to." This sounds like a warning, but it was listed as an error and it refused to go on.
What was bad about this message is that it lied. G++ was NOT choosing that version in the slightest. It was trying (and failing) to tell me that the problem was that it was ambiguious which one I meant and it was choosing NEITHER, and thus couldn't go on.
The compiler message told me it was "choosing to do foo" when in reality it wasn't able to tell if it should do foo or not, and that was the actual error.
(The problem was that I had two methods that had some defaulted parameters in just such a way that it was ambiguous which one I meant when I left the defaulted parameters out. The error I admit was real, and was my fault. My beef was that the compiler's message was telling me the compiler was doing something it clearly was not.)
In places where "," is the decimal separator, "." is the thousands separator - it's an exact inversion from what you're used to: 123,456.7 --> 123.456,7
The original post said: "I don't know how it is in more diverse places, but it often seems like I'm the only gay man majoring in Computer Science..."
I admit to misremembering this. The original post did use the word "diversity". But it doesn't look like it's using it that way you say it is. Since he prefaces the statement with "I don't know how it is in more diverse places", he's obviously NOT talking about diversity of sexual preferences when he used the word "diverse" there, because if he was it would have rendered the statement rather stupid - of course he would know that in places with more diversity of sexual preferences there'd be more gay men. The fact that he said he doesn't know indicates that he's talking about some other type of diversity, obviously.
And so I thought, "Well, obviously he's talking about the sort of diversity that compsci actually does lack, not about diversities that it has plenty of, and he's saying that he doesen't necessarily think sexual preference is one of them that's lacking - he's just wondering if it is." (The other responses seem to indicate that it isn't laking, by the way.)
Which is why it looked to me like you kept trying to shift the topic into persecution of people based on sexual preferences. By the original reading of the post, it doesn't look like it's anything even close to being about that. It wasn't, as you characterize it, "Oh, woe is me, I'm being persecuted by compsci people, hey wait, look at that the father of compsci was gay, now I have ammunition to use when people persecute my gayness in compsci.". It was "It's frustrating being the only gay person in compsci, but hey wait, look at that the father of compsci was gay, maybe gayness in compsci isn't as rare as I thought, that's reassuring."
Feeling like you're the only one like you in a group can be depressing even when nobody's doing a thing to persecute you for it in the slightest - especially if it's something related to trying to find a signifigant other.
Yes, you did in fact turn this into a thread about tying diversity to privilege. That was not a feature of the original post. It was only about lamenting the lack of others of a similar bent, not about lamenting being persecuted or unprivileged.
I agree that ownership would be better than licensing, so save your breath.
But your original point I objected to was not about that. It was about the fear of one company being able to buy up all the spectrum when that same fear doesn't exist for real estate so why should people be worried? They should be worried because there's only a few hundred broadcast channels per large city (and that's when you add up AM/FM/VHF/UHF together), while there's a hell of a lot more plots of land than that. It is prohibitively expensive to buy up all the real estate but it is feasable to buy up all the RF spectrum. So, yes, have RF channels be owned instead of licensed, but keep the rule that puts an upper maxiumum on how many channels you can own in an area.
To be able to broadcast on all those frequencies you first have to own them, and you have to own the rights in every "jurisdiction" where you plan to broadcast.
While FCC licenses are expensive, it still costs orders of magnitude less to buy enough FCC licenses to broadcast on all frequencies in a city than it does to buy enough real estate to own all the land in that city. That is why buying all the land is not feasable but buying all the airwaves is, and that's why the artificial cap is in place.
It's just standard procedure to design this kind of a one-shot mission such that the *minimum* possible lifespan of the thing is enough to get done what you want to get done. But it's largely a crapshoot - there's so many things that can wear down and die that it's impossible to get a narrow prediction on how long the thing will last. So if your analysis says the thing will last somewhere between one month and two years, you plan for the worst case scenario - the one month time window. Everything else beyond that is "bonus".
I went back and reviewed the thread, and it seems an apology is in order.
Here's what happened - I saw Rei's post, and I saw the grandparent of Rei's post, but I never saw the post that comes between the two (the one from ioslipstream). I therefore thought that the grandparent of Rei's post (kfg's post) was the direct parent of Rei's post, and therefore thought that Rei's acid tones were a response to the text I was reading in kfg's post, which I misattributed to ioslipstream because I didn't pay attention closely enough. (Note that the quote I included and attributed to ioslipstream was actually from kfg's post.)
I never even saw ioslipstream's post until just now when I went back to review replies to my posts, saw your post and went "huh??", and then clicked up the "parent" links and saw it there.
Now that I've finally seen it I'd have to agree that it was a stupid and unsympathetic post.
I'm guessing that it must have been modded down beneath a score of zero, and that's why I didn't see it the first time. My bad.
[The long rant directed at your made up strawman of my point has been ignored]
What does this have to do with my original post? My post was explaining that the kind of diversity the original post mentioned wasn't about people who think differently and creatively about math and science.
The original post didn't use "diversity". The original just complained that the poster didn't find any other gay CS students, then a respondant said, with incredulity at this claim, that there was plenty of diversity of the mind in CS students, despite their pirvileged background in upbringing (implying that it probably is not true to claim that CS students are less likely to be gay than any other students), and then YOU were the one that jumped on that as if that wasn't an allowed way to use the word diversity.
I find it annoying that you wasted such a long post to rail me over the many applications of the word "priviledged" (irrelevant since I never said there was only one kind) while hippocritically not accepting yourself that there can be many applications of the word "diversity", and that the person you responded to was not using it the way you falsely claimed he was.
You aren't a fanatic because you care about the rights of gays. That's laudable. You're a fanatic because of your tendency to turn everything into the topic you want to rail over, even when it's a very tenuous link to do so.
nobody has a problem with the concept that some corporation might control all the land why do we consider this a viable reality for the spectrum?
False. I have a *large* problem with that concept. The difference is that it's a heck of a lot less feasable for that to actually happen with real estate than it is with the RF spectrum, so there's less danger of it. If I thought it was possible to occur, then I'd be rasing a big stink over it. The reason nobody is worried about one company owning all the land is just because it simply cannot happen - there's too much of it for anyone to be able to afford buying all of it. With RF frequencies, on the other hand, it isn't that much more expensive to make your transmitter broadcast on a flood of all frequencies than it is to make it broadcast on just one narrow band of the spectrum. The only "expense" with this, really, is the artificial one created by FCC licensing.
By selling both the spectrum and the allowed wattage you now effectively have a 2-D resource.
False. If you own a plot of land at 1001 north maple street, and I own a plot of land at 2001 north maple street, these are seperate independant pieces of land, despite the fact that they both share the same east/west coordinate in the 2-D resource. But, on the other hand if I own a radio station broadcasting at a different wattage than yours, but they share the same 'coordinate' on the spectrum, they *do* interfere. This means the RF spectrum is not as "2-D" a resource as real estate is.
Watch a partisan house floor debate on C-Span some time, and you'll see what I mean. Every so often, it makes a huge difference.
The problem is that on any issue that I'm motivated enough to actaully put up with watching that, I am in disagreement with both the parties and they are actually on the same side as each other, with a few lone dissenters from both parties.
Or in other words - the debates that are partisan are not the debates on issues I care all that much about so I don't watch them. On the PATRIOT/USA act vote, I was very glad to see my state's senator, Feingold, explain what was a bad idea about that bill, and why he couldn't support it in good conscience. I was very dissapointed to not see anyone ELSE take the same stance, and so it passed with him being the lone dissenter in the senate.
That's not a partisan debate. His own party got pissed at him for that stance.
I would imagine there is a strong correlation between "prudeness" and "straightness" (And I say this as someone who is straight but I hopefully count myself as not being part of that prude correlation), or at least *declared* straightness. Therefore I would automatically disgregard any psychological study trying to determine how prevelent various sexual orientations are if that study is dependant on people volunteering information honestly.
Also, anyone who is 'outcast' for being in the minority with regards to a particular opinion is more likely to be the sort who spends time thinking about that particular thing. (The average third-party supporter in politics probably spends more time thinking about politics than the general population, because he's constantly reminded that his politics differ from the majority. The average atheist spends more time thinking about religion than the average theist, because he's constantly reminded that his position differs from the majority. And, similarly, the average gay person probably spends more time thinking about his own sexuality than the average straight person does, again, because he's constantly reminded that his orientation differs from other people's.) Thus the willingness to volunteer answers to the questions this survey asks ends up being a filter that makes for a non-representative sample. A straight person is less likely to volunteer for such a study.
Sexual orientation is not social status of the type you were talking about. You were speaking of privileged upbringing. I can't imagine how being rich makes someone more or less likely to be gay. Therefore your statement that CS majors are from more privileged backgrounds has zero, nada, nil, nothing, nohow, no way, to do with what ratio of them are gay. If you continue to tie the two together I'll have to write you off as a one-issue fanatic.
Nah, that's not quite the same thing. I was very, very klutzy way back in high school, and I was the "Bob" of your example. I had no problem with this, and encouraged it as a fun form of self-effacing humor (not that I would have used words like "self-effacing" in high school).
The problem with pointing at something you dislike and equating it's alleged lameness with gayness is that it makes the connection gay=lame, which is not only insulting, but also often false (depending on just what the lame thing in question is.) Pointing out that "Joe" is similar to "Bob" in his trippingness is not insulting unless either it is false that Bob trips a lot, or it is true but it is something that Bob feels embarassed about.
There are some who would say that the whole gay/bi/straight thing shouldn't really be treated as seperate distinct categories, but rather as a sliding scale where very few people are entirely at one end or the other. A 100% straight or 100% gay person is rare, and most are something like 98% one and 2% the other or something like that - with that kind of a model, it's easy to see how an evolutionary model could end up with percentages that come out "straight" only 90% of the time, and those percentages could differ from one person to the next, to the point where in rare cases the preferences end up the other way around - it's not a difference of category, but one of proportionment and ratio.
Under that model, the difference between gays and straights wouldn't be so much a categorical difference (like having ten fingers versus having six) but a slight ratio difference (like the ratio of pignments in your hair that makes some people's hair come out blond or brown or black or red.)
Diversity means a mix of people from different privilege levels in society.
No. Diversity means a mix of things that are different in several ways period. Those differences don't *have* to be about social class. If I look at a set of children's crayon drawings and notice that some are of birds, some are of houses, some are of people, some are complex, some are simple, and so on, I might say "there are a diverse bunch of drawings here" even though they all share some properties, like being on paper, and being done in crayon, and being done by children.
The context that was relevant to the post was *obviously* not the context of social status.
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While his writing style is a bit too conceited for my tastes, and you have to take things he says with a hefty block of salt, according to Winston Chruchil's history of WW2, in 1942 the japanese were unsure whether to pursue a policy of holding what they had obtained and defending it well, versus expanding even further outward past their original planned expansion. According to his history (which, again, I don't know how much accuracy I would give it) the Doolittle raid is what made the Japanese choose the policy of further expansion - to try to hold a frontier out past aircraft range. And it was this policy of further expansion that made them push into terrirtory that the US was still strong in, and thus it led to the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, which pretty much threw away their naval dominance.
And if you call the soldiers who burned the white house down British, you might as well call all Canadians of the time British. Sheesh!
Precisely. That's what they *were*.
One of the funnier bits of evidence was the general lack of ridicule some years back when Nixon told us that he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.
The War of 1812 was a draw. The attempts by the US to take over land in what later became Canada didn't get far. The attempts by the British to take over cities in the US also didn't get far. The reason they burned the white house was because they knew they had to make the operation a hit-and-run and they would be driven out once the armies were gathered if they tried to stay in the capitol.
In the end, Britain signed a treaty that gave the US the area that was to become Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and the US agreed to stay out of Canada. It was very much a draw.
The war wasn't over control, but over (believe it or not) trade rights. Remember the complaints the colonists had with the trade policies of the British Empire - that finished goods manufacturing was the provedence of Britain only, and that materials had to be traded with Britain only? Basically, after becoming a seperate nation, the new USA found that it was disallowed from trading with the British colonies that still remained under British control - in other words, "Canada". Faced with similar policies from other European mother countries, the US wasn't being allowed to trade with any neighboring countries, because they were all still colonies of European powers. This was the complaint that was being used to spark the war. The thought was that the only way to have any ability to have a functioning economy for the new USA was for was to break the control of Europe over its other colonies. Since there was still resentment with Britain, the British colonies to the north seemed like the place to start this practice. (Whether it's the real reason or not is, of course, the sort of thing that pundits will argue about back and forth. It became moot after 1812 because the European powers started relaxing their imperial trade policies, under the realization that they wouldn't be able to excercise tight control over them anyway, as the colonies became more built-up and more eager to trade with each other.)
Zero. It was soldiers of the British Empire that burned down the white house in 1812. Yes, they were operating out of Canada, but Canada was still a British colony, and every person living there was still therefore a British subject.
What?? Okay, so you see a post that mentions Canada was at war with Japan, and mentions that therefore a baloon bomb landing in Canada is just as successful as one landing in the US (in reaction to the post that came before it which implied it wasn't), and you use accuse that poster of being US-centric??? Why?
Misplaced accusations of national jingoism are sometimes themselves another form of national jingoism.
You do not repeal old laws by passing new ones
Yes, you do. For example, there are two constitutional amendments about alchohol prohibition on the record - the one that instituted it and the one that repealed it later. If what you say was true, then the old one would have been striken from the constituion, instead of being left in place to be contradicted later in the document.
Yes, new laws superceed old ones - if the new law is of equal or higher jursidictional level. Only if the new law is of a lower jurisdictional level than the old one, then and only then does the old one superceed it. (i.e. a law can only superceed a constitutional amendment by being a constitutional amendment itself.)
gcc is also the most compliant C++ compiler. It is actually perfectly compliant. It also generates very clear compiler messages, while microsoft's are often cryptic.
Not necessarily. I spent quite a bit of time once trying to figure out why g++ was bitching at me for the error "choosing over because that is the closest match to
What was bad about this message is that it lied. G++ was NOT choosing that version in the slightest. It was trying (and failing) to tell me that the problem was that it was ambiguious which one I meant and it was choosing NEITHER, and thus couldn't go on.
The compiler message told me it was "choosing to do foo" when in reality it wasn't able to tell if it should do foo or not, and that was the actual error.
(The problem was that I had two methods that had some defaulted parameters in just such a way that it was ambiguous which one I meant when I left the defaulted parameters out. The error I admit was real, and was my fault. My beef was that the compiler's message was telling me the compiler was doing something it clearly was not.)
In places where "," is the decimal separator, "." is the thousands separator - it's an exact inversion from what you're used to:
123,456.7 --> 123.456,7
It's a rigid skeleton with a flexible covering. Sort of a mix of the two.
The original post said: "I don't know how it is in more diverse places, but it often seems like I'm the only gay man majoring in Computer Science..."
I admit to misremembering this. The original post did use the word "diversity". But it doesn't look like it's using it that way you say it is. Since he prefaces the statement with "I don't know how it is in more diverse places", he's obviously NOT talking about diversity of sexual preferences when he used the word "diverse" there, because if he was it would have rendered the statement rather stupid - of course he would know that in places with more diversity of sexual preferences there'd be more gay men. The fact that he said he doesn't know indicates that he's talking about some other type of diversity, obviously.
And so I thought, "Well, obviously he's talking about the sort of diversity that compsci actually does lack, not about diversities that it has plenty of, and he's saying that he doesen't necessarily think sexual preference is one of them that's lacking - he's just wondering if it is." (The other responses seem to indicate that it isn't laking, by the way.)
Which is why it looked to me like you kept trying to shift the topic into persecution of people based on sexual preferences. By the original reading of the post, it doesn't look like it's anything even close to being about that. It wasn't, as you characterize it, "Oh, woe is me, I'm being persecuted by compsci people, hey wait, look at that the father of compsci was gay, now I have ammunition to use when people persecute my gayness in compsci.". It was "It's frustrating being the only gay person in compsci, but hey wait, look at that the father of compsci was gay, maybe gayness in compsci isn't as rare as I thought, that's reassuring."
Feeling like you're the only one like you in a group can be depressing even when nobody's doing a thing to persecute you for it in the slightest - especially if it's something related to trying to find a signifigant other.
Yes, you did in fact turn this into a thread about tying diversity to privilege. That was not a feature of the original post. It was only about lamenting the lack of others of a similar bent, not about lamenting being persecuted or unprivileged.
I agree that ownership would be better than licensing, so save your breath.
But your original point I objected to was not about that. It was about the fear of one company being able to buy up all the spectrum when that same fear doesn't exist for real estate so why should people be worried? They should be worried because there's only a few hundred broadcast channels per large city (and that's when you add up AM/FM/VHF/UHF together), while there's a hell of a lot more plots of land than that. It is prohibitively expensive to buy up all the real estate but it is feasable to buy up all the RF spectrum. So, yes, have RF channels be owned instead of licensed, but keep the rule that puts an upper maxiumum on how many channels you can own in an area.
To be able to broadcast on all those frequencies you first have to own them, and you have to own the rights in every "jurisdiction" where you plan to broadcast.
While FCC licenses are expensive, it still costs orders of magnitude less to buy enough FCC licenses to broadcast on all frequencies in a city than it does to buy enough real estate to own all the land in that city. That is why buying all the land is not feasable but buying all the airwaves is, and that's why the artificial cap is in place.
It's just standard procedure to design this kind of a one-shot mission such that the *minimum* possible lifespan of the thing is enough to get done what you want to get done. But it's largely a crapshoot - there's so many things that can wear down and die that it's impossible to get a narrow prediction on how long the thing will last. So if your analysis says the thing will last somewhere between one month and two years, you plan for the worst case scenario - the one month time window. Everything else beyond that is "bonus".
I went back and reviewed the thread, and it seems an apology is in order.
Here's what happened - I saw Rei's post, and I saw the grandparent of Rei's post, but I never saw the post that comes between the two (the one from ioslipstream). I therefore thought that the grandparent of Rei's post (kfg's post) was the direct parent of Rei's post, and therefore thought that Rei's acid tones were a response to the text I was reading in kfg's post, which I misattributed to ioslipstream because I didn't pay attention closely enough. (Note that the quote I included and attributed to ioslipstream was actually from kfg's post.)
I never even saw ioslipstream's post until just now when I went back to review replies to my posts, saw your post and went "huh??", and then clicked up the "parent" links and saw it there.
Now that I've finally seen it I'd have to agree that it was a stupid and unsympathetic post.
I'm guessing that it must have been modded down beneath a score of zero, and that's why I didn't see it the first time. My bad.
[The long rant directed at your made up strawman of my point has been ignored]
What does this have to do with my original post? My post was explaining that the kind of diversity the original post mentioned wasn't about people who think differently and creatively about math and science.
The original post didn't use "diversity". The original just complained that the poster didn't find any other gay CS students, then a respondant said, with incredulity at this claim, that there was plenty of diversity of the mind in CS students, despite their pirvileged background in upbringing (implying that it probably is not true to claim that CS students are less likely to be gay than any other students), and then YOU were the one that jumped on that as if that wasn't an allowed way to use the word diversity.
I find it annoying that you wasted such a long post to rail me over the many applications of the word "priviledged" (irrelevant since I never said there was only one kind) while hippocritically not accepting yourself that there can be many applications of the word "diversity", and that the person you responded to was not using it the way you falsely claimed he was.
You aren't a fanatic because you care about the rights of gays. That's laudable. You're a fanatic because of your tendency to turn everything into the topic you want to rail over, even when it's a very tenuous link to do so.
nobody has a problem with the concept that some corporation might control all the land why do we consider this a viable reality for the spectrum?
False. I have a *large* problem with that concept. The difference is that it's a heck of a lot less feasable for that to actually happen with real estate than it is with the RF spectrum, so there's less danger of it. If I thought it was possible to occur, then I'd be rasing a big stink over it. The reason nobody is worried about one company owning all the land is just because it simply cannot happen - there's too much of it for anyone to be able to afford buying all of it. With RF frequencies, on the other hand, it isn't that much more expensive to make your transmitter broadcast on a flood of all frequencies than it is to make it broadcast on just one narrow band of the spectrum. The only "expense" with this, really, is the artificial one created by FCC licensing.
By selling both the spectrum and the allowed wattage you now effectively have a 2-D resource.
False. If you own a plot of land at 1001 north maple street, and I own a plot of land at 2001 north maple street, these are seperate independant pieces of land, despite the fact that they both share the same east/west coordinate in the 2-D resource. But, on the other hand if I own a radio station broadcasting at a different wattage than yours, but they share the same 'coordinate' on the spectrum, they *do* interfere. This means the RF spectrum is not as "2-D" a resource as real estate is.
Watch a partisan house floor debate on C-Span some time, and you'll see what I mean. Every so often, it makes a huge difference.
The problem is that on any issue that I'm motivated enough to actaully put up with watching that, I am in disagreement with both the parties and they are actually on the same side as each other, with a few lone dissenters from both parties.
Or in other words - the debates that are partisan are not the debates on issues I care all that much about so I don't watch them. On the PATRIOT/USA act vote, I was very glad to see my state's senator, Feingold, explain what was a bad idea about that bill, and why he couldn't support it in good conscience. I was very dissapointed to not see anyone ELSE take the same stance, and so it passed with him being the lone dissenter in the senate.
That's not a partisan debate. His own party got pissed at him for that stance.
I would imagine there is a strong correlation between "prudeness" and "straightness" (And I say this as someone who is straight but I hopefully count myself as not being part of that prude correlation), or at least *declared* straightness. Therefore I would automatically disgregard any psychological study trying to determine how prevelent various sexual orientations are if that study is dependant on people volunteering information honestly.
Also, anyone who is 'outcast' for being in the minority with regards to a particular opinion is more likely to be the sort who spends time thinking about that particular thing. (The average third-party supporter in politics probably spends more time thinking about politics than the general population, because he's constantly reminded that his politics differ from the majority. The average atheist spends more time thinking about religion than the average theist, because he's constantly reminded that his position differs from the majority. And, similarly, the average gay person probably spends more time thinking about his own sexuality than the average straight person does, again, because he's constantly reminded that his orientation differs from other people's.) Thus the willingness to volunteer answers to the questions this survey asks ends up being a filter that makes for a non-representative sample. A straight person is less likely to volunteer for such a study.
Sexual orientation is not social status of the type you were talking about. You were speaking of privileged upbringing. I can't imagine how being rich makes someone more or less likely to be gay. Therefore your statement that CS majors are from more privileged backgrounds has zero, nada, nil, nothing, nohow, no way, to do with what ratio of them are gay. If you continue to tie the two together I'll have to write you off as a one-issue fanatic.
Nah, that's not quite the same thing. I was very, very klutzy way back in high school, and I was the "Bob" of your example. I had no problem with this, and encouraged it as a fun form of self-effacing humor (not that I would have used words like "self-effacing" in high school).
The problem with pointing at something you dislike and equating it's alleged lameness with gayness is that it makes the connection gay=lame, which is not only insulting, but also often false (depending on just what the lame thing in question is.) Pointing out that "Joe" is similar to "Bob" in his trippingness is not insulting unless either it is false that Bob trips a lot, or it is true but it is something that Bob feels embarassed about.
Why on earth did you just try and mix up homosexuality and transsexuality?
Because the post was trying to describe the prevelent attitiude in the '50s. This was not necessarily in agreement with the opinions of the poster.
There are some who would say that the whole gay/bi/straight thing shouldn't really be treated as seperate distinct categories, but rather as a sliding scale where very few people are entirely at one end or the other. A 100% straight or 100% gay person is rare, and most are something like 98% one and 2% the other or something like that - with that kind of a model, it's easy to see how an evolutionary model could end up with percentages that come out "straight" only 90% of the time, and those percentages could differ from one person to the next, to the point where in rare cases the preferences end up the other way around - it's not a difference of category, but one of proportionment and ratio.
Under that model, the difference between gays and straights wouldn't be so much a categorical difference (like having ten fingers versus having six) but a slight ratio difference (like the ratio of pignments in your hair that makes some people's hair come out blond or brown or black or red.)
Diversity means a mix of people from different privilege levels in society.
No. Diversity means a mix of things that are different in several ways period. Those differences don't *have* to be about social class. If I look at a set of children's crayon drawings and notice that some are of birds, some are of houses, some are of people, some are complex, some are simple, and so on, I might say "there are a diverse bunch of drawings here" even though they all share some properties, like being on paper, and being done in crayon, and being done by children.
The context that was relevant to the post was *obviously* not the context of social status.