Other than someone says 'we need more women in STEM', why do we ACTUALLY NEED more women in STEM?
Off the top of my head, I'd say it's because it's better for the industry and the field of study.
Because a demographically diverse group is going to bring a greater range of ideas and perspectives to the table.
Because encouraging the presence and visibility of women within the field helps ensure that those who choose to be there are accepted as a relatively normal occurrence and therefore given credence for their ideas and work, rather than judged based upon the novelty of heir gender.
Because if an entire intellectual pursuit builds itself up around self-selection of an unrelated trait like gender, it's symptomatic of other self-selected biases which are similarly counter-productive and not in any way relevant to the pursuit itself.
It's fundamentally better for the industry and profession as a whole. For a field that tends to pride itself upon its egalitarian ethos and the importance of logic, the idea that an irrelevant criteria (in this discussion, gender) is so wildly over-represented is wildly hypocritical.
We need more women garbage men too, but you aren't fucking whining about that are you? More women in STEM is not going to get you laid or fix your social issues that prevent you from getting a date.
You accurately noted that there is a wildly disproportionate representation of men amongst garbage collectors and yet that doesn't bother me in the least. That's not because it's unglamorous or because I think it's beneath my notice, but rather because I don't think that physical act of garbage collection will be improved through fresh insight, voices, or perspectives.
I will admit that I would like for there to be at least a few women in garbage collection, just as an indicator that, "No, seriously, 50% of the population can actually choose to do whatever work they damn well please, just like the other 50%," but that does not improve garbage collection itself, just society as a whole. Since it isn't improving the actual practice of garbage collection, let's set that aside as "SJW bullshit", shall we? I can accept that.
I absolutely do think that the logistics of how to handle garbage collection on a city- or region-wide level is a field that can benefit from fresh insight and voices. I know nothing about the sanitation services management industry, but I strongly suspect that it's run by old white men. Rather than gender being the issue, in this case, I'd be more concerned about class, race, and representative makeup of the public being served.
That's why your counterpoint is in no way related to the topic of hand.
The reason this works particularly well in baseball, basketball and hockey is the schedule. You have 162 games a year in MLB, for example. In the NBA and NHL, it's 82 games. That's a relatively substantial sample - each game only accounts for roughly 0.6 or 1.2% of the season record.
The NFL, on the other hand, has a 16 game season. A team having a particularly good or bad game carries 10 times the weight it does in baseball (just going off the percentage of the season's games). Also, unlike baseball, football's playoffs are single-elimination.
The reason analytics aren't as directly relevant to football is exactly the reason that I enjoy it immensely.
---
Legend for our friends abroad: MLB = Major League Baseball NHL = National Hockey League NBA = National Basketball Association NFL = National Football** League
** - yes, we're talking about American football, rather than the game known internationally as the game in which you kick a ball with your foot.
... the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated.
Can we keep our units/ratios consistent?
... the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about one-in-250,000, NASA stated.
When you're regurgitating statistics that are generally considered good news - such as the decreased chance of global catastrophe - doesn't it seem reasonable to make those statistics intelligible?
From what I remember, Alan Moore has expressed very little concern about what is done with his stories in other media. I don't have a link handy, but I recall an ancient interview with the AV Club over on The Onion in which he essentially said that what other people did with his stories really wasn't his concern and he had enough of his own work to keep him busy. He'd just let it go and take the paycheck.
You can call it selling out but it sounds like one of the more rational ways of handling it. How else are you going to stay sane during the dark days of 'LXG'?
(Disclaimer: His opinion may have changed over time. I think this may have been in response to the From Hell movie, which puts it back around 2001, and I haven't really been keeping up on such things.)
...it actually supports a huge number of subformats (and different compression algorithms) in addition.
TIFF: Thousands of Image File Formats
If you do wind up converting to tiff, then remember to document everything in excruciating detail. With thousands of possible combinations - each of which is a perfectly valid tiff image - you may encounter some issues if someone's using a less robust reader and assuming for the wrong compression algorithm, byte order, data striping or photometric interpretation.
I used it to play games in 1998. 2004? Big deal. I've got cheese older than that.
Yeah, about that...
We all talked and decided that if you aren't going to take your turn cleaning the fridge, then we're going to charge you extra on next month's rent to pay for the HAZMAT service.
... Because the merits of the case are determined by the information brought forth by the investigators and a conflict of interest could very clearly have a profound effect on the nature of that information?
Also, by defining USA and Rebels as a maybe, they by definition must be more than 0% likely, therefore it's impossible to then list Russia or China as 100%.
The seemingly erroneous total is a byproduct of that motivational seminar he attended. He's giving his whackjob theories 110%.
Ironically, I actually liked what they did with 3rd Edition based upon my very limited playing. You may feel as though they blew it but I felt that the whole thing ("the whole thing" being just the core rules, in my very limited experience) felt surprisingly consistent and outright elegant in a few places. I sincerely believe that they did a decent job with 3rd edition and, although I've never tried 3.5, it appears to have a lot of support as a fairly reasonable "patch" that addressed a few nagging issues.
(Granted, I think that those issues should have been addressed as errata rather than a money-grabbing new half-version... but my net worth isn't equal to that of Hasbro for a reason.)
Unfortunately, I just dislike the level, class and hit point mechanics which sort of define it as D&D. The math behind the scenes seems reasonably solid (if a bit abstract) to me, but it's the D&D at the forefront that turns me off.
In a related vein, I'm still not sure who the target audience may be.
I'm haven't been a regular D&D player for a few decades but I am involved in a RPG community which is largely centered around 3.5 and DDM. The response there has been almost unilaterally one of revulsion.
After much discussion, most reasonable theory that we have come up with is that the current target market is new players - the ever-popular WoW crowd - for whom the purchase of new books is an addition, rather than a replacement with the assumption that a significant percentage of regulars will fall in line, despite their grumbling, out of a desire to stay "official." The video ad campaigns seem to reinforce this belief with the persistent, nagging mockery of the existing player base. The developer's comments are consistently spun to point out the many failings of 3rd Edition as well.
So, with that being said, are you relying primarily upon the 3E crowd to swallow their pride and accept that you've convinced them to pay for and playtest your inferior system in order to pave the way for your new, vastly superior revision again? What, if any, steps are being taken to address isolation and resentment amongst the current customers or is the primary focus entirely upon attracting new players and recreating the same level of devotion from scratch?
You just love saying, "BZZT!", don't you? Endearing habit you've got there.
You are correct, however. As with the reply above, I misspoke/mistyped yet again. "Stealing" was a very poor choice of words and was intended in a non-specific, generalized way which is entirely inaccurate when taken in a very specific legal context. My apologies on my error.
My bad. Common English versus Legal English. Thank you for the correction.
Nonetheless - however inaccurately I may have used very specific terms - the end result is that:
a) Fair Use is a defense only after the establishment of the acts in question having occurred. b) Resorting to a Fair Use argument is therefore an admission of said acts being factual - which cannot accurately be described as either "guilt" or "infringement" in Legal English.
Is that correct and accurate? Because that was my intention, clumsily phrased as it may have been.
Congratulations on reading TFA, but I think you might have missed a few rather crucial points.
1. Fair Use Reform. The author offered no concrete suggestions, just "expand fair use". I offer a suggestion: any non-commercial use should be considered fair use. And if you sue me for copyright infringement and the courts deem my use to be fair use, I should be able to collect a kingly sum from you.
Currently, Fair Use is something that you never, ever want to have to invoke in a court of law. It's the last chance defense to be used only once you've been determined as having definitely infringed upon the copyright holder. By definition, it means admitting guilt to infringing. The author is proposing radically strengthening the current system by adding several specifically-named considerations - one of which is specifically stated as non-commercial personal use. Using the strengthened definitions, you give people more of a safety net in which to say, "Yes, I infringed upon the copyright holder in order to make a copy of the musical recording for use on another device for my own convenience, which is specifically allowed as a non-commercial, personal use in section blah of blah blah blah etc..."
Currently, you're essentially saying, "Yeah, I totally did it. But... well... I think that's ok, since... well... it seemed ok."
On a side note, I actually significantly prefer the author's definition of personal non-commercial use over the sweepingly broad any non-commercial use, which is far too open to abuse. Who here wants to see a large entity with deep pockets legally infringing upon a smaller independent entity's work by blatantly stealing it and giving it away for free in order to drive them out of business?
2.Limits on Secondary Liability BZZZT! No, these tech ddin't become popular because they "challenged the status quo." They became popular because (surprise) they were USEFUL. And again, IMO TFA is wrong. There shouldn't be "limits" to secondary liability, there should be no such thing as "secondary liability.
Just to check, you do realize that he was suggesting that any technology or medium with substantial non-infringing use would be protected if the Sony Betamax standard was codified... right? He's also suggesting weakening the penalties for secondary liability that it actually represents the closest approximation of real financial results.
While "no such thing" sounds nice and simple, I think it's pretty reasonable that if I create and market the Book-Gank 4000 expressly for the purpose of encouraging the duplication of the NY Times bestsellers at a fraction of their list price, I'd be liable for a reasonable estimation of the amount of money which was not earned by the authors I'd indirectly infringed upon because of my actions. Information may want to be free, but authors still want to eat and pay rent. As a compromise, I find it relatively palatable, personally.
3. Protections Against Copyright Abuse. Am I the only one that gets annoyed when someone presents some obscure reference that I'm supposed to know about to the point that they need no link? Look, you want me to know about the "The Let's Go Crazy Baby" case then dammit, link to a Wikipedia article about it. Hmmm... "No page with that title exists". That said, I agree with the author about his point even though it was extremely retarded to expect me to know about "lets go crazy baby". If it isn't in Wikipedia it must be pretty damned obscure.
Psssst. Paragraph 11. He describes the whole thing. You sure you read the article?
4. Fair and Accessible Licensing As an end-user, I should have no license, nor any need for one. Licenses are for those who wish to use a copyrighted work for financial gain. End-user licenses should be illegal, PERIOD, not merely the unenforceable clickthrough licenses.
As to music, a small sample should be considered "fair use", not unlike a quote f
Please forgive me for quoting in multiple pieces. I'm not trying to take you out of context, I simply think there are a few different things to address.
The self made quest I described is long and hard BUT it has one massive goal that at the end YOU managed to pull off.
The point I was trying somewhat clumsily to make is that your one massive goal consists of putting yourself at inconvenience, when taken from another viewpoint. To me, walking for hours without being allowed to reliably use any sort of faster transportation, for example, is tedious rather than engrossing.
Compare this with more casual games where you spend the same amount of time, but do it just travelling around. I don't consider a game where you have to spend uninterrupted hours just traveling around in order to eventually do something fun as a casual game (barring the hypothetical exception where traveling is the point of the game, I suppose). That, to me, typifies the exact same "hardcore" mentality you described in your rancor quest. Investment of time in order to eventually reap rewards of fun and accomplishment.
I rather have that lake crossing be an hour long hard battle, and do it ONCE, then those constant swims as quests send you there and back again.
Personally, I'd rather that it be possible to complete it in 5 minutes and it just gets increasingly difficult as the rewards get progressively greater. For some, that would seem to be a hollow accomplishment because it only took 5 minutes. For others, the difficulty itself is what determines the sense of accomplishment.
My whole point is that I believe the latter is much, much harder to implement (and harder to make money off of) and therefore it has been completely dropped. Using my own definitions, a "hardcore" casual game - one in which the challenge is significant enough without requiring an outright embarrassing investment of time required for any particular goal - could actually exist without being a complete oxymoron.
I greatly fear that the more typical definition of hardcore is the time involved, rather than the difficulty, making such a game impossible by definition.
One possible reason is that there is no way to have a realistic metric for difficulty. You can't say, "That was 42 kilodiffs and I won. I rock!" because there's no way to measure such a thing. Time, on the other hand, is quite easily measured. "I spent 12 hours raiding to get my drops for my new helmet. Now that is worthwhile."
Without a numeric measure of your e-penis, there's not much need for a big one, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible revision: "Cortana now admits to reading all of your emails."
Off the top of my head, I'd say it's because it's better for the industry and the field of study.
It's fundamentally better for the industry and profession as a whole. For a field that tends to pride itself upon its egalitarian ethos and the importance of logic, the idea that an irrelevant criteria (in this discussion, gender) is so wildly over-represented is wildly hypocritical.
You accurately noted that there is a wildly disproportionate representation of men amongst garbage collectors and yet that doesn't bother me in the least. That's not because it's unglamorous or because I think it's beneath my notice, but rather because I don't think that physical act of garbage collection will be improved through fresh insight, voices, or perspectives.
I will admit that I would like for there to be at least a few women in garbage collection, just as an indicator that, "No, seriously, 50% of the population can actually choose to do whatever work they damn well please, just like the other 50%," but that does not improve garbage collection itself, just society as a whole. Since it isn't improving the actual practice of garbage collection, let's set that aside as "SJW bullshit", shall we? I can accept that.
I absolutely do think that the logistics of how to handle garbage collection on a city- or region-wide level is a field that can benefit from fresh insight and voices. I know nothing about the sanitation services management industry, but I strongly suspect that it's run by old white men. Rather than gender being the issue, in this case, I'd be more concerned about class, race, and representative makeup of the public being served.
That's why your counterpoint is in no way related to the topic of hand.
To be fair, the Drupal date module isn't just "the simplest helper module."
Off the top of my head, those 14k lines of code also include:
It's not quite the same thing as a WP plugin that lets you add Date fields to posts.
Speak for yourself.
The reason this works particularly well in baseball, basketball and hockey is the schedule. You have 162 games a year in MLB, for example. In the NBA and NHL, it's 82 games. That's a relatively substantial sample - each game only accounts for roughly 0.6 or 1.2% of the season record.
The NFL, on the other hand, has a 16 game season. A team having a particularly good or bad game carries 10 times the weight it does in baseball (just going off the percentage of the season's games). Also, unlike baseball, football's playoffs are single-elimination.
The reason analytics aren't as directly relevant to football is exactly the reason that I enjoy it immensely.
---
Legend for our friends abroad:
MLB = Major League Baseball
NHL = National Hockey League
NBA = National Basketball Association
NFL = National Football** League
** - yes, we're talking about American football, rather than the game known internationally as the game in which you kick a ball with your foot.
Can we keep our units/ratios consistent?
When you're regurgitating statistics that are generally considered good news - such as the decreased chance of global catastrophe - doesn't it seem reasonable to make those statistics intelligible?
Burma Shave.
From what I remember, Alan Moore has expressed very little concern about what is done with his stories in other media. I don't have a link handy, but I recall an ancient interview with the AV Club over on The Onion in which he essentially said that what other people did with his stories really wasn't his concern and he had enough of his own work to keep him busy. He'd just let it go and take the paycheck.
You can call it selling out but it sounds like one of the more rational ways of handling it. How else are you going to stay sane during the dark days of 'LXG'?
(Disclaimer: His opinion may have changed over time. I think this may have been in response to the From Hell movie, which puts it back around 2001, and I haven't really been keeping up on such things.)
It was Kent but yeah. Exactly where my mind was going with it, too.
"Look, it was hot and I was hungry..."
TIFF: Thousands of Image File Formats
If you do wind up converting to tiff, then remember to document everything in excruciating detail. With thousands of possible combinations - each of which is a perfectly valid tiff image - you may encounter some issues if someone's using a less robust reader and assuming for the wrong compression algorithm, byte order, data striping or photometric interpretation.
Yeah, about that...
We all talked and decided that if you aren't going to take your turn cleaning the fridge, then we're going to charge you extra on next month's rent to pay for the HAZMAT service.
Sincerely,
Your roommate
r0bbl3 r0bbl3
Thanks for pointing that out. It takes me way back.
I learned it from my cousin and passed it along to my friends in grade school. We alternated between tanks and ships, as we felt like it.
... Because the merits of the case are determined by the information brought forth by the investigators and a conflict of interest could very clearly have a profound effect on the nature of that information?
Just a wild theory. Call me crazy.
Are you sure you're really understanding the cart/horse relationship? It's not really about ease or speed of deployment...
The seemingly erroneous total is a byproduct of that motivational seminar he attended. He's giving his whackjob theories 110%.
To be fair, it sounds like the pulsar and the interstellar dust did all the hard work. The Australian astronomers just managed to notice it.
Ironically, I actually liked what they did with 3rd Edition based upon my very limited playing. You may feel as though they blew it but I felt that the whole thing ("the whole thing" being just the core rules, in my very limited experience) felt surprisingly consistent and outright elegant in a few places. I sincerely believe that they did a decent job with 3rd edition and, although I've never tried 3.5, it appears to have a lot of support as a fairly reasonable "patch" that addressed a few nagging issues.
(Granted, I think that those issues should have been addressed as errata rather than a money-grabbing new half-version... but my net worth isn't equal to that of Hasbro for a reason.)
Unfortunately, I just dislike the level, class and hit point mechanics which sort of define it as D&D. The math behind the scenes seems reasonably solid (if a bit abstract) to me, but it's the D&D at the forefront that turns me off.
In a related vein, I'm still not sure who the target audience may be.
I'm haven't been a regular D&D player for a few decades but I am involved in a RPG community which is largely centered around 3.5 and DDM. The response there has been almost unilaterally one of revulsion.
After much discussion, most reasonable theory that we have come up with is that the current target market is new players - the ever-popular WoW crowd - for whom the purchase of new books is an addition, rather than a replacement with the assumption that a significant percentage of regulars will fall in line, despite their grumbling, out of a desire to stay "official." The video ad campaigns seem to reinforce this belief with the persistent, nagging mockery of the existing player base. The developer's comments are consistently spun to point out the many failings of 3rd Edition as well.
So, with that being said, are you relying primarily upon the 3E crowd to swallow their pride and accept that you've convinced them to pay for and playtest your inferior system in order to pave the way for your new, vastly superior revision again? What, if any, steps are being taken to address isolation and resentment amongst the current customers or is the primary focus entirely upon attracting new players and recreating the same level of devotion from scratch?
You just love saying, "BZZT!", don't you? Endearing habit you've got there.
You are correct, however. As with the reply above, I misspoke/mistyped yet again. "Stealing" was a very poor choice of words and was intended in a non-specific, generalized way which is entirely inaccurate when taken in a very specific legal context. My apologies on my error.
My bad. Common English versus Legal English. Thank you for the correction.
Nonetheless - however inaccurately I may have used very specific terms - the end result is that:
a) Fair Use is a defense only after the establishment of the acts in question having occurred.
b) Resorting to a Fair Use argument is therefore an admission of said acts being factual - which cannot accurately be described as either "guilt" or "infringement" in Legal English.
Is that correct and accurate? Because that was my intention, clumsily phrased as it may have been.
Currently, Fair Use is something that you never, ever want to have to invoke in a court of law. It's the last chance defense to be used only once you've been determined as having definitely infringed upon the copyright holder. By definition, it means admitting guilt to infringing. The author is proposing radically strengthening the current system by adding several specifically-named considerations - one of which is specifically stated as non-commercial personal use. Using the strengthened definitions, you give people more of a safety net in which to say, "Yes, I infringed upon the copyright holder in order to make a copy of the musical recording for use on another device for my own convenience, which is specifically allowed as a non-commercial, personal use in section blah of blah blah blah etc..."
Currently, you're essentially saying, "Yeah, I totally did it. But... well... I think that's ok, since... well... it seemed ok."
On a side note, I actually significantly prefer the author's definition of personal non-commercial use over the sweepingly broad any non-commercial use, which is far too open to abuse. Who here wants to see a large entity with deep pockets legally infringing upon a smaller independent entity's work by blatantly stealing it and giving it away for free in order to drive them out of business?
Just to check, you do realize that he was suggesting that any technology or medium with substantial non-infringing use would be protected if the Sony Betamax standard was codified... right? He's also suggesting weakening the penalties for secondary liability that it actually represents the closest approximation of real financial results.
While "no such thing" sounds nice and simple, I think it's pretty reasonable that if I create and market the Book-Gank 4000 expressly for the purpose of encouraging the duplication of the NY Times bestsellers at a fraction of their list price, I'd be liable for a reasonable estimation of the amount of money which was not earned by the authors I'd indirectly infringed upon because of my actions. Information may want to be free, but authors still want to eat and pay rent. As a compromise, I find it relatively palatable, personally.
Psssst. Paragraph 11. He describes the whole thing. You sure you read the article?
I'll second N. Edges out Cave Story as my favorite platformer of all time.
Best of all, the two are pretty drastically different, so it's worth trying both.
The point I was trying somewhat clumsily to make is that your one massive goal consists of putting yourself at inconvenience, when taken from another viewpoint. To me, walking for hours without being allowed to reliably use any sort of faster transportation, for example, is tedious rather than engrossing.
Compare this with more casual games where you spend the same amount of time, but do it just travelling around.
I don't consider a game where you have to spend uninterrupted hours just traveling around in order to eventually do something fun as a casual game (barring the hypothetical exception where traveling is the point of the game, I suppose). That, to me, typifies the exact same "hardcore" mentality you described in your rancor quest. Investment of time in order to eventually reap rewards of fun and accomplishment.
Personally, I'd rather that it be possible to complete it in 5 minutes and it just gets increasingly difficult as the rewards get progressively greater. For some, that would seem to be a hollow accomplishment because it only took 5 minutes. For others, the difficulty itself is what determines the sense of accomplishment.
My whole point is that I believe the latter is much, much harder to implement (and harder to make money off of) and therefore it has been completely dropped. Using my own definitions, a "hardcore" casual game - one in which the challenge is significant enough without requiring an outright embarrassing investment of time required for any particular goal - could actually exist without being a complete oxymoron.
I greatly fear that the more typical definition of hardcore is the time involved, rather than the difficulty, making such a game impossible by definition.
One possible reason is that there is no way to have a realistic metric for difficulty. You can't say, "That was 42 kilodiffs and I won. I rock!" because there's no way to measure such a thing. Time, on the other hand, is quite easily measured. "I spent 12 hours raiding to get my drops for my new helmet. Now that is worthwhile."
Without a numeric measure of your e-penis, there's not much need for a big one, I suppose.