But you never had the code, so it can't have been stolen.
If someone steals a package which is being mailed to you from the post office, this is very definitely stealing - that package legally belongs to you, even though you have never physically held it in your possession.
I agree that "theft" is a silly metaphor when applied to information, ever, but in this case the reason you give is not the reason it's silly.
You, I and the rest of the world are being illegally denied access to this code. According to the terms of the GPL, that code should be made available to us licenced under the GPL. Whether or not we have ever had the opportunity to see this code (that is, ever "had" this code in the past) is irrelevant.
You're missing the point. There is a kind of "theft" occurring, but what is being "stolen" is not the original Pear OS code, but the Cherry OS modifications to the Pear OS code.
According to the GPL, if you take GPLed code and modify it, if you distribute it, you must do so under the GPL licence. In other words, any changes to GPL code that you release must be added to the pool of the world's GPL code. If you release a modification of GPLed code without releasing the source code, you are thus "stealing" resources from that pool, and from the open source community.
This is the entire point of the GPL, and what distinguishes it from the public domain and the BSD licences.
I have used inverted commas because the theft metaphor has been so frequently misused, and become so loaded with illogical connotations, that I don't think its use should be encouraged.
Pfft. I would by far prefer this distro to a real puppy for my birthday. They are both cute, but one of them would grow up to be a big, smelly animal requiring regular walks, and possibly try to eat my cats, and the other would merely need an occasional upgrade.
The things which make me most productive are multiple workspaces, tabbed browsing with tabs aligned vertically, and the unix command line.
The native Windows way of organising multiple windows on your desktop - individually minimising or maximising them using the toolbar - is horrible. I haven't used OS X much, but as I recall it continues the Mac OS tradition of showing / hiding applications, which is slightly better than the Windows way, but not much.
On Linux I can use the Galeon web browser, which allows me (admittedly with a little more difficulty than before, since the development team's feature-removing rampage) to put the tabs on the left or right. This means that when I have twenty or thirty tabs open (as I usually do), I can still see all the names. (The first person to tell me that I'm using the browser wrong, and that you're only supposed to have ten tabs open in each window, or that you're supposed to open a new window for each new website, is going to get a poke in the eye.)
And then there's the unix command line, its enormous selection of utilities, and the shell. I use it to navigate and manipulate the filesystem (I've tried to like graphical file managers, but I don't), do various useful things to text files (with sed, awk, head, tail...), write bash scripts to automate tasks... It's probably the tool most useful to me on a daily basis, and the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows computer. You get a command line in OS X, but (at least in the client version) the majority of the unix utilities is missing.
I know that there are third party utilities which emulate multiple workspaces on Windows (although I hear they're buggy), and that you can install Cygwin - but you have to make a special effort to get them, and when you're temporarily working on *someone else's* vanilla installation, you seldom have the option of adding arbitrary extra software.
Linux gives me two of these three things natively - I'm guaranteed of finding them in any standard installation.
To be fair, I do have to go to a little extra effort to get Galeon, since it is rather obscure and isn't included by default in the major distributions. But as far as I know, there is no browser available for any other OS that lets you align tabs vertically. Firefox can do it if you install Tabbrowser Extensions (Bloatzilla!). There is currently no other extension that I know of which enables this.
These three things are not the only reasons that I use Linux, but they're the things whose lack annoys me the most when I'm working in another OS.
How can we learn nuclear physics if we don't test an atomic bomb?
The theoretical knowledge of nuclear physics which we have today is grounded in experimentation and the observation of physical phenomena. If Marie Curie had ever messed around with radioactive materials, and if nuclear tests had never been done, we would have less theory to work with today.
A human embryo could be tomorrow's doctor, musician, writer...
Embryos implanted in the womb regularly get reabsorbed through an entirely natural process. I consider embryos to be as disposable as sperm and ova. Just because an embryo is one step closer to becoming a human doesn't make it human now. Potential people are not people.
If we don't care for human embryos now, what makes you think we will always care for other humans later?
I don't want to see a world where already-born human babies are experimented with.
This is a ridiculous slippery-slope argument. Just because you consider human embryos to be as human and as deserving of protection as human babies doesn't mean that everyone else does - and thus that someone who thinks it's OK to kill embryos is likely to also think it's OK to kill babies.
The spray-on thing may be new, but the idea of a mechanical counter pressure suit isn't.
Jerry Pournelle mentioned a project like this in A Step Farther Out, a collection of science articles related to space travel and other science fiction ideas written in the seventies. He claims that tests of the suit design in actual vacuum conditions were going very well, and then the project got canned for no apparent reason.
I'm glad that it's back in development - I don't think we'd get very far in space relying on clunky armoured suits.
On a side note, it's very amusing how many people have bizarre misconceptions of the effects of vacuum on the human body, thanks to godawful movie "science".
OK, I took a mental shortcut when typing my reply, and I realise upon re-reading it that I mangled what I was trying to say.
What I meant to say was this: The hypothesis that a particular population is statistically likely to have genetic characteristics which grant an advantage in field/skill X (or a disadvantage in field/skill Y) is either true or not true.
Any such hypothesis is really two hypotheses combined: (a) that a population is statistically likely to display genetic characteristic A, and (b) that genetic characteristic A grants an advantage in a particular situation.
I'm sure that many examples of (a) exist, but I'm not holding my breath for much of (b) if the situation being considered is a complex mental ability.
So I don't think that the hypothesis "on average, women are genetically predisposed to be worse at mathematics" is likely to be true. But I concede that it is possible that it is true. If a researcher finds compelling evidence for the truthfulness of this statement, I would like to know about it. They should be free to state what they believe to be a scientific fact, and not be pressured to keep quiet about it because the truth isn't what the public consensus of the time would like it to be. That is never right.
I agree with you that the current demographics within a particular occupation give you no useful information about the genetic or social predisposition of various population groups to engage in that occupation. I wasn't claiming that this was the case.;)
We should not be striving for any mythical "ratio of equality". We should be striving for a completely impartial meritocracy, wherein qualifications are the only factor which affects hiring. We should be striving for a society where nobody is preemptively excluded from pursuing any career direction because of their superficial (or unrelated) physical characteristics.
We can actually achieve this without ever working out what the statistics and scientific facts are - we just won't know if we've done it or not without the statistics as a vague checksum.
if you study them and it comes out that men are better at something than women, why must it be that you are immediately misogynist?
Because accepting as law something that may only be true statistically - and even then for unknown reasons - makes individual accomplishment irrelevant.
Wha? What exactly do you mean by "accepting as law"?
The hypothesis that a particular population has a statistical predisposition to have high X or low Y is either true or not true. If it is true, then it is true. The fact itself is not inherently bad. Stating a fact (or a theory which has a lot of supporting evidence and has thus far stood up well to scrutiny) is not inherently racist, sexist or anything-ist.
People may selectively take note of certain facts and not others (which would perhaps change their significance) because of their personal biases, and people may stupidly misunderstand and misapply facts, but that is an entirely different issue.
If it was discovered, beyond any reasonable doubt, that women do have a genetic predisposition to be worse at maths than men, and people responded to this by excluding women from maths and science jobs, that would be bad. And also stupid.
Who hires people on the basis of a statistical estimate of their skills? A statistical trend within a population tells you absolutely nothing about the characteristics of an individual member of that population. In a handful of applicants, you will have stupid women, smart women, stupid men and smart men. You won't know what you have until you check. It would make no more sense to automatically refuse a woman's application (because she is statistically less likely to be qualified than a man) than to automatically accept the application of the first man, without looking at his CV.
Not that I'm saying that some people wouldn't try to do this, and think that it made perfect sense. The world is full of people who lack the most fundamental understanding of statistics. But making something which is true taboo because it would make stupid people do stupid things is not a valid solution.
The kind of people who would use this result to prop up their prejudices are already prejudiced without it.
If you ask, "Are men better at maths than women?" you can show it to be true easily by showing the number of graduates of each sex - just as you can supposedly prove that white men can't jump by looking at basketball results. Are either of these results rigorous proof of the assertions? No. They just show that as of today, white men apparently less often jump and women less often take maths degrees.
Precisely. It sometimes astonishes me how few people seem to understand this.
I think it is extremely difficult to decouple social and genetic gender factors when doing any such study, because proper control groups don't exist.
I mean, say you're studying the behaviour of small children, which is probably a good start. You can't treat children like laboratory mice. You can't completely control the environment in which those children are brought up, or ensure that they are in fact treated in exactly the same way regardless of gender. So you can't state with a high degree of accuracy that little boys or girls are showing a particular trend because they are genetically predisposed to develop that way. The parents could be horribly contaminating your experiment at home.
Many parents seem to believe that buying your daughter a toy truck = a gender-neutral upbringing. Yet parents often treat their male and female children differently without realising it, because their behaviour is governed by assumptions so deep-seated that they are invisible.
The most effective way to conduct studies like this would probably be to find as many parents as possible who break social stereotypes (and thus may be less likely to pass social stereotypes to their children), and compare children brought up in such environments to children brought up in more "traditional" homes.
This got slashdotted!? The idea of recognizing words by "word shape" seems so silly to me that I almost feel as if the author is attacking a straw man rather than a widely accepted linguistic theory.
The author is aiming the article at typographers, not linguists and psychologists. It seems that while everyone who does scientific research into the way that we read has known for a long time that the word shape theory is full of crap, the theory persists as a kind of urban myth among typographers. So the paper is a scientific literature review for the benefit of people working in typography.
I may be alone in my opinion, but personally I can't stand popular music because the content of the songs is so banal, bland and boring. Why should 8 songs out of 10 be about love/sex? Aren't there any other interesting topics besides kissing lips and holding hands?
You're not alone.
Two factors determine whether or not I like a song: the tune, and the words. Whether or not I like the tune becomes apparent first, and the overwhelming majority of pop songs become disqualified at this point - because they all use exactly the same frickin' key, and the same three cords. I call it the Whiny Boy-Band Key, and I have grown to loathe it.
I have gone completely off songs which I thought were pretty decent musically, after paying closer attention to the lyrics and realising how stupid they were. And you're right - the popular music world seems to have decided that love and sex are the only acceptable subject matter for music.
It's not that I think there's nothing left to be said about love and sex, but nobody in pop music is saying it. Turning on the radio is like walking into a bookshop which contains only Mills & Boon novels. And possibly dodgy self-help manuals.
I'm perfectly happy to listen music in foreign languages which I don't spea. I have some Indian pop on my computer. I'm pretty sure that the lyrics are as banal and horrible as your average English pop lyrics, but for now I am blissfully ignorant - what I can't understand isn't decreasing my enjoyment.
There certainly is a question of entitlement. If parental leave is purely a medical leave (which at this point I'm guessing it is) than the father has no basis for leave.
I don't think that it is considered to be purely medical leave - as far as I know, it's a couple of months, and it is intended as leave for child-rearing.
I hope you realize that when you're considering the extremely rare people who are at the absolute top of human physical ability, if you did have mixed team sports then few women would ever be chosen and most teams would have none at all. Yes, a top female athlete is more skilled than the average male. However, since when did they start picking average men for the NBA?
If you carry your argument out to the logical conclusion, you would find that - without quotas - there would be a tremendous inequity based on gender in mixed sports.
Yes, I realise that - and I think that's perfectly fine. I don't think quotas are ever a good idea, and while I can see that there are arguments which can be made in their favour in a situation where the imbalance is temporary, it would be completely stupid to enforce them in a situation where the imbalance is a reflection of a natural spread in physical ability.
Yes, there would be very few women in the very best sports teams. The majority of good female sportsmen would perhaps end up in the second- or third-best sports teams. (Realistically, given the current comparison in skill levels, I would expect them to do quite poorly at first.) But it doesn't matter. Everybody would be able to achieve the best position they can achieve, according to their physical abitity, and that's the way that it should be. That's the whole point of sport.
I understand that the current mindset is that it is more "fair" to have a separate benchmark for women because as a group they tend to fit a particular physical mould, but I think that this is misguided - and makes less sense than explicitly dividing people up according to various physical qualifications, irrespective of gender.
I wonder if you also think of separate divisions for men and women in almost all sports as gender bias.
Actually, I think that having separate sports divisions for men and women is stupid. It's like having separate divisions for short people and tall people in, say, basketball. We don't need it.
Obviously the best basketball teams in the world are made up of tall people, because those are the people who naturally rise to the top in basketball. However, anyone, regardless of height, has the opportunity to try out for a basketball team and be placed purely on the basis of their merit.
This is the way it should be with gender. Obviously on average women are more slightly-built than men and so aren't as strong and can't run as quickly. But that doesn't mean that there aren't individual women who can physically match the average man. There's no reason why we can't have mixed sports teams.
At the moment, most sports have massively funded and highly skilled men's teams, which have a huge popular following, and less popular women's teams. As a result of their second-class status they are inevitably poorly funded and less skilled. Excellent women players don't have the chance to meet their full potential, because they never get the chance to compete freely with better teams (i.e. the men's teams).
The only area where any regulations should be put in place are contact sports, where the players should be grouped by weight category. I believe that this is already done in many such sports anyway.
As with every other kind of profession, you get nice companies and crappy companies. The trick is not to choose a crappy one.
When I was looking for work recently, I had an amusing interview experience. It was amusing rather than disheartening because by that point it was obvious that there were so many other things wrong with this company that I definitely did not want to work there.
I was being interviewed by one of the managerial types; a guy in his thirties. From the first words of PC gibberish that came out of his mouth, I could tell that we weren't going to be friends. After a very boring half an hour, the conversation got to this point (paraphrased):
Guy: So, tell me, how do you feel about working in such a male-dominated field? [IT]
Me: I don't really care. It's not an issue for me.
Guy: [confused pause] Um, yeah, because there's really a lot of testosterone in this field... uh... but maybe you like that...
Me: [boggles]
Guy: Uh, yeah, apparently women make better software engineers than men...
Me: [pointed lack of interest]
So basically, according to this guy, if you're a woman going into a technological field, either you are a self-conscious feminist who will harp on for an hour about the challenges of working in a male-dominated environment, or you are some kind of ho who thrives on male attention. Niiiice.
I always find it entertaining when political correctness backfires, and serves only to highlight the speaker's prejudices - and make it obvious that he (or she) can only relate to people on the basis of broad stereotypical categories.
I should have asked the guy what he thought about women working in IT, since he obviously found it such a fascinating topic.
Are you more likely to apply to MIT because it has a women president?
No.
It irritates me intensely when people place emphasis on giving girls female "role models" in the sciences and technology in an attempt to make them more interested in pursuing those fields.
I think that this spreads the unconscious perception among girls that they shouldn't try to explore new ground, or be the first to try something new, or not give a crap how many men and how many women work somewhere - instead, they should wait until another woman has tried it, to see if it's "safe for women". WTF?
I have never cared about the gender balance in any place I have ever wanted to go to. If I wanted to go, I went. Nobody has ever tried to stop me.
The point is to remove the gender bias surrounding leave ("women have the babies, so they should be the ones who get leave to take care of them").
It's not gender bias, it's the facts of nature. We can not make politically correct reguardless of how we try. Not yet atleast. I still need a reason why the male should be off. I'm not looking for why it should be equal because biologically we are not equal.
What facts of nature? Once you get past the breastfeeding stage, there is nothing which makes a child's mother more suited to look after the child than the child's father (retarded social conditioning aside).
In an ideal, gender-unbiased society, any person would be entitled to a fixed amount of parental leave shortly after the birth of a child. The mother could take her leave first, when the child needs breastfeeding, and the father could take his leave when the mother's leave ends. Or they could both take it at the same time if they have triplets or something.
To me there is no question of "entitlement" - a father has just as much right to this leave as a mother. And implementing this system would indeed remove one of the major reasons for gender discrimination in the workplace.
This is a nice idea, except that it assumes that internet and office tool usage are separate tasks which never need to interact, except for rare cases where someone needs to look up a brief fact while writing something.
Do you seriously expect someone who is writing an article and researching it on the web to hop back and forth between different computers with pen and paper? That's like the carrier pigeon transfer protocol.
And what about someone who wants to retrieve article text and illustrations from his email account and put them together in a word processor?
While this security measure would be very effective at preventing abuse of the system, it would be equally effective at preventing use of it.
The HP project is targetting South Africa specifically. South Africa is a developing country, not a third world hole in the ground. Yes, the majority of the country suffers from poverty, and AIDS is a serious problem, but as far as I know even the poorest areas have food and water (unless an unusual disaster occurs), and the people there know perfectly well how to farm. This isn't Sudan, and it isn't Zimbabwe.
What South Africa needs is better education and better resources in the poor areas - because this more than anything else is what is going to improve them. If we insist on basic aid only and reject offers of computers and telecommunications equipment, we will end up with a nation of ignorant people living in the stone age, and ripe for exploitation by the rest of the world, which has moved on.
I think it's debatable if the nation can ever reach anything that could be called prosperity if it doesn't keep up with technological advances. Not all new technology is frivolous luxury. I think that internet access is a valuable tool which can greatly improve people's lives.
Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English. However, most people in South Africa have the opportunity to learn basic English, and nothing improves your command of a language like reading lots of it every day.
I have a concrete, practical example of how the internet can help a poor person improve his life: programming skills. A person with no resources other than the internet can learn how to program in a number of languages - and this skill is potentially worth money. It may not be suited to everyone, but the opportunity is there.
Whoa! I think you and another poster a little further down are confusing two completely different issues. The licence under which a textbook is released has nothing to do with which version of the textbook is set as a standard.
If a textbook is released under a licence which allows it to be freely modified and redistributed, this means exactly that - it can legally be freely modified and redistributed. Any modified versions, however, will not be the textbook which was prescribed for the course.
Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that an institution can't require all its employees to use a standardised version of it.
It's likely that respectable "upgrades" of the textbook would periodically be adopted as the new standard, but this would not happen automatically (in theory, there is no reason for it to happen automatically now, but - as other people have said - it is worth a lot of money to many people to ensure that it does).
If the author didn't make supermegabucks off every pointless, trivial change, there would be no incentive for him to make pointless, trivial changes. And there would be no incentive for other people involved to push institutions into adopting the updated version when it isn't necessary.
That is something that I would like to see - a series of documentation files consisting entirely of examples.
And it would be cool if users could submit examples to be added, if they found that they needed to do something they thought was obvious but which was not in the examples, and figured it out.
I have frequently flipped through a lengthy list of super-duper-powerful options thinking "Yes, that's very nice, but all I want to do is...".
And the list could also include counter-examples - things that you can't do with the command which you intuitively might think that you can do.
If I am paying someone to deliver stuff to my house, obviously I will give them my address, since I want them to find my house, and I don't mind giving them my personal details, since I feel that they are entitled to know enough about me to be able to track me down if I don't pay the money I owe them.
But online news (and other) sites are not selling me anything, nor do they have any other good reason to know who I am and where I live. They want my "subscription" for vaporous marketing reasons - so that they can target me with ads (which are of absolutely no interest to me and which I will block anyway), and so that they can tell sponsors/investors about the millions of subscriptions that they have (a mostly meaningless statistic).
I have never registered for any subscription-only news site. I can't be arsed to spend ten minutes making up stupid fake information and setting up a disposable address to throw to the wolves, because when I am skimming through dozens of Google News links, ten minutes is a long time. And the story is likely to be somewhere else, given that the only news I read on US news sites is world news (since I don't live in the US).
I'm not screaming about my "rights" or claiming that what they're doing is "eeevil" and should be stopped. It's not illegal, and if they want to do it, they can. However, I think they're providing bad service, and since subscription-free sites offer better service, they can stuff off.
Slashdot Mirror
But you never had the code, so it can't have been stolen.
If someone steals a package which is being mailed to you from the post office, this is very definitely stealing - that package legally belongs to you, even though you have never physically held it in your possession.
I agree that "theft" is a silly metaphor when applied to information, ever, but in this case the reason you give is not the reason it's silly.
You, I and the rest of the world are being illegally denied access to this code. According to the terms of the GPL, that code should be made available to us licenced under the GPL. Whether or not we have ever had the opportunity to see this code (that is, ever "had" this code in the past) is irrelevant.
You're missing the point. There is a kind of "theft" occurring, but what is being "stolen" is not the original Pear OS code, but the Cherry OS modifications to the Pear OS code.
According to the GPL, if you take GPLed code and modify it, if you distribute it, you must do so under the GPL licence. In other words, any changes to GPL code that you release must be added to the pool of the world's GPL code. If you release a modification of GPLed code without releasing the source code, you are thus "stealing" resources from that pool, and from the open source community.
This is the entire point of the GPL, and what distinguishes it from the public domain and the BSD licences.
I have used inverted commas because the theft metaphor has been so frequently misused, and become so loaded with illogical connotations, that I don't think its use should be encouraged.
Pfft. I would by far prefer this distro to a real puppy for my birthday. They are both cute, but one of them would grow up to be a big, smelly animal requiring regular walks, and possibly try to eat my cats, and the other would merely need an occasional upgrade.
Linux wins, hands down.
The things which make me most productive are multiple workspaces, tabbed browsing with tabs aligned vertically, and the unix command line.
The native Windows way of organising multiple windows on your desktop - individually minimising or maximising them using the toolbar - is horrible. I haven't used OS X much, but as I recall it continues the Mac OS tradition of showing / hiding applications, which is slightly better than the Windows way, but not much.
On Linux I can use the Galeon web browser, which allows me (admittedly with a little more difficulty than before, since the development team's feature-removing rampage) to put the tabs on the left or right. This means that when I have twenty or thirty tabs open (as I usually do), I can still see all the names. (The first person to tell me that I'm using the browser wrong, and that you're only supposed to have ten tabs open in each window, or that you're supposed to open a new window for each new website, is going to get a poke in the eye.)
And then there's the unix command line, its enormous selection of utilities, and the shell. I use it to navigate and manipulate the filesystem (I've tried to like graphical file managers, but I don't), do various useful things to text files (with sed, awk, head, tail...), write bash scripts to automate tasks... It's probably the tool most useful to me on a daily basis, and the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows computer. You get a command line in OS X, but (at least in the client version) the majority of the unix utilities is missing.
I know that there are third party utilities which emulate multiple workspaces on Windows (although I hear they're buggy), and that you can install Cygwin - but you have to make a special effort to get them, and when you're temporarily working on *someone else's* vanilla installation, you seldom have the option of adding arbitrary extra software.
Linux gives me two of these three things natively - I'm guaranteed of finding them in any standard installation.
To be fair, I do have to go to a little extra effort to get Galeon, since it is rather obscure and isn't included by default in the major distributions. But as far as I know, there is no browser available for any other OS that lets you align tabs vertically. Firefox can do it if you install Tabbrowser Extensions (Bloatzilla!). There is currently no other extension that I know of which enables this.
These three things are not the only reasons that I use Linux, but they're the things whose lack annoys me the most when I'm working in another OS.
How can we learn nuclear physics if we don't test an atomic bomb?
The theoretical knowledge of nuclear physics which we have today is grounded in experimentation and the observation of physical phenomena. If Marie Curie had ever messed around with radioactive materials, and if nuclear tests had never been done, we would have less theory to work with today.
A human embryo could be tomorrow's doctor, musician, writer...
Embryos implanted in the womb regularly get reabsorbed through an entirely natural process. I consider embryos to be as disposable as sperm and ova. Just because an embryo is one step closer to becoming a human doesn't make it human now. Potential people are not people.
If we don't care for human embryos now, what makes you think we will always care for other humans later?
I don't want to see a world where already-born human babies are experimented with.
This is a ridiculous slippery-slope argument. Just because you consider human embryos to be as human and as deserving of protection as human babies doesn't mean that everyone else does - and thus that someone who thinks it's OK to kill embryos is likely to also think it's OK to kill babies.
The spray-on thing may be new, but the idea of a mechanical counter pressure suit isn't.
Jerry Pournelle mentioned a project like this in A Step Farther Out, a collection of science articles related to space travel and other science fiction ideas written in the seventies. He claims that tests of the suit design in actual vacuum conditions were going very well, and then the project got canned for no apparent reason.
I'm glad that it's back in development - I don't think we'd get very far in space relying on clunky armoured suits.
On a side note, it's very amusing how many people have bizarre misconceptions of the effects of vacuum on the human body, thanks to godawful movie "science".
OK, I took a mental shortcut when typing my reply, and I realise upon re-reading it that I mangled what I was trying to say.
What I meant to say was this: The hypothesis that a particular population is statistically likely to have genetic characteristics which grant an advantage in field/skill X (or a disadvantage in field/skill Y) is either true or not true.
Any such hypothesis is really two hypotheses combined: (a) that a population is statistically likely to display genetic characteristic A, and (b) that genetic characteristic A grants an advantage in a particular situation.
I'm sure that many examples of (a) exist, but I'm not holding my breath for much of (b) if the situation being considered is a complex mental ability.
So I don't think that the hypothesis "on average, women are genetically predisposed to be worse at mathematics" is likely to be true. But I concede that it is possible that it is true. If a researcher finds compelling evidence for the truthfulness of this statement, I would like to know about it. They should be free to state what they believe to be a scientific fact, and not be pressured to keep quiet about it because the truth isn't what the public consensus of the time would like it to be. That is never right.
I agree with you that the current demographics within a particular occupation give you no useful information about the genetic or social predisposition of various population groups to engage in that occupation. I wasn't claiming that this was the case. ;)
We should not be striving for any mythical "ratio of equality". We should be striving for a completely impartial meritocracy, wherein qualifications are the only factor which affects hiring. We should be striving for a society where nobody is preemptively excluded from pursuing any career direction because of their superficial (or unrelated) physical characteristics.
We can actually achieve this without ever working out what the statistics and scientific facts are - we just won't know if we've done it or not without the statistics as a vague checksum.
if you study them and it comes out that men are better at something than women, why must it be that you are immediately misogynist?
Wha? What exactly do you mean by "accepting as law"?
The hypothesis that a particular population has a statistical predisposition to have high X or low Y is either true or not true. If it is true, then it is true. The fact itself is not inherently bad. Stating a fact (or a theory which has a lot of supporting evidence and has thus far stood up well to scrutiny) is not inherently racist, sexist or anything-ist.
People may selectively take note of certain facts and not others (which would perhaps change their significance) because of their personal biases, and people may stupidly misunderstand and misapply facts, but that is an entirely different issue.
If it was discovered, beyond any reasonable doubt, that women do have a genetic predisposition to be worse at maths than men, and people responded to this by excluding women from maths and science jobs, that would be bad. And also stupid.
Who hires people on the basis of a statistical estimate of their skills? A statistical trend within a population tells you absolutely nothing about the characteristics of an individual member of that population. In a handful of applicants, you will have stupid women, smart women, stupid men and smart men. You won't know what you have until you check. It would make no more sense to automatically refuse a woman's application (because she is statistically less likely to be qualified than a man) than to automatically accept the application of the first man, without looking at his CV.
Not that I'm saying that some people wouldn't try to do this, and think that it made perfect sense. The world is full of people who lack the most fundamental understanding of statistics. But making something which is true taboo because it would make stupid people do stupid things is not a valid solution.
The kind of people who would use this result to prop up their prejudices are already prejudiced without it.
If you ask, "Are men better at maths than women?" you can show it to be true easily by showing the number of graduates of each sex - just as you can supposedly prove that white men can't jump by looking at basketball results. Are either of these results rigorous proof of the assertions? No. They just show that as of today, white men apparently less often jump and women less often take maths degrees.
Precisely. It sometimes astonishes me how few people seem to understand this.
I think it is extremely difficult to decouple social and genetic gender factors when doing any such study, because proper control groups don't exist.
I mean, say you're studying the behaviour of small children, which is probably a good start. You can't treat children like laboratory mice. You can't completely control the environment in which those children are brought up, or ensure that they are in fact treated in exactly the same way regardless of gender. So you can't state with a high degree of accuracy that little boys or girls are showing a particular trend because they are genetically predisposed to develop that way. The parents could be horribly contaminating your experiment at home.
Many parents seem to believe that buying your daughter a toy truck = a gender-neutral upbringing. Yet parents often treat their male and female children differently without realising it, because their behaviour is governed by assumptions so deep-seated that they are invisible.
The most effective way to conduct studies like this would probably be to find as many parents as possible who break social stereotypes (and thus may be less likely to pass social stereotypes to their children), and compare children brought up in such environments to children brought up in more "traditional" homes.
This got slashdotted!? The idea of recognizing words by "word shape" seems so silly to me that I almost feel as if the author is attacking a straw man rather than a widely accepted linguistic theory.
The author is aiming the article at typographers, not linguists and psychologists. It seems that while everyone who does scientific research into the way that we read has known for a long time that the word shape theory is full of crap, the theory persists as a kind of urban myth among typographers. So the paper is a scientific literature review for the benefit of people working in typography.
I may be alone in my opinion, but personally I can't stand popular music because the content of the songs is so banal, bland and boring. Why should 8 songs out of 10 be about love/sex? Aren't there any other interesting topics besides kissing lips and holding hands?
You're not alone.
Two factors determine whether or not I like a song: the tune, and the words. Whether or not I like the tune becomes apparent first, and the overwhelming majority of pop songs become disqualified at this point - because they all use exactly the same frickin' key, and the same three cords. I call it the Whiny Boy-Band Key, and I have grown to loathe it.
I have gone completely off songs which I thought were pretty decent musically, after paying closer attention to the lyrics and realising how stupid they were. And you're right - the popular music world seems to have decided that love and sex are the only acceptable subject matter for music.
It's not that I think there's nothing left to be said about love and sex, but nobody in pop music is saying it. Turning on the radio is like walking into a bookshop which contains only Mills & Boon novels. And possibly dodgy self-help manuals.
I'm perfectly happy to listen music in foreign languages which I don't spea. I have some Indian pop on my computer. I'm pretty sure that the lyrics are as banal and horrible as your average English pop lyrics, but for now I am blissfully ignorant - what I can't understand isn't decreasing my enjoyment.
There certainly is a question of entitlement. If parental leave is purely a medical leave (which at this point I'm guessing it is) than the father has no basis for leave.
I don't think that it is considered to be purely medical leave - as far as I know, it's a couple of months, and it is intended as leave for child-rearing.
I hope you realize that when you're considering the extremely rare people who are at the absolute top of human physical ability, if you did have mixed team sports then few women would ever be chosen and most teams would have none at all. Yes, a top female athlete is more skilled than the average male. However, since when did they start picking average men for the NBA?
If you carry your argument out to the logical conclusion, you would find that - without quotas - there would be a tremendous inequity based on gender in mixed sports.
Yes, I realise that - and I think that's perfectly fine. I don't think quotas are ever a good idea, and while I can see that there are arguments which can be made in their favour in a situation where the imbalance is temporary, it would be completely stupid to enforce them in a situation where the imbalance is a reflection of a natural spread in physical ability.
Yes, there would be very few women in the very best sports teams. The majority of good female sportsmen would perhaps end up in the second- or third-best sports teams. (Realistically, given the current comparison in skill levels, I would expect them to do quite poorly at first.) But it doesn't matter. Everybody would be able to achieve the best position they can achieve, according to their physical abitity, and that's the way that it should be. That's the whole point of sport.
I understand that the current mindset is that it is more "fair" to have a separate benchmark for women because as a group they tend to fit a particular physical mould, but I think that this is misguided - and makes less sense than explicitly dividing people up according to various physical qualifications, irrespective of gender.
I wonder if you also think of separate divisions for men and women in almost all sports as gender bias.
Actually, I think that having separate sports divisions for men and women is stupid. It's like having separate divisions for short people and tall people in, say, basketball. We don't need it.
Obviously the best basketball teams in the world are made up of tall people, because those are the people who naturally rise to the top in basketball. However, anyone, regardless of height, has the opportunity to try out for a basketball team and be placed purely on the basis of their merit.
This is the way it should be with gender. Obviously on average women are more slightly-built than men and so aren't as strong and can't run as quickly. But that doesn't mean that there aren't individual women who can physically match the average man. There's no reason why we can't have mixed sports teams.
At the moment, most sports have massively funded and highly skilled men's teams, which have a huge popular following, and less popular women's teams. As a result of their second-class status they are inevitably poorly funded and less skilled. Excellent women players don't have the chance to meet their full potential, because they never get the chance to compete freely with better teams (i.e. the men's teams).
The only area where any regulations should be put in place are contact sports, where the players should be grouped by weight category. I believe that this is already done in many such sports anyway.
As with every other kind of profession, you get nice companies and crappy companies. The trick is not to choose a crappy one.
When I was looking for work recently, I had an amusing interview experience. It was amusing rather than disheartening because by that point it was obvious that there were so many other things wrong with this company that I definitely did not want to work there.
I was being interviewed by one of the managerial types; a guy in his thirties. From the first words of PC gibberish that came out of his mouth, I could tell that we weren't going to be friends. After a very boring half an hour, the conversation got to this point (paraphrased):
Guy: So, tell me, how do you feel about working in such a male-dominated field? [IT]
Me: I don't really care. It's not an issue for me.
Guy: [confused pause] Um, yeah, because there's really a lot of testosterone in this field... uh... but maybe you like that...
Me: [boggles]
Guy: Uh, yeah, apparently women make better software engineers than men...
Me: [pointed lack of interest]
So basically, according to this guy, if you're a woman going into a technological field, either you are a self-conscious feminist who will harp on for an hour about the challenges of working in a male-dominated environment, or you are some kind of ho who thrives on male attention. Niiiice.
I always find it entertaining when political correctness backfires, and serves only to highlight the speaker's prejudices - and make it obvious that he (or she) can only relate to people on the basis of broad stereotypical categories.
I should have asked the guy what he thought about women working in IT, since he obviously found it such a fascinating topic.
Are you more likely to apply to MIT because it has a women president?
No.
It irritates me intensely when people place emphasis on giving girls female "role models" in the sciences and technology in an attempt to make them more interested in pursuing those fields.
I think that this spreads the unconscious perception among girls that they shouldn't try to explore new ground, or be the first to try something new, or not give a crap how many men and how many women work somewhere - instead, they should wait until another woman has tried it, to see if it's "safe for women". WTF?
I have never cared about the gender balance in any place I have ever wanted to go to. If I wanted to go, I went. Nobody has ever tried to stop me.
It's not gender bias, it's the facts of nature. We can not make politically correct reguardless of how we try. Not yet atleast. I still need a reason why the male should be off. I'm not looking for why it should be equal because biologically we are not equal.
What facts of nature? Once you get past the breastfeeding stage, there is nothing which makes a child's mother more suited to look after the child than the child's father (retarded social conditioning aside).
In an ideal, gender-unbiased society, any person would be entitled to a fixed amount of parental leave shortly after the birth of a child. The mother could take her leave first, when the child needs breastfeeding, and the father could take his leave when the mother's leave ends. Or they could both take it at the same time if they have triplets or something.
To me there is no question of "entitlement" - a father has just as much right to this leave as a mother. And implementing this system would indeed remove one of the major reasons for gender discrimination in the workplace.
This is a nice idea, except that it assumes that internet and office tool usage are separate tasks which never need to interact, except for rare cases where someone needs to look up a brief fact while writing something.
Do you seriously expect someone who is writing an article and researching it on the web to hop back and forth between different computers with pen and paper? That's like the carrier pigeon transfer protocol.
And what about someone who wants to retrieve article text and illustrations from his email account and put them together in a word processor?
While this security measure would be very effective at preventing abuse of the system, it would be equally effective at preventing use of it.
The HP project is targetting South Africa specifically. South Africa is a developing country, not a third world hole in the ground. Yes, the majority of the country suffers from poverty, and AIDS is a serious problem, but as far as I know even the poorest areas have food and water (unless an unusual disaster occurs), and the people there know perfectly well how to farm. This isn't Sudan, and it isn't Zimbabwe.
What South Africa needs is better education and better resources in the poor areas - because this more than anything else is what is going to improve them. If we insist on basic aid only and reject offers of computers and telecommunications equipment, we will end up with a nation of ignorant people living in the stone age, and ripe for exploitation by the rest of the world, which has moved on.
I think it's debatable if the nation can ever reach anything that could be called prosperity if it doesn't keep up with technological advances. Not all new technology is frivolous luxury. I think that internet access is a valuable tool which can greatly improve people's lives.
Earlier posters have ridiculed the idea that access to the internet can be useful to people in rural areas, since they don't speak English. However, most people in South Africa have the opportunity to learn basic English, and nothing improves your command of a language like reading lots of it every day.
I have a concrete, practical example of how the internet can help a poor person improve his life: programming skills. A person with no resources other than the internet can learn how to program in a number of languages - and this skill is potentially worth money. It may not be suited to everyone, but the opportunity is there.
Whoa! I think you and another poster a little further down are confusing two completely different issues. The licence under which a textbook is released has nothing to do with which version of the textbook is set as a standard.
If a textbook is released under a licence which allows it to be freely modified and redistributed, this means exactly that - it can legally be freely modified and redistributed. Any modified versions, however, will not be the textbook which was prescribed for the course.
Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that an institution can't require all its employees to use a standardised version of it.
It's likely that respectable "upgrades" of the textbook would periodically be adopted as the new standard, but this would not happen automatically (in theory, there is no reason for it to happen automatically now, but - as other people have said - it is worth a lot of money to many people to ensure that it does).
If the author didn't make supermegabucks off every pointless, trivial change, there would be no incentive for him to make pointless, trivial changes. And there would be no incentive for other people involved to push institutions into adopting the updated version when it isn't necessary.
I hope this means that I will eventually be able to use AdBlock with Galeon. Then my life will be complete. :)
That is something that I would like to see - a series of documentation files consisting entirely of examples.
And it would be cool if users could submit examples to be added, if they found that they needed to do something they thought was obvious but which was not in the examples, and figured it out.
I have frequently flipped through a lengthy list of super-duper-powerful options thinking "Yes, that's very nice, but all I want to do is...".
And the list could also include counter-examples - things that you can't do with the command which you intuitively might think that you can do.
If I am paying someone to deliver stuff to my house, obviously I will give them my address, since I want them to find my house, and I don't mind giving them my personal details, since I feel that they are entitled to know enough about me to be able to track me down if I don't pay the money I owe them.
But online news (and other) sites are not selling me anything, nor do they have any other good reason to know who I am and where I live. They want my "subscription" for vaporous marketing reasons - so that they can target me with ads (which are of absolutely no interest to me and which I will block anyway), and so that they can tell sponsors/investors about the millions of subscriptions that they have (a mostly meaningless statistic).
I have never registered for any subscription-only news site. I can't be arsed to spend ten minutes making up stupid fake information and setting up a disposable address to throw to the wolves, because when I am skimming through dozens of Google News links, ten minutes is a long time. And the story is likely to be somewhere else, given that the only news I read on US news sites is world news (since I don't live in the US).
I'm not screaming about my "rights" or claiming that what they're doing is "eeevil" and should be stopped. It's not illegal, and if they want to do it, they can. However, I think they're providing bad service, and since subscription-free sites offer better service, they can stuff off.
Augh! Sorry about the One Giant Paragraph. I haven't posted in ages and ages and did not notice that the format is HTML by default.
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