It will also help users protect their personal information on public Wi-Fi networks as it offers 256-bit encryption.
This is why I avoid non-encrypted public Wi-Fi whenever possible - too big a chance of a passive eavesdropper (the risk of an evil-twin/man-in-the-middle exists even with encrypted WiFi if the passphrase is well-known, so that by itself not a reason to prefer encrypted WiFi over unencrypted WiFi).
If the home-internet providers would offer "VPN service to make it look like you are in your home city" that would make "not cutting the cord" that much more attractive.
Heck, if they could work out a joint deal with the media companies and the Netflixes of the world so I could watch "only in [my home country] movies while traveling abroad" I might even be willing to pay $1/day extra for out-of-country use.
(because unlike conventional power sources, it all peaks at the same time)
This isn't true if you have a geographically-large grid.
The Eastern-US grid stretches from eastern Montana to the Texas panhandle to Louisiana (bypassing most of Texas) to Florida to Maine.
Yes, sometimes it is sunny or cloudy across the entire area, but most of the time it's not.
The Western-US grid stretches basically from El Paso, Texas, north to Canada and west to the Pacific coast. Thanks to the mountains, there are large variations in weather across this region on any given day.
On the other hand, the "Texas grid" which consists of most of Texas and maybe small parts of surrounding states is small enough that "it's sunny across almost the whole grid" will be true much of the time in the summer.
They can't transition [to Cognizant] without the information that we have.
So, are the workers saying that if all of themwere in the same plane at the same time and it crashed and killed everyone, EmblemHealth would go out of business?
If so, then yes, they do have a huge amount of leverage.
Otherwise, their leverage is limited to the damage of the "you all died at the same time" scenario above.
Yes, I'm assuming the workers wouldn't stoop so low as to actually sabotage things to hurt the company WORSE than if they were to suddenly die, quit, or otherwise become "permanently unavailable."
It's one this for Facebook, Inc. to take a political position and back it with money or what-not.
It's another thing all together for Facebook as a service provider to treat their custumers differently based on their political views or to allow some political discourse but not other dscourse.
The latter usually backfires unless the "silenced" topics are almost universally reviled by your customers and prospective customers or at least that the censorship has nearly-universal customer support.
In other words, if Facebook treated pro-Trump content differently than pro-other-candidate material, it will bite them bad.
The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration publicly blamed a solar storm. However, behind the scenes the Swedes were notifying NATO about a serious, ongoing cyber attack, Norwegian news outlet aldrimer.no reports.
Wait, you mean the government lied to its people?
I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. We must report this to the authorities at once. I'm sure a proper government-run investigation will get to the bottom of this quickly and the responsible people will be punished. You can count on it.
The only thing I want in a CABLE besides wires and insulation and maybe a matching transformer or other "if it's not there it won't work" things are safety systems, such as a fuse or idiot-proof/keyed endings/pinouts.
If it's got anything else, it deserves a title more glorified than "cable." Maybe "adapter" or "connector" or "extender" (think USB-2 extension cables with button-batteries in them to boost the signal) but not a lowly term that implies simplicity like "cable."
If computer stores could buy a good, reliable cable tester - one that that tested the actual hardware for compliance with the actual spec - for under $100, it would make a great marketing tool.
As long as the list is accurate and as long as the recipients have to swear under penalty of perjury that they are indeed entitled to this relief, this sounds like a good thing.
I agree with an earlier poster though, this is not "news for nerds."
As one example of how English is a living language that popped up in the news recently, the usage and therefore the definition of "internet" (all lowercase) has changed over the last few years from "an interconnected network" to "the interconnected network formerly known as the Internet [capitalization required]." Only recently have "official" things like style-books caught up with actual usage.
To require a fixed, never-changing definition for edge cases or to ask me what definition I use then reject it because I didn't cite a specific authority but instead presented a logical argument supporting it is, well, not helpful to discussion.
By the way, I don't know if your purpose of the argument was to "win" or not, but when I have discussions on forums like this, my purpose is to present the ideas I present, and leave it up to each reader - including you but also those reading today and those reading months or years from now - to decide what to take away from it.
By the way, I am familiar with the term "doublespeak" as used by George Orwell. "Black is white" declared by fiat is not the same as when a dictionary re-defines "literal" as "not necessarily literal" as a major dictionary publisher recently did after observing that the actual usage of the term has evolved over time (I think this news item made Slashdot, but I forget).
I'm sure this isn't the only known SS7 vulnerability out there.
If this gets popular, I predict a rash of SS7 zero-days in the coming years.
Oh, and I haven't even mentioned vendor-specific vulnerabilities in the implementation of SS7, VoIP (where applicable), cell-tower, and cellphone-handset technology.
Like gender, the definition of what it means to be Black/African-American and the definition of what is means to be human both have "edge cases" where there isn't universal agreement among experts.
Unlike gender, "what you feel like inside" is not, by itself, enough to move you from the "every expert agrees you, a woman born to two non-African-American parents, are not not African-American" or "Every expert agrees you, a child born to two human beings, are not a cat" group to the "there is no consensus about your racial identity" or "there is no consensus about your species" group, much less to the "you are African-American" group or the "you are a cat" group.
For that reason, these people are so far away from the "edge cases" of contemporary, early-21st-century definitions of the terms that it's laughable to suggest that Dolezal is African-American or that Nano is a feline.
However, it would be arrogant (to say the least) for me to see these definitions as immutable. Hypothetically speaking, if 1000 years from now we have gene-splicing such that we have "intelligent cats" and a human being is raised by "intelligent cats" as if she was one, I can see language evolving to the point that the term "cat person" might include someone who, genetically, is 100% Homo sapiens. For now though, I'll leave that particular hypothetical scenario to the realm of science fiction and thought experiment.
By the way, the "edge cases" for racial groupings is very real. The "edge cases" for being human is still hypothetical. But someday, if there is enough gene-splicing and breeding between Homo sapiens and our closely-related primates, or enough gene-splicing between our species and more distantly-related species, expect to see differences of opinions among experts over whether a particular individual is or is not a human being. I see this as far more likely to happen than any "intelligent cat" scenario. It might even happen this century.
Thank you for this admission. But we are still conversing in English and reinventing terms to mean something new is not acceptable.
Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement on the definition of what a "man" is. There is broad agreement that fits the vast majority of cases, but there is disagreement on the edge cases, and for the purposes of this discussion, it's the edge cases that count.
So, if we are going to stick to what is universally agreed upon, then by definition a man (including boys) would be the set of all individuals which would be labeled as "male" by every subject-matter expert and every expert in the meanings of words and how they change over time (or, more practically, by the consensus expert opinion where such a consensus expert opinion existed) and a woman (including girls) would be the set of all individuals which would be labeled as "female" by every expert (or, more practically, by the consensus expert opinion where such a consensus expert opinion existed). But what about those where there was disagreement among experts (or, more practically, where there was no consensus opinion of whether that individual was a male or female)?
If you allow for biologically-intersexed individuals, that last group is clearly not empty. However, you've asked that people with non-clear-gender biology be excluded, so I will exclude them for the sake of argument.
Sticking only with people who have both XY genes and clearly male body parts and, by extension, those who have clearly XX genes and clearly female body parts, the question arises: Is that last group - the set of all individuals where experts would disagree on their gender (or, more practically, where there is no consensus expert opinion) an empty set?
I claim that it is not. I don't have time right now to scour the scholarly research, but the fact that several countries allow "other" or "indeterminate" genders on passports and other official documents for reasons other than biological inconsistencies strongly supports my claim. I will grant you that this is not proof, as these decisions may have been completely motivated by reasons outside of science, such as for purely political reasons. But I strongly doubt it.
Not talking about such invalids — only about those, whose chromosomes and genitalia are quite unmistakable and in full agreement, yet they insist on identifying as something other than what they are for some intangible reasons.
Suppose it's 1970 and a new baby is born. It looks like a girl so they put "girl" on the birth certificate.
The girl grows up and is a tomboy as a kid and is consistently masculine in behavior and feels like she's a boy trapped in a girl's body. She's afraid of being called weird so she keeps her feelings to herself but it's pretty obvious she's not very feminine. Assume for the sake of argument that she dies at a young age, before things like cheap DNA testing are available and before the gay- and lesbian-rights movement became the LGBT-rights movement.
Based on the evidence available, is she a male-acting, possibly-delusional woman, or is she one of those chromosome-to-body mis-matches that you are explicitly "not talking about"? The answer is, of course "I don't know the answer without a DNA test."
What if, 50 years from now, science comes to the consensus that sex includes some as-yet-undiscovered component. If that is the case, then the version of you 50 years from now would probably include disagreement between that component, DNA, and visible genitalia as "exceptional cases."
It is possible - not necessarily likely, but possible - that the vast majority or even all of people we now consider "transgender" but whose body parts at birth and DNA agree with each other have some other component that is mis-matching with both DNA and body parts, and that at some point in the future this component will be discovered and science will gradually come to understand its importance.
A person who is unambiguously male in all ways which can be measured or self-reported is a man (or boy).
Ah, thank you! Finally we have something.
This definition would not apply to homosexual men, for example — yet they are referred to as men by everyone.
I don't follow your statement "this definition would not apply to homosexual men, for example."
That is false - to the extent that a gay man is XY, has male body parts, and self-identifies as male, the definition applies. I do acknowledge that some people with XY genes and male body parts who are sexually attracted to men think of themselves as female or something else other than a male (e.g. a "third sex"), and that those in this group who "present themselves to the public" as gay men (as opposed to presenting themselves to the public as a transgender straight woman or as a "third sex") will very likely be thought of as gay men by the general public. However, the definition I am using would not apply to them - they are in that "undefined" group that may or may not be "men." They are in that group because there isn't anything close to a universal agreement on whether they are "men" or not.
Similarly, it would apply to a lesbian who is XX, has female body parts, and who identifies as female.
If you are still sure, you wish to defend it, may I ask, where this definition is from and when did it appear? Because I can not find it in any of the dictionaries at my disposal... You did not just invent it, did you?
I did invent it. The wording of your original post "be sure to include your definition" [emphasis original] seemed to invite us to do so. I'm glad you asked the question the way you asked it. The "edge cases" of the definitions of what it means to be a man (or woman) are not universally agreed on. Heck, even the basic definition has changed in the last 75 years - before we knew what DNA was, a baby was a man, a woman, or "in between" based on looks alone. Now we know better: The looks give us a presumptive gender, but if the DNA and the appearance disagree, then that presumption goes away.
The polar opposite position is to force women who are still sporting the male equipment they were born with into women's restrooms and showers. If that's you, congratulations, your on the side of scaring women who are showering off in the gym after a workout when they see a pre-op trans woman sporting the male anatomy she is still carrying around and they assume she's not a she.
In short: Your point, while valid, doesn't tell the whole story.
NC is BY FAR the most backwards, outdated, close minded place I've ever been.
Based on your description and the followup comment that made it clear you weren't talking about urban areas, I'd say it's a tie: There are rural areas of several other states whose reputations match your description.
Oh, and just in case people think I'm rural-bashing: There are certain neighborhoods in certain cities that are equally closed-minded in their own way (although not necessarily in the area of sexuality/gender-identity), and there are plenty of rural areas that are a far cry from what is described in the parent post to this one.
I'm a male. Do I really want a trans-woman sporting a penis walking into the stall next to me in a men's room because the law says she has to? Perhaps I'm still slightly bigoted, but it does make me uncomfortable relieving myself next to a woman where I can see her feet and she can see mine.
Do I really want a trans-man sporting a vagina doing the same? Call me bigoted, but I'm about equally discomforted, for the same reason.
I think it's safe to say that I'm not alone in my discomfort.
The increasing awareness that transgender people exist and that the man washing his hands next to me in the men's room may still be sporting the female private parts he was born with means I can't bury my head in the sand: I have to face the issue head-on like an adult. With this in mind, perhaps its time we went to unisex bathrooms with completely-private stalls and a common washing area. Or, alternatively, require that newly-constructed buildings with bathrooms larger than a certain size be accompanied by a single-stall completely-private bathroom that anyone can use, similar to the "handicapped or parents-with-small-children only" restrooms you sometimes see in large recently-built movie theaters and shopping malls in the United States. Heck, it could just be a matter of changing the signage to make it clear that anyone is allowed to use the "private" restroom, not just those with physical disabilities or who are assisting small children.
The facts in evidence - starting with chromosomal abnormalities like XXY or chimeras who happen to be about half XY and about half XX, then going on to body-doesn't-match-chromosome situations like a baby who looks like a girl on the outside but is genetically XY or babies born with visually-ambiguous genitalia - prove this statement false.
I haven't even gotten to the people whose "mental gender" mis-matches their external body parts, their genes, or both. I don't have to. All I had to do was demonstrate that the core point of your argument - the claim that "there are simply men and women" - is not true. Once that is proven false, the rest of your statements are no longer logically provably true without help. If you expect the reader to believe they are true, you should replace the now-disproven first sentence with statements that are both true and sufficient to prove the rest of your posting.
Since you asked for a definition of the term man (which I take to include boys), I will give you one. I assume you also want a definition of a woman, which, by the definition I am using, is NOT "any human being who is not a man/boy."
By the way, here's a "minimalist" definition of "man" and "woman" - I say minimalist because I don't think anyone would argue that those who meet this definition are men or women:
A person who is unambiguously male in all ways which can be measured or self-reported is a man (or boy). These include but are not necessarily limited to genetics (XY, XX for women/girls), internal and external sex-dependent characteristics (testicles/penis, ovaries/vagina/etc.), and, where the person has the capacity to meaningfully assert it, a claim that the person is completely male or completely female.
Any person who lacks any of these things may be neither a man (or boy) nor woman (or girl). This includes those with XXY genes, chimeras with both male-gene and female-gene cells, those with visually ambiguous genitalia, and those whose mental self-concept differs from either their genes, their sex-related appearance (penis or vagina), or both.
This doesn't mean that a person who is lacking in one or more of these things MUST be neither, only that this person MAY be neither. The definition presented is intentionally incomplete in that it doesn't attempt to define such people as either a man (or boy), a woman (or girl), or neither/in-between/both. It doesn't attempt to do so in large part because there isn't a universal agreement about what the definition should be (see intersex and third gender as well as the references in these articles for further discussion).
Maybe there is something to be said for keeping some of your "in house" data only on paper or at least on disconnected computers to make infiltration and ex-filtration harder.
Yes, there is some data that you must have accessible from the outside. For example, if you are a doctor's office your current clients will want to be able to cancel or change future appointments without having to talk to a live human being. But you don't necessarily need all of your former patents' complete medical and payment histories or even their names on an internet-connected computer.
You'll still need off-site backups of your non-Internet-accessible data though: fire destroys both disks and paper, and rogue employees and state-level actors can still compromise your paper and offline records if they care to do so. Heck, even a police raid that takes "all of your computers and papers" is much easier to recover from if you have off-site backups that weren't named in the warrant.
Granted, sometimes these can be compliments but when they aren't they can really hurt the target.
They can also hurt the reputation of the people using them and overall team productivity. When that happens, it can hurt the careers of the whole team including the team's direct managers.
Slashdot Mirror
For the average Joe, not so much.
It will also help users protect their personal information on public Wi-Fi networks as it offers 256-bit encryption.
This is why I avoid non-encrypted public Wi-Fi whenever possible - too big a chance of a passive eavesdropper (the risk of an evil-twin/man-in-the-middle exists even with encrypted WiFi if the passphrase is well-known, so that by itself not a reason to prefer encrypted WiFi over unencrypted WiFi).
If the home-internet providers would offer "VPN service to make it look like you are in your home city" that would make "not cutting the cord" that much more attractive.
Heck, if they could work out a joint deal with the media companies and the Netflixes of the world so I could watch "only in [my home country] movies while traveling abroad" I might even be willing to pay $1/day extra for out-of-country use.
(because unlike conventional power sources, it all peaks at the same time)
This isn't true if you have a geographically-large grid.
The Eastern-US grid stretches from eastern Montana to the Texas panhandle to Louisiana (bypassing most of Texas) to Florida to Maine.
Yes, sometimes it is sunny or cloudy across the entire area, but most of the time it's not.
The Western-US grid stretches basically from El Paso, Texas, north to Canada and west to the Pacific coast. Thanks to the mountains, there are large variations in weather across this region on any given day.
On the other hand, the "Texas grid" which consists of most of Texas and maybe small parts of surrounding states is small enough that "it's sunny across almost the whole grid" will be true much of the time in the summer.
I have no idea what the grid in India looks like.
Reference: Info on the electrical grid for the continental United States
They can't transition [to Cognizant] without the information that we have.
So, are the workers saying that if all of themwere in the same plane at the same time and it crashed and killed everyone, EmblemHealth would go out of business?
If so, then yes, they do have a huge amount of leverage.
Otherwise, their leverage is limited to the damage of the "you all died at the same time" scenario above.
Yes, I'm assuming the workers wouldn't stoop so low as to actually sabotage things to hurt the company WORSE than if they were to suddenly die, quit, or otherwise become "permanently unavailable."
It's one this for Facebook, Inc. to take a political position and back it with money or what-not.
It's another thing all together for Facebook as a service provider to treat their custumers differently based on their political views or to allow some political discourse but not other dscourse.
The latter usually backfires unless the "silenced" topics are almost universally reviled by your customers and prospective customers or at least that the censorship has nearly-universal customer support.
In other words, if Facebook treated pro-Trump content differently than pro-other-candidate material, it will bite them bad.
The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration publicly blamed a solar storm. However, behind the scenes the Swedes were notifying NATO about a serious, ongoing cyber attack, Norwegian news outlet aldrimer.no reports.
Wait, you mean the government lied to its people?
I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. We must report this to the authorities at once. I'm sure a proper government-run investigation will get to the bottom of this quickly and the responsible people will be punished. You can count on it.
The only thing I want in a CABLE besides wires and insulation and maybe a matching transformer or other "if it's not there it won't work" things are safety systems, such as a fuse or idiot-proof/keyed endings/pinouts.
If it's got anything else, it deserves a title more glorified than "cable." Maybe "adapter" or "connector" or "extender" (think USB-2 extension cables with button-batteries in them to boost the signal) but not a lowly term that implies simplicity like "cable."
If computer stores could buy a good, reliable cable tester - one that that tested the actual hardware for compliance with the actual spec - for under $100, it would make a great marketing tool.
As long as the list is accurate and as long as the recipients have to swear under penalty of perjury that they are indeed entitled to this relief, this sounds like a good thing.
I agree with an earlier poster though, this is not "news for nerds."
Much of what he had to say is worth thinking about.
English is not a dead language.
The shades of meanings are in flux.
As one example of how English is a living language that popped up in the news recently, the usage and therefore the definition of "internet" (all lowercase) has changed over the last few years from "an interconnected network" to "the interconnected network formerly known as the Internet [capitalization required]." Only recently have "official" things like style-books caught up with actual usage.
To require a fixed, never-changing definition for edge cases or to ask me what definition I use then reject it because I didn't cite a specific authority but instead presented a logical argument supporting it is, well, not helpful to discussion.
By the way, I don't know if your purpose of the argument was to "win" or not, but when I have discussions on forums like this, my purpose is to present the ideas I present, and leave it up to each reader - including you but also those reading today and those reading months or years from now - to decide what to take away from it.
By the way, I am familiar with the term "doublespeak" as used by George Orwell. "Black is white" declared by fiat is not the same as when a dictionary re-defines "literal" as "not necessarily literal" as a major dictionary publisher recently did after observing that the actual usage of the term has evolved over time (I think this news item made Slashdot, but I forget).
Have they fixed this known problem yet?
I'm sure this isn't the only known SS7 vulnerability out there.
If this gets popular, I predict a rash of SS7 zero-days in the coming years.
Oh, and I haven't even mentioned vendor-specific vulnerabilities in the implementation of SS7, VoIP (where applicable), cell-tower, and cellphone-handset technology.
Like gender, the definition of what it means to be Black/African-American and the definition of what is means to be human both have "edge cases" where there isn't universal agreement among experts.
Unlike gender, "what you feel like inside" is not, by itself, enough to move you from the "every expert agrees you, a woman born to two non-African-American parents, are not not African-American" or "Every expert agrees you, a child born to two human beings, are not a cat" group to the "there is no consensus about your racial identity" or "there is no consensus about your species" group, much less to the "you are African-American" group or the "you are a cat" group.
For that reason, these people are so far away from the "edge cases" of contemporary, early-21st-century definitions of the terms that it's laughable to suggest that Dolezal is African-American or that Nano is a feline.
However, it would be arrogant (to say the least) for me to see these definitions as immutable. Hypothetically speaking, if 1000 years from now we have gene-splicing such that we have "intelligent cats" and a human being is raised by "intelligent cats" as if she was one, I can see language evolving to the point that the term "cat person" might include someone who, genetically, is 100% Homo sapiens. For now though, I'll leave that particular hypothetical scenario to the realm of science fiction and thought experiment.
By the way, the "edge cases" for racial groupings is very real. The "edge cases" for being human is still hypothetical. But someday, if there is enough gene-splicing and breeding between Homo sapiens and our closely-related primates, or enough gene-splicing between our species and more distantly-related species, expect to see differences of opinions among experts over whether a particular individual is or is not a human being. I see this as far more likely to happen than any "intelligent cat" scenario. It might even happen this century.
Thank you for this admission. But we are still conversing in English and reinventing terms to mean something new is not acceptable.
Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement on the definition of what a "man" is. There is broad agreement that fits the vast majority of cases, but there is disagreement on the edge cases, and for the purposes of this discussion, it's the edge cases that count.
So, if we are going to stick to what is universally agreed upon, then by definition a man (including boys) would be the set of all individuals which would be labeled as "male" by every subject-matter expert and every expert in the meanings of words and how they change over time (or, more practically, by the consensus expert opinion where such a consensus expert opinion existed) and a woman (including girls) would be the set of all individuals which would be labeled as "female" by every expert (or, more practically, by the consensus expert opinion where such a consensus expert opinion existed). But what about those where there was disagreement among experts (or, more practically, where there was no consensus opinion of whether that individual was a male or female)?
If you allow for biologically-intersexed individuals, that last group is clearly not empty. However, you've asked that people with non-clear-gender biology be excluded, so I will exclude them for the sake of argument.
Sticking only with people who have both XY genes and clearly male body parts and, by extension, those who have clearly XX genes and clearly female body parts, the question arises:
Is that last group - the set of all individuals where experts would disagree on their gender (or, more practically, where there is no consensus expert opinion) an empty set?
I claim that it is not. I don't have time right now to scour the scholarly research, but the fact that several countries allow "other" or "indeterminate" genders on passports and other official documents for reasons other than biological inconsistencies strongly supports my claim. I will grant you that this is not proof, as these decisions may have been completely motivated by reasons outside of science, such as for purely political reasons. But I strongly doubt it.
Not talking about such invalids — only about those, whose chromosomes and genitalia are quite unmistakable and in full agreement, yet they insist on identifying as something other than what they are for some intangible reasons.
Suppose it's 1970 and a new baby is born. It looks like a girl so they put "girl" on the birth certificate.
The girl grows up and is a tomboy as a kid and is consistently masculine in behavior and feels like she's a boy trapped in a girl's body. She's afraid of being called weird so she keeps her feelings to herself but it's pretty obvious she's not very feminine. Assume for the sake of argument that she dies at a young age, before things like cheap DNA testing are available and before the gay- and lesbian-rights movement became the LGBT-rights movement.
Based on the evidence available, is she a male-acting, possibly-delusional woman, or is she one of those chromosome-to-body mis-matches that you are explicitly "not talking about"? The answer is, of course "I don't know the answer without a DNA test."
What if, 50 years from now, science comes to the consensus that sex includes some as-yet-undiscovered component. If that is the case, then the version of you 50 years from now would probably include disagreement between that component, DNA, and visible genitalia as "exceptional cases."
It is possible - not necessarily likely, but possible - that the vast majority or even all of people we now consider "transgender" but whose body parts at birth and DNA agree with each other have some other component that is mis-matching with both DNA and body parts, and that at some point in the future this component will be discovered and science will gradually come to understand its importance.
I invite you to think about this possibility.
I learned a new word today. Thank you mi, and thank you Google.
A person who is unambiguously male in all ways which can be measured or self-reported is a man (or boy).
Ah, thank you! Finally we have something.
This definition would not apply to homosexual men, for example — yet they are referred to as men by everyone.
I don't follow your statement "this definition would not apply to homosexual men, for example."
That is false - to the extent that a gay man is XY, has male body parts, and self-identifies as male, the definition applies. I do acknowledge that some people with XY genes and male body parts who are sexually attracted to men think of themselves as female or something else other than a male (e.g. a "third sex"), and that those in this group who "present themselves to the public" as gay men (as opposed to presenting themselves to the public as a transgender straight woman or as a "third sex") will very likely be thought of as gay men by the general public. However, the definition I am using would not apply to them - they are in that "undefined" group that may or may not be "men." They are in that group because there isn't anything close to a universal agreement on whether they are "men" or not.
Similarly, it would apply to a lesbian who is XX, has female body parts, and who identifies as female.
If you are still sure, you wish to defend it, may I ask, where this definition is from and when did it appear? Because I can not find it in any of the dictionaries at my disposal... You did not just invent it, did you?
I did invent it. The wording of your original post "be sure to include your definition" [emphasis original] seemed to invite us to do so. I'm glad you asked the question the way you asked it. The "edge cases" of the definitions of what it means to be a man (or woman) are not universally agreed on. Heck, even the basic definition has changed in the last 75 years - before we knew what DNA was, a baby was a man, a woman, or "in between" based on looks alone. Now we know better: The looks give us a presumptive gender, but if the DNA and the appearance disagree, then that presumption goes away.
The polar opposite position is to force women who are still sporting the male equipment they were born with into women's restrooms and showers. If that's you, congratulations, your on the side of scaring women who are showering off in the gym after a workout when they see a pre-op trans woman sporting the male anatomy she is still carrying around and they assume she's not a she.
In short: Your point, while valid, doesn't tell the whole story.
NC is BY FAR the most backwards, outdated, close minded place I've ever been.
Based on your description and the followup comment that made it clear you weren't talking about urban areas, I'd say it's a tie: There are rural areas of several other states whose reputations match your description.
Oh, and just in case people think I'm rural-bashing: There are certain neighborhoods in certain cities that are equally closed-minded in their own way (although not necessarily in the area of sexuality/gender-identity), and there are plenty of rural areas that are a far cry from what is described in the parent post to this one.
Well, maybe not in North Carolina, but worldwide, yes.
I'm a male. Do I really want a trans-woman sporting a penis walking into the stall next to me in a men's room because the law says she has to? Perhaps I'm still slightly bigoted, but it does make me uncomfortable relieving myself next to a woman where I can see her feet and she can see mine.
Do I really want a trans-man sporting a vagina doing the same? Call me bigoted, but I'm about equally discomforted, for the same reason.
I think it's safe to say that I'm not alone in my discomfort.
The increasing awareness that transgender people exist and that the man washing his hands next to me in the men's room may still be sporting the female private parts he was born with means I can't bury my head in the sand: I have to face the issue head-on like an adult. With this in mind, perhaps its time we went to unisex bathrooms with completely-private stalls and a common washing area. Or, alternatively, require that newly-constructed buildings with bathrooms larger than a certain size be accompanied by a single-stall completely-private bathroom that anyone can use, similar to the "handicapped or parents-with-small-children only" restrooms you sometimes see in large recently-built movie theaters and shopping malls in the United States. Heck, it could just be a matter of changing the signage to make it clear that anyone is allowed to use the "private" restroom, not just those with physical disabilities or who are assisting small children.
There are simply men and women
The facts in evidence - starting with chromosomal abnormalities like XXY or chimeras who happen to be about half XY and about half XX, then going on to body-doesn't-match-chromosome situations like a baby who looks like a girl on the outside but is genetically XY or babies born with visually-ambiguous genitalia - prove this statement false.
I haven't even gotten to the people whose "mental gender" mis-matches their external body parts, their genes, or both. I don't have to. All I had to do was demonstrate that the core point of your argument - the claim that "there are simply men and women" - is not true. Once that is proven false, the rest of your statements are no longer logically provably true without help. If you expect the reader to believe they are true, you should replace the now-disproven first sentence with statements that are both true and sufficient to prove the rest of your posting.
Since you asked for a definition of the term man (which I take to include boys), I will give you one. I assume you also want a definition of a woman, which, by the definition I am using, is NOT "any human being who is not a man/boy."
By the way, here's a "minimalist" definition of "man" and "woman" - I say minimalist because I don't think anyone would argue that those who meet this definition are men or women:
A person who is unambiguously male in all ways which can be measured or self-reported is a man (or boy). These include but are not necessarily limited to genetics (XY, XX for women/girls), internal and external sex-dependent characteristics (testicles/penis, ovaries/vagina/etc.), and, where the person has the capacity to meaningfully assert it, a claim that the person is completely male or completely female.
Any person who lacks any of these things may be neither a man (or boy) nor woman (or girl). This includes those with XXY genes, chimeras with both male-gene and female-gene cells, those with visually ambiguous genitalia, and those whose mental self-concept differs from either their genes, their sex-related appearance (penis or vagina), or both.
This doesn't mean that a person who is lacking in one or more of these things MUST be neither, only that this person MAY be neither. The definition presented is intentionally incomplete in that it doesn't attempt to define such people as either a man (or boy), a woman (or girl), or neither/in-between/both. It doesn't attempt to do so in large part because there isn't a universal agreement about what the definition should be (see intersex and third gender as well as the references in these articles for further discussion).
The editor really should have stripped those out, it makes it read like a press release.
Check that, the editor really should have checked to see if this was a press release, and if so, bin-spammed it.
Maybe there is something to be said for keeping some of your "in house" data only on paper or at least on disconnected computers to make infiltration and ex-filtration harder.
Yes, there is some data that you must have accessible from the outside. For example, if you are a doctor's office your current clients will want to be able to cancel or change future appointments without having to talk to a live human being. But you don't necessarily need all of your former patents' complete medical and payment histories or even their names on an internet-connected computer.
You'll still need off-site backups of your non-Internet-accessible data though: fire destroys both disks and paper, and rogue employees and state-level actors can still compromise your paper and offline records if they care to do so. Heck, even a police raid that takes "all of your computers and papers" is much easier to recover from if you have off-site backups that weren't named in the warrant.
Granted, sometimes these can be compliments but when they aren't they can really hurt the target.
They can also hurt the reputation of the people using them and overall team productivity. When that happens, it can hurt the careers of the whole team including the team's direct managers.