Perhaps there is an upcoming adaptor for the 360 that gives it very powerful cybernetic arms that can throw things at the water cooling system hard enough to send shockwaves rippling through space and time, waves that will go back through history to the point where you were about to put on your socks and slap you upside your head, making you say "Huh? What was that?" and thus distracting you from your sock donning, thus not only essentially knocking your socks off, but erasing from all existence any memory that you had, at one time, even had them on.
But noooo, you couldn't give them the benefit of the doubt - you have to assume that, rather than making hardware so powerful it can alter history, they just don't know what the word means. Such negativity!
What brings race into this is that people are constantly referring to "Chinese" gold farmers, as if being Chinese is somehow part of the problem when it is only the gold farming that is objectionable. It would be like putting "Black spammers" or "Jewish phishers" or "Mexican telemarketers" as being a problem, rather than simply spammers, phishers and telemarketers.
Yes, that's 151 bad parts per million that we produced and sent out of our building. That's less than 0.02% defect rate. If our external PPM ever got over 1% for a particular department (1000 parts per million), it would not be surprising to see some operators and quality inspectors fired. In my plants, a 4-digit PPM is a capitol crime.
Nitpick: 1% defect rate would be 10,000 PPM, not 1,000.
And a not-so-nitpick: I would expect that parts for a dashboard are rather less compliated than an XBox 360, or most of the parts for the 360. What parts of the dashboard are moving parts? Do people operate their dashboards in both horizontal and vertical configurations (and if they go vertical, I imagine their problems are just beginning...)
The more complex a machine is, the more components that go into it, the more chance there is of failure. Additionally, there's also factors of fault-tolerance: When a product malfunction can lead to catastrophic injury or death, tolerances are MUCH stricter, and parts are failed much more frequently. When a product malfunction can lead to a scratched game disk and a little disappointment, tolerances are less strict, and things are allowed to go out when they are more "iffy."
I used to work in a custom pc shop, and we had, on anything with moving parts (printers, HDDs mainly) at least a 5% DOA rate due to stuff like dropped box syndrome or "idiot who can't read thinks 'Fragile' is a sub-tropical country."
I don't work in QA, or have much to do with it, but this stuff seems pretty intuitive/obvious. Relatively inexpensive consumer products with lots of complicated innards will have a defect rate substantially higher than simpler plastic component.
I've a GameBoy Advance SP, and it comes with a little dongle you can plug standard headphones into - at least, the one I bought did (it came with a few accessories and games [Rampage, Paperboy, Risk, Battleship and some others, if I remember right]).
But that's a diary, not a web log! A log is more like a ship's captains log, something that stores important daily information of importance, not trivial personal events.
Who are you to say what is important information vs. what's trivial, for anyone else?
There are people who make staggering sums of money doing things that I consider to be trivial, but I am at least intellectually honest enough to admit that my opinions are nothing more than that - my opinions as to what's important, and not some kind of objective, empirical measurement of real importance. Almost certainly, the majority of people on the planet would find the things I personally care most about to be marginal, at best.
As long as there are decent indexes, there's no such thing as information overload.
A good index allows one to narrow down one's search while also allowing serendipity. It allows one to state the same thing in multiple ways, while also informing the user of proper taxonomy. It is up to date and complete.
The only people who think there's too much information are the people who can't figure out how to access it efficiently, and get overwhelmed - people who fret over new tools, rather than embrace them.
The new desktop I had made using an AMD64 3000 is running Win XP 64, and the only problem I've had is getting my 3 year old laser printer running on it. According to Samsung, however, they are anticipating having 64 bit drivers out "soon" so I'm not feeling too bad.
Other than that, everything I've got has been just fine. Webcam, camera, scanner, drawing tablet - all good. I did get it with the os pre-installed, and I did select components for performance, price and compatibility, which is usually not a luxury one gets in a laptop unless one pays through the nose.
The orcs are violent, yes, but not indiscriminately, and they have honor - they freed the Tauren, rather than try to enslave them. Trolls I don't recall much about, but I certainly didn't feel "evil" when I went through many of their story lines.
On the other hand, the humans are eco-rapists who want only to expand, consequences be damned. I found it really insane that the night elves would ally with them - I could easily have seen the night elves & tauren being their own faction, really (balanced?)
My feeling is that neither faction is resolutely evil or good - the situation is much more balanced than that, with good and evil being a matter of point of view, not something clear cut like "Humans always help others, orcs eat babies."
put another way, if noone signs up for tests, then the whole thing can't have been *that* bad, anyway.
Not so much.
If the choice is "die of horrible illness for certain" or "volunteer for medication protocol that might kill me but also might help me" then there's no choice - I'm going to volunteer.
But if the choice is "suffer from continued arthritis in my hands" or "volunteer for medication protocol that might kill me but also might help me" then there's also no choice - no fucking way will I volunteer.
According to you, the only "ethical" thing for me to do is suffer excruciating pain in my hands because I'm not willing to risk death to test out new drugs that might relieve my pain somewhat. How stupid.
I am against absurd animal testing, and I buy accordingly. Cruelty-free cosmetics and so on. Do I think a bunny should suffer so that I can have striking lashes? Hell no. That doesn't mean, however, that I have a problem with that same bunny dying of liver failure if it means that I can use my hands on a cold morning.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of scientist - theorists and experimentalists.
Theorists focus on the "why" (to some extent, but really more of a "how") - "Why don't we see starlight in every portion of the sky?" leads to a question of "What are the possible scenarios in which we would see the sky as we see it?" leads to theories - "We see the night sky the way it is because [...]"
Experimentalists then enter the picture. "Well, if [...] was the reason for the sky looking as it does, then we should find X and Y traits also." Then they do their experiments and record the observations. Sometimes, those observations match up with the theoretical predictions. Sometimes, those observations are almost, but not quite right, and sometimes they're incredibly far off, and everyone needs to go back and look for sources of difference.
Now, you dismiss experimentalists as being just "applied mathematicians" (or, at least, that is certainly what your tone implies - they're somehow less relevant, valuable, whatever than "pure" mathematicians) - however, one cannot be terribly effective without the other.
Some scientists are exceptional at both theory and experiment - Issac Newton would be an excellent example of that fusion. Some are pure theorists - Einstein is a poster child for those folks. And some are pure experimentalists - Hubble would be my pick as an archetypical experimentalist.
.... being fed their own testicles before being stuffed in a trunk.
I have a hard time imagining that Russian piracy rings would be filled with nice-nice people who would be scared of a few lawsuits or even Russian "law enforcement."
Paul Allen probably is looked upon favourably by more people than Gates. While Bill Gates is better known, a lot of people hold at best mixed feelings about his achievements.
Paul Allen is probably completely unknown amongst most people. And most people look at Gates as "the richest man in the world" or "that guy who gave like, a billion dollars to fight AIDS in Africa" if they know who he is.
There are over 6 billion people in the world - most of them have likely never heard of either one, but if they have, it's likely Gates, and likely in conjunction with his vast wealth or his charitable giving.
I would love it if I were asked what my favorite funny movies were during an interview - it'd give me a chance to seriously fuck with a place that I pretty clearly wouldn't want to work anyway, if they need to resort to such artificial measures to try and boost morale.
"What's your favorite funny movie?"
"Hm, that's a toughie - I think I'm torn between Schindler's List and Silence of the Lambs."
"... Uh... I don't really think those are comedies..."
"Oh, sure they are - that part where that guy is shooting people from his balcony? That was comedy gold. And then there's always 'It rubs the lotion on its back or else it gets the hose again!'"
Ideally, suits should be the exception, not the rule, as you say.
The problem is, lawsuits are a financially better alternative than following the rules for everyone but the consumer.
Until penalties for breaking the rules are made worse than the cost of a lawsuit, companies will break the rules - they look at fines as the price of getting to break the law. Engage in any unethical and illegal behavior you want - make a billion dollars, get fined at most a few million.
And then we have class action lawsuits. Ideally, those should be undertaken when there is real harm done to individuals, but now we have scumbags who see them as the royal road to riches and encourage people to sue because their coffee was too cold, or because someone said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" or a clerk at a Wal-Mart looked at them funny.
Penalties need to be made 100x worse to corporations. Executives responsible for illegal behavior need to go to prison as a rule, not as a rare example. Class action suits should be handled by the AG's office, not by opportunistic private attorneys who recruit people to join their bullshit class action suits.
Business is able to rape and pillage with impunity - I say put the fear of god into the executives. CEO wants to make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars? Fine - as long as they do so legally - and can't use that money to shield themselves when they overreach.
Now, I like the idea of a free market, but there do need to be some limits or else we wind up with corporate tyranny. Ideally, government and business should balance each other out and let the rest of us get on with our lives without having to fear either one.
Please don't forget problem #3: The "designer" must have been smoking crack.
How else can an ID advocate explain the obvious - EVEN TO A "LIMITED" HUMAN INTELLECT! - design flaws such as our eyes, ability to choke on food, etc and so on?
Maybe their "god" was actually a freshman engineering student that flunked out?
... most of those things can be addressed by software updates.
In fact, I am willing to bet that, right around the time of the PS3 launch, several of those "missing" features will be announced - specifically, MSN music and web browsing.
As for the other stuff - small hard-drive, for example - I can see MSFT selling upgrades for people who've run out of space.
The 360 is designed to allow plenty of room for upsales. Would I spend $1000 on a console in one shot? Hell no. Would I spend $1000 on a console if it were spread out in dribs and drabs over 5 years? Maybe not, but it's a lot more likely than the up-front expenditure.
Here's the problem: YOU can't explain how it works. YOU didn't bother doing even a cursory search on Google or whatever to see if maybe someone else could. YOU didn't bother thinking about this beyond the "It's too complex for me, must be God!" type of crap that ID people put out there all the time.
I can't explain all kinds of things, but MY default assumption when I can't is that maybe someone else can, or, if not, maybe I can investigate the matter further. I don't just throw up my hands and say "God did it!"
It's sloppy on philosophical/logical grounds as well.
How many times in the past have people - even smart ones, even brilliant ones - insisted that something could not be so, only to be shown, eventually, that it is true?
Heavier than air flight: Impossible! Oops... Rockets in space: Impossible! Oops... Sailing around the world: Impossible! Oops... The Earth goes round the sun: Impossible! Oops... Etc.
ID relies on the following argument:
"We cannot currently explain how X came about, therefore it must be the work of an Intelligent Designer."
That argument is pointless because of the word "currently" - a word that no proponent of ID will actually use, but a word that is indeed part of that particular belief system.
Disposing of the ID claims is as easy as adding the word "yet" to pretty much any of them.
We can not explain how pierced lungs evolved... yet. We can not explain how protiens fold... yet. We can not explain how various motive systems in small organisims evolved... yet.
100 years ago, it might have been said:
We can not explain how genetic information is passed on from parent to child. We can not explain how the stars shine. We can not explain any number of things that have since become not just explained, but grade-school level science.
Proponents of ID are not scientists, they are not philosophers, they are not any thing but sloppy thinkers who need to quit trying to tell everyone else what to think.
Depends on what you mean by "their co-workers are weird."
I've had (and am a) "weird" co-workers in the sense that I read strange things, listen to strange music, make dumb jokes that are funny only to people who are up on highly specific nerdly things" - you know, harmless geekery.
But I've also had the lovely experience of getting a call at midnight at my supposedly unlisted phone number phone from a co-worker who was being rather over friendly, would drop comments about how easily he could get at my "private" information, and would demonstrate his geek skills by casually mentioning events from my past that happened, somehow, to get documented on the web (like, discussions I've had with people via usenet etc). He never asked me out or tried to get anywhere with me - I think he really was just doing this stuff to try to show off, with no malice - but it was fucking stalker-level creepy. I handled it by telling him that I wasn't amused, and that I'd appreciate it if he'd respect my privacy or at least stop telling me about his exploits. (And it worked - he stopped telling me about it, whether or not he actually stopped doing it)
There's regular weird and then there's "You're vaguely creepy and I think you might have bodies stacked up in your basement" weird. Fuck em if they can't deal with the former, and people shouldn't have to deal with the latter.
There are two broad classes of reasons more women don't go into computer science:
1) "Natural" reasons - fundamental differences between the sexes that are caused by differing neural wiring. Women tend to be superior at multi-tasking and social processing, men tend to be superior at narrow-focusing and logical processing. I use the word "tend" and that's all the soft soaping I'm gonna do.
2) "Artificial" reasons - things like hostile work environments and so on. I am specifically thinking of places where it is considered a given that a female will by default be less capable than a male. Ex. Female network administrator being given "easy" tasks despite demonstrated competence, while guys are given more "manly" and difficult tasks despite not being terribly competent. Or just nasty social shit like horny geek dude mistaking friendly chat for something more. Which happens anywhere, not just in CS, though I will say that it seems to be a bit more blatant in the geekly circles - which is a blessing and a curse, I suppose.
The question isn't "What can we do to get more women in CS?" That's putting the cart before the horse - that's assuming that more women want to be in CS, that there's a real benefit to more women being in CS. The real question that should be asked is this - what's the percentage of women that would be in CS and similar fields in the absence of those artificial disincentives? If it is much different, then that indicates that there are things that could be changed - the dreaded sensitivity AKA "Don't be a patronizing asshole intent only on her boobs" classes, and shit like that. If the percentages aren't all that different, well, then, it's just the way things are.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there is an upcoming adaptor for the 360 that gives it very powerful cybernetic arms that can throw things at the water cooling system hard enough to send shockwaves rippling through space and time, waves that will go back through history to the point where you were about to put on your socks and slap you upside your head, making you say "Huh? What was that?" and thus distracting you from your sock donning, thus not only essentially knocking your socks off, but erasing from all existence any memory that you had, at one time, even had them on.
But noooo, you couldn't give them the benefit of the doubt - you have to assume that, rather than making hardware so powerful it can alter history, they just don't know what the word means. Such negativity!
Bilestoad - that was the game that got me into gaming. I would play against my brother. I'd run to a chariot, charge him and chop off his axe hand.
Mangrove Earthshoe for ye olde tyme feeling.
So, how's that "2 wrongs" thing working out for ya?
What brings race into this is that people are constantly referring to "Chinese" gold farmers, as if being Chinese is somehow part of the problem when it is only the gold farming that is objectionable. It would be like putting "Black spammers" or "Jewish phishers" or "Mexican telemarketers" as being a problem, rather than simply spammers, phishers and telemarketers.
Yes, that's 151 bad parts per million that we produced and sent out of our building. That's less than 0.02% defect rate. If our external PPM ever got over 1% for a particular department (1000 parts per million), it would not be surprising to see some operators and quality inspectors fired. In my plants, a 4-digit PPM is a capitol crime.
Nitpick: 1% defect rate would be 10,000 PPM, not 1,000.
And a not-so-nitpick: I would expect that parts for a dashboard are rather less compliated than an XBox 360, or most of the parts for the 360. What parts of the dashboard are moving parts? Do people operate their dashboards in both horizontal and vertical configurations (and if they go vertical, I imagine their problems are just beginning...)
The more complex a machine is, the more components that go into it, the more chance there is of failure. Additionally, there's also factors of fault-tolerance: When a product malfunction can lead to catastrophic injury or death, tolerances are MUCH stricter, and parts are failed much more frequently. When a product malfunction can lead to a scratched game disk and a little disappointment, tolerances are less strict, and things are allowed to go out when they are more "iffy."
I used to work in a custom pc shop, and we had, on anything with moving parts (printers, HDDs mainly) at least a 5% DOA rate due to stuff like dropped box syndrome or "idiot who can't read thinks 'Fragile' is a sub-tropical country."
I don't work in QA, or have much to do with it, but this stuff seems pretty intuitive/obvious. Relatively inexpensive consumer products with lots of complicated innards will have a defect rate substantially higher than simpler plastic component.
I've a GameBoy Advance SP, and it comes with a little dongle you can plug standard headphones into - at least, the one I bought did (it came with a few accessories and games [Rampage, Paperboy, Risk, Battleship and some others, if I remember right]).
But that's a diary, not a web log! A log is more like a ship's captains log, something that stores important daily information of importance, not trivial personal events.
Who are you to say what is important information vs. what's trivial, for anyone else?
There are people who make staggering sums of money doing things that I consider to be trivial, but I am at least intellectually honest enough to admit that my opinions are nothing more than that - my opinions as to what's important, and not some kind of objective, empirical measurement of real importance. Almost certainly, the majority of people on the planet would find the things I personally care most about to be marginal, at best.
As long as there are decent indexes, there's no such thing as information overload.
A good index allows one to narrow down one's search while also allowing serendipity. It allows one to state the same thing in multiple ways, while also informing the user of proper taxonomy. It is up to date and complete.
The only people who think there's too much information are the people who can't figure out how to access it efficiently, and get overwhelmed - people who fret over new tools, rather than embrace them.
The new desktop I had made using an AMD64 3000 is running Win XP 64, and the only problem I've had is getting my 3 year old laser printer running on it. According to Samsung, however, they are anticipating having 64 bit drivers out "soon" so I'm not feeling too bad.
Other than that, everything I've got has been just fine. Webcam, camera, scanner, drawing tablet - all good. I did get it with the os pre-installed, and I did select components for performance, price and compatibility, which is usually not a luxury one gets in a laptop unless one pays through the nose.
But they play the air guitar - they HAVE to be evil!
IMO, the only "evil" race in WoW is the Forsaken.
The orcs are violent, yes, but not indiscriminately, and they have honor - they freed the Tauren, rather than try to enslave them. Trolls I don't recall much about, but I certainly didn't feel "evil" when I went through many of their story lines.
On the other hand, the humans are eco-rapists who want only to expand, consequences be damned. I found it really insane that the night elves would ally with them - I could easily have seen the night elves & tauren being their own faction, really (balanced?)
My feeling is that neither faction is resolutely evil or good - the situation is much more balanced than that, with good and evil being a matter of point of view, not something clear cut like "Humans always help others, orcs eat babies."
put another way, if noone signs up for tests, then the whole thing can't have been *that* bad, anyway.
Not so much.
If the choice is "die of horrible illness for certain" or "volunteer for medication protocol that might kill me but also might help me" then there's no choice - I'm going to volunteer.
But if the choice is "suffer from continued arthritis in my hands" or "volunteer for medication protocol that might kill me but also might help me" then there's also no choice - no fucking way will I volunteer.
According to you, the only "ethical" thing for me to do is suffer excruciating pain in my hands because I'm not willing to risk death to test out new drugs that might relieve my pain somewhat. How stupid.
I am against absurd animal testing, and I buy accordingly. Cruelty-free cosmetics and so on. Do I think a bunny should suffer so that I can have striking lashes? Hell no. That doesn't mean, however, that I have a problem with that same bunny dying of liver failure if it means that I can use my hands on a cold morning.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of scientist - theorists and experimentalists.
Theorists focus on the "why" (to some extent, but really more of a "how") - "Why don't we see starlight in every portion of the sky?" leads to a question of "What are the possible scenarios in which we would see the sky as we see it?" leads to theories - "We see the night sky the way it is because [...]"
Experimentalists then enter the picture. "Well, if [...] was the reason for the sky looking as it does, then we should find X and Y traits also." Then they do their experiments and record the observations. Sometimes, those observations match up with the theoretical predictions. Sometimes, those observations are almost, but not quite right, and sometimes they're incredibly far off, and everyone needs to go back and look for sources of difference.
Now, you dismiss experimentalists as being just "applied mathematicians" (or, at least, that is certainly what your tone implies - they're somehow less relevant, valuable, whatever than "pure" mathematicians) - however, one cannot be terribly effective without the other.
Some scientists are exceptional at both theory and experiment - Issac Newton would be an excellent example of that fusion. Some are pure theorists - Einstein is a poster child for those folks. And some are pure experimentalists - Hubble would be my pick as an archetypical experimentalist.
.... being fed their own testicles before being stuffed in a trunk.
I have a hard time imagining that Russian piracy rings would be filled with nice-nice people who would be scared of a few lawsuits or even Russian "law enforcement."
Paul Allen probably is looked upon favourably by more people than Gates. While Bill Gates is better known, a lot of people hold at best mixed feelings about his achievements.
Paul Allen is probably completely unknown amongst most people. And most people look at Gates as "the richest man in the world" or "that guy who gave like, a billion dollars to fight AIDS in Africa" if they know who he is.
There are over 6 billion people in the world - most of them have likely never heard of either one, but if they have, it's likely Gates, and likely in conjunction with his vast wealth or his charitable giving.
I would love it if I were asked what my favorite funny movies were during an interview - it'd give me a chance to seriously fuck with a place that I pretty clearly wouldn't want to work anyway, if they need to resort to such artificial measures to try and boost morale.
"What's your favorite funny movie?"
"Hm, that's a toughie - I think I'm torn between Schindler's List and Silence of the Lambs."
"... Uh... I don't really think those are comedies..."
"Oh, sure they are - that part where that guy is shooting people from his balcony? That was comedy gold. And then there's always 'It rubs the lotion on its back or else it gets the hose again!'"
"..."
Ideally, suits should be the exception, not the rule, as you say.
The problem is, lawsuits are a financially better alternative than following the rules for everyone but the consumer.
Until penalties for breaking the rules are made worse than the cost of a lawsuit, companies will break the rules - they look at fines as the price of getting to break the law. Engage in any unethical and illegal behavior you want - make a billion dollars, get fined at most a few million.
And then we have class action lawsuits. Ideally, those should be undertaken when there is real harm done to individuals, but now we have scumbags who see them as the royal road to riches and encourage people to sue because their coffee was too cold, or because someone said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" or a clerk at a Wal-Mart looked at them funny.
Penalties need to be made 100x worse to corporations. Executives responsible for illegal behavior need to go to prison as a rule, not as a rare example. Class action suits should be handled by the AG's office, not by opportunistic private attorneys who recruit people to join their bullshit class action suits.
Business is able to rape and pillage with impunity - I say put the fear of god into the executives. CEO wants to make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars? Fine - as long as they do so legally - and can't use that money to shield themselves when they overreach.
Now, I like the idea of a free market, but there do need to be some limits or else we wind up with corporate tyranny. Ideally, government and business should balance each other out and let the rest of us get on with our lives without having to fear either one.
"God put those trilobite fossils in the old rocks to test us."
"God made the guinea worm to test us."
The problem with invoking God is that nothing is out of bounds. Therefore *any* result is compatible with ID.
Please don't forget problem #3: The "designer" must have been smoking crack.
How else can an ID advocate explain the obvious - EVEN TO A "LIMITED" HUMAN INTELLECT! - design flaws such as our eyes, ability to choke on food, etc and so on?
Maybe their "god" was actually a freshman engineering student that flunked out?
... most of those things can be addressed by software updates.
In fact, I am willing to bet that, right around the time of the PS3 launch, several of those "missing" features will be announced - specifically, MSN music and web browsing.
As for the other stuff - small hard-drive, for example - I can see MSFT selling upgrades for people who've run out of space.
The 360 is designed to allow plenty of room for upsales. Would I spend $1000 on a console in one shot? Hell no. Would I spend $1000 on a console if it were spread out in dribs and drabs over 5 years? Maybe not, but it's a lot more likely than the up-front expenditure.
I bought a GBA recently specifically so that I can play all the arcade game compilations from way back when. Love that stuff!
Most recently I got one that had Time Pilot and Yie Ar Kung Fu on it, used, for 7 bucks.
Good way to waste time at airports.
Here's the problem: YOU can't explain how it works. YOU didn't bother doing even a cursory search on Google or whatever to see if maybe someone else could. YOU didn't bother thinking about this beyond the "It's too complex for me, must be God!" type of crap that ID people put out there all the time.
I can't explain all kinds of things, but MY default assumption when I can't is that maybe someone else can, or, if not, maybe I can investigate the matter further. I don't just throw up my hands and say "God did it!"
It's sloppy on philosophical/logical grounds as well.
How many times in the past have people - even smart ones, even brilliant ones - insisted that something could not be so, only to be shown, eventually, that it is true?
Heavier than air flight: Impossible! Oops...
Rockets in space: Impossible! Oops...
Sailing around the world: Impossible! Oops...
The Earth goes round the sun: Impossible! Oops...
Etc.
ID relies on the following argument:
"We cannot currently explain how X came about, therefore it must be the work of an Intelligent Designer."
That argument is pointless because of the word "currently" - a word that no proponent of ID will actually use, but a word that is indeed part of that particular belief system.
Disposing of the ID claims is as easy as adding the word "yet" to pretty much any of them.
We can not explain how pierced lungs evolved... yet.
We can not explain how protiens fold... yet.
We can not explain how various motive systems in small organisims evolved... yet.
100 years ago, it might have been said:
We can not explain how genetic information is passed on from parent to child.
We can not explain how the stars shine.
We can not explain any number of things that have since become not just explained, but grade-school level science.
Proponents of ID are not scientists, they are not philosophers, they are not any thing but sloppy thinkers who need to quit trying to tell everyone else what to think.
Depends on what you mean by "their co-workers are weird."
I've had (and am a) "weird" co-workers in the sense that I read strange things, listen to strange music, make dumb jokes that are funny only to people who are up on highly specific nerdly things" - you know, harmless geekery.
But I've also had the lovely experience of getting a call at midnight at my supposedly unlisted phone number phone from a co-worker who was being rather over friendly, would drop comments about how easily he could get at my "private" information, and would demonstrate his geek skills by casually mentioning events from my past that happened, somehow, to get documented on the web (like, discussions I've had with people via usenet etc). He never asked me out or tried to get anywhere with me - I think he really was just doing this stuff to try to show off, with no malice - but it was fucking stalker-level creepy. I handled it by telling him that I wasn't amused, and that I'd appreciate it if he'd respect my privacy or at least stop telling me about his exploits. (And it worked - he stopped telling me about it, whether or not he actually stopped doing it)
There's regular weird and then there's "You're vaguely creepy and I think you might have bodies stacked up in your basement" weird. Fuck em if they can't deal with the former, and people shouldn't have to deal with the latter.
There are two broad classes of reasons more women don't go into computer science:
1) "Natural" reasons - fundamental differences between the sexes that are caused by differing neural wiring. Women tend to be superior at multi-tasking and social processing, men tend to be superior at narrow-focusing and logical processing. I use the word "tend" and that's all the soft soaping I'm gonna do.
2) "Artificial" reasons - things like hostile work environments and so on. I am specifically thinking of places where it is considered a given that a female will by default be less capable than a male. Ex. Female network administrator being given "easy" tasks despite demonstrated competence, while guys are given more "manly" and difficult tasks despite not being terribly competent. Or just nasty social shit like horny geek dude mistaking friendly chat for something more. Which happens anywhere, not just in CS, though I will say that it seems to be a bit more blatant in the geekly circles - which is a blessing and a curse, I suppose.
The question isn't "What can we do to get more women in CS?" That's putting the cart before the horse - that's assuming that more women want to be in CS, that there's a real benefit to more women being in CS. The real question that should be asked is this - what's the percentage of women that would be in CS and similar fields in the absence of those artificial disincentives? If it is much different, then that indicates that there are things that could be changed - the dreaded sensitivity AKA "Don't be a patronizing asshole intent only on her boobs" classes, and shit like that. If the percentages aren't all that different, well, then, it's just the way things are.