So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
Well stated. I've often thought that when feminists encourage women to fight for equality by becoming exactly like men, there is an implicit admission in there that they themselves believe women are less valuable than men. Why else would they be so concerned with pretending to be men, rather than happily being women?
That's not to say there haven't been legitimate injustices done towards women (and men for that matter), but I think it'd be a lot more effective to recognize that men and women are different in a lot of ways, and that both men and women in general have certain strengths and weaknesses.
Why is there not so strong a push to get more male nurses
My mom works as a nursing instructor at a community college. She says there is actually a lot of demand for more male nurses. One of the reasons is that nursing requires a fair amount of physical strength, such as when moving unconscious or even dead bodies around. Men, on average, have more physical strength than women, and thus they can do these particular tasks more effectively than women can.
I'm a Christian. I'm by no means perfect. I make mistakes way more frequently than I should, and really, each mistake I make is an instance of me not practicing what I preach. Since no one's perfect, I suppose you won't find a Christian or a sect of Christianity that perfectly practice what they preach. At least for me though, and many others I'm sure, I'm trying to follow what I preach (and more importantly, what the Bible teaches), and each day make fewer mistakes than I did the day before.
Regarding the Old Testament though, while many would disagree with me (especially non-Christians), the Old Testament does not apply today. The Old Testament itself says that it will be superseded by a new law in the future, and the New Testament explicitly says that the old law no longer applies. In fact, the Old Testament only ever applied to the nation of Israel. If you happened to be from a different area, you were not bound by the Old Testament law.
Yes, the Old Testament being obsolete even includes things such as the Ten Commandments. This doesn't mean things like murder are now any more allowed than they were then, as all of the Ten Commandments except for keeping the Sabbath are repeated in the New Testament, albeit not in such a concise list as the original Ten Commandments.
That being said, the Old Testament is still useful for Christians to study. It gives insight into the character and nature of God, and helps to put Christianity in its proper context. In large part, the point of the Old Testament was to bring the New Testament into the world.
Staying relevant as in staying an industry leader in computer software and remaining competitive in the industry.
"It also happens that probably the very best college candidates are the ones that have contributed to open source projects."
What do you base this on?
I already mentioned that college students who contribute to open source projects are going above and beyond their school's curriculum, which gives them experience that a student who doesn't contribute to open source project won't get. Chances are these projects will require them to work in a geographically diverse team on an ongoing project. These skills are also valuable to large software companies. Granted, doing summer internships could give you a lot of the same kinds of experience as well, and you might contribute to crappy open source projects and get no useful experience, so as with most things, it's not an absolute advantage.
I'd also say that most people in computer science programs fall somewhere on the line between "I'm just doing this because then I can get a good-paying job/my parents made me do it/I didn't have anything better to do" and "I'm doing this because I really love computer science and am driven to excel at it." Guess which end open source contributors are probably closer to. This mindset is also something that employers will value.
I feel like Microsoft has taken some important steps towards playing nice with Open Source, and encouraging interoperability. Some examples include projects like IronPython, the WIX Installer tools, the fact that Silverlight actually supports at least one non-Windows platform, and the extremely detailed communications protocol documents recently released on MSDN. Sure, part of this has been for legal compliance reasons, and it turns out customers value things like interoperability.
I think there's a subtler reason that will become more apparent in the coming years. Microsoft needs to hire new employees if it wants to stay relevant, and it competes with the likes of Google and others for these new hires. It also happens that probably the very best college candidates are the ones that have contributed to open source projects. These are the students that went beyond what their curriculum required of them, and showed the drive to understand and contribute to a real-world project on their spare time. This kind of experience is valuable in a new hire, but many of them would be turned off by an anti open source attitude and look for more open source-friendly employers. In other words, to attract the best young minds (which is crucial to Microsoft's long term success), Microsoft is going to have to become much more friendly to open source projects.
There is a Windows Sidebar gadget you can get that tells you the current threat level. I used to use it, but I got tired of it always telling me the threat level was "Elevated."
You shouldn't get an award because of your genes, but because of the work you put in.
At any reasonably sized school, there are enough students with high intelligence genes that you won't get an award unless you also put in the work to excel beyond the other smart students.
Huh, the story I heard a long time ago was that Fahrenheit was a doctor and tried to come up with a scale that would be useful for medical purposes. Thus, he stuck 0 as the temperature of a vat of salty ice water, which was the coldest he could manage to make liquid water. The 100 degree mark was supposed to be the average human body temperature. For a doctor concerned with whether a person has a fever or not, this seems to make more sense than sticking 100 degrees at the boiling point of water.
The rest of the story was that around World War I, the army took an average of all their recruits and redefined normal body temperature to be 98.6 degrees rather than adjusting the scale so the average would still be 100.
It seems reasonable to me, but according to the Wikipedia article, it's almost entirely incorrect. Of course, there's a "This article needs more verification" warning at the top, so it might still be correct.
If the 96 is really the correct average body temperature as Fahrenheit intended, it's worth nothing that it's 8 * 12, which has lots of small factors and could make doing mental arithmetic easier, which would have been useful in the 1700s.
The Second Amendment was muddily written, and is badly obsolete.
So fix it the way the Constitution says to fix it. If the Second Amendment is really so badly obsolete, let's amend the Constitution and get rid of that pesky amendment. Our Constitution only works as long as we agree to follow it. I don't like the idea of our legislative, executive and judicial branches deciding certain parts of the Constitution are outdated and therefore we can just ignore them. We should formally declare them to be obsolete.
Given most of the comments I've seen here, I'd be surprised if many of the readers actually even knew what a kernel was, much less what's wrong with Vista's.
The better question is how many computers will have touch screens in 2-4 years. I suspect there will be many more than now. Remember, Windows 7 is at least another year off.
And by the way, isn't "Church" a Christian designation?
Off topic, but I felt like sharing anyway. The word church originally comes from a Greek word, ekklesia. Ekklesia basically just meant a group of people. In the Bible, it usually gets translated church, but in at least one occasion the same word refers to an angry mob. In today's language, church is normally associated with Christianity, and especially if it's capitalized, but at least in my mind it doesn't necessarily have to even be religious.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, I don't know how to put it into practice. I personally think not only should people be able to read to vote in the US, they should demonstrate a knowledge of the way the US government is supposed to work. This includes things like the fact that the president has no constitutional authority for half (perhaps even all) the things they promise to do if elected.
The problem is I can't think of a good way to enforce it. In the past there have been literacy tests for voting, and my understanding is that they were primarily used to keep blacks and other minority groups from voting. Do we make a voter licensing test? Who gets to decide what's on the test? Hopefully it would just include relatively factual things, such as the branches of government, what duties the Constitution assigns to each branch, and how the people in each branch are chosen. However, I could just as easily see people using it to filter out someone who should be voting. If we used what I thought people should understand before voting as the standard, we would probably end up disenfranchising a lot of the left, because I believe the Constitution was designed on the principles of limited government and didn't intend for the federal government to dabble in things like universal healthcare. Someone else might disenfranchise me on account of the idea that it's immoral to let someone die in the street because they can't afford to buy food. (For the record, I don't like the idea either, I just think there are other ways of dealing with it than government)
The sum of all this is, I'd rather tolerate a few uninformed voters than risk excluding people's voices who may not fit the profile of what some authority thinks is a person suitable to vote. Hopefully the people who care enough to take the time to fill out a ballot also pay attention in civics class and learn something about how the system works.
The section you quoted about the drivers driving on to the shoulder or in the wrong lane 9 times in a minute in the undistracted case should have raised some flags on its own. Most people driving rarely go in the wrong lane or on the shoulder, certainly not once every 6 seconds. If this were the case, there would probably be far more accidents than there are now. It sounds like they were basically playing a video game. I know if I drove in real life the way I drive in video games, I would have been dead years ago.
Scientists today have fancier computer models and a little better data gathering capability than back in 1895, but are likely just as wrong as their ancestor scientists were over time.
One of the things that scientists have discovered with these fancy computer models and improved data gathering is chaos. This was discovered by studying, of all things, weather. If just simply rounding your numbers differently can cause your model to predict the complete opposite of what it did previously, I wonder why we are so confident in today's computer models and better data gathering.
The data listed in your post reminded me of when I did a project on Brownian Motion in my Fractals class a few years ago. A good example is this image.
One of the interesting things of a curve like that one is that you can view it on any scale, and it will never smooth out. If you look at a window of size 1/128, you might see a clear downward trend, but if you look at a larger window over the same point of size 1/64, you might realize that was just a small blip on an overall upward trend, and on and on. In the graph I linked, at the end you are at the same place you started, but it would be hard to predict that by looking at a small or even a fairly large subset of the data.
Even if we were on a general warming trend with small dips on the way since 1995, that trend could itself be a small upward blip when viewed on the scale of 100 or 1000 years. That said, I've only looked at the global temperature record enough to say "hmmm... that certainly looks like it could be a subset of a Brownian Motion curve." I'm sure you've studied the issue much more than I and are much better qualified to argue whether global warming is a problem.
After the Roman empire fell, the only thing that survived was rock and paper... which meant text. Pictures were lost; music was lost; even marble statues failed to survive (they were used as building material). Thousands of years of music and art just disappeared.
And there you've touched on what I think is the biggest problem when you talk about archiving data for 1,400 years. Most of the ones I've seen proposed assume that you'll have a civilization that's able to keep the machines powered up through that entire time. Given what we know of the last 1,400 years, that's a pretty big assumption.
Except that it really can't be accurately described that way.
I know this wasn't really the point of your post, but you can put the center of the universe (i.e. your center of reference) pretty much wherever you want. If you have a nice, neat set of equations that describes the position of everything and you put the sun at (0,0,0), all you have to do is is replace all x's with x - Earth[x], y's with y - Earth[y], and z's with z - Earth[z] and then you suddenly have an equally descriptive model of a geocentric universe.
As far as I know, the reason we put the Sun in the center is because you can do a pretty good job of describing the planets' orbits with ellipses rather than weird spiral things. To be fair though, I think a geocentric theory assumes the planets move in circles centered at the Earth, instead of awkward sprirals, which is incorrect.
One reason I'm a fan of paper ballots is that you don't need a degree in Computer Science to understand how they work. Just about any second grader could devise a paper ballot system, which means almost everyone not denied the right to vote can easily reason about whether the system works the way it's supposed to. They don't have to trust experts to be able to trust the voting system.
Just because we're the Slashdot community doesn't mean we should be in favor at gratuitously throwing more technology at everything. Some things are better done the old-fashioned way.
it assumes that, because no evidence has been found, that no evidence could ever be found. In other words, it presumes that it is impossible for such evidence to exist. This is not scientific!
I've never observed an occasion where I pushed a ball off of a table and it fell to the ceiling. Would it be unscientific to form a theory of the behavior of balls pushed off of tables that predicted they always fall to the floor?
Any API or documentation that MS publishes has been internally determined to have low or no risk to them. If they published everything, there would be a completely FOSS Windows clone started within months, and the outcome would be similar to how Linux overcame the commercial Unix flavors.
This action, like so many before, is a meaningless charade to make them appear cooperative. This is hardly meaningless. Take a look at some of the Windows Protocol Documentation that has already been released. For the networking protocols, it documents every byte that goes over the wire, complete with annotated examples. There is enough detail that any competent developer should be able to write a complete interoperable server or client using any of these protocols.
Slashdot Mirror
So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
Well stated. I've often thought that when feminists encourage women to fight for equality by becoming exactly like men, there is an implicit admission in there that they themselves believe women are less valuable than men. Why else would they be so concerned with pretending to be men, rather than happily being women?
That's not to say there haven't been legitimate injustices done towards women (and men for that matter), but I think it'd be a lot more effective to recognize that men and women are different in a lot of ways, and that both men and women in general have certain strengths and weaknesses.
Why is there not so strong a push to get more male nurses
My mom works as a nursing instructor at a community college. She says there is actually a lot of demand for more male nurses. One of the reasons is that nursing requires a fair amount of physical strength, such as when moving unconscious or even dead bodies around. Men, on average, have more physical strength than women, and thus they can do these particular tasks more effectively than women can.
I'm a Christian. I'm by no means perfect. I make mistakes way more frequently than I should, and really, each mistake I make is an instance of me not practicing what I preach. Since no one's perfect, I suppose you won't find a Christian or a sect of Christianity that perfectly practice what they preach. At least for me though, and many others I'm sure, I'm trying to follow what I preach (and more importantly, what the Bible teaches), and each day make fewer mistakes than I did the day before.
Regarding the Old Testament though, while many would disagree with me (especially non-Christians), the Old Testament does not apply today. The Old Testament itself says that it will be superseded by a new law in the future, and the New Testament explicitly says that the old law no longer applies. In fact, the Old Testament only ever applied to the nation of Israel. If you happened to be from a different area, you were not bound by the Old Testament law.
Yes, the Old Testament being obsolete even includes things such as the Ten Commandments. This doesn't mean things like murder are now any more allowed than they were then, as all of the Ten Commandments except for keeping the Sabbath are repeated in the New Testament, albeit not in such a concise list as the original Ten Commandments.
That being said, the Old Testament is still useful for Christians to study. It gives insight into the character and nature of God, and helps to put Christianity in its proper context. In large part, the point of the Old Testament was to bring the New Testament into the world.
Stay relevant to what or whom?
Staying relevant as in staying an industry leader in computer software and remaining competitive in the industry.
"It also happens that probably the very best college candidates are the ones that have contributed to open source projects."
What do you base this on?
I already mentioned that college students who contribute to open source projects are going above and beyond their school's curriculum, which gives them experience that a student who doesn't contribute to open source project won't get. Chances are these projects will require them to work in a geographically diverse team on an ongoing project. These skills are also valuable to large software companies. Granted, doing summer internships could give you a lot of the same kinds of experience as well, and you might contribute to crappy open source projects and get no useful experience, so as with most things, it's not an absolute advantage.
I'd also say that most people in computer science programs fall somewhere on the line between "I'm just doing this because then I can get a good-paying job/my parents made me do it/I didn't have anything better to do" and "I'm doing this because I really love computer science and am driven to excel at it." Guess which end open source contributors are probably closer to. This mindset is also something that employers will value.
I feel like Microsoft has taken some important steps towards playing nice with Open Source, and encouraging interoperability. Some examples include projects like IronPython, the WIX Installer tools, the fact that Silverlight actually supports at least one non-Windows platform, and the extremely detailed communications protocol documents recently released on MSDN. Sure, part of this has been for legal compliance reasons, and it turns out customers value things like interoperability.
I think there's a subtler reason that will become more apparent in the coming years. Microsoft needs to hire new employees if it wants to stay relevant, and it competes with the likes of Google and others for these new hires. It also happens that probably the very best college candidates are the ones that have contributed to open source projects. These are the students that went beyond what their curriculum required of them, and showed the drive to understand and contribute to a real-world project on their spare time. This kind of experience is valuable in a new hire, but many of them would be turned off by an anti open source attitude and look for more open source-friendly employers. In other words, to attract the best young minds (which is crucial to Microsoft's long term success), Microsoft is going to have to become much more friendly to open source projects.
There is a Windows Sidebar gadget you can get that tells you the current threat level. I used to use it, but I got tired of it always telling me the threat level was "Elevated."
At any reasonably sized school, there are enough students with high intelligence genes that you won't get an award unless you also put in the work to excel beyond the other smart students.
Huh, the story I heard a long time ago was that Fahrenheit was a doctor and tried to come up with a scale that would be useful for medical purposes. Thus, he stuck 0 as the temperature of a vat of salty ice water, which was the coldest he could manage to make liquid water. The 100 degree mark was supposed to be the average human body temperature. For a doctor concerned with whether a person has a fever or not, this seems to make more sense than sticking 100 degrees at the boiling point of water.
The rest of the story was that around World War I, the army took an average of all their recruits and redefined normal body temperature to be 98.6 degrees rather than adjusting the scale so the average would still be 100.
It seems reasonable to me, but according to the Wikipedia article, it's almost entirely incorrect. Of course, there's a "This article needs more verification" warning at the top, so it might still be correct.
If the 96 is really the correct average body temperature as Fahrenheit intended, it's worth nothing that it's 8 * 12, which has lots of small factors and could make doing mental arithmetic easier, which would have been useful in the 1700s.
Granted, I'm not married yet, but once I am I imagine I will find my marriage much more important than Microsoft's shareholders.
So fix it the way the Constitution says to fix it. If the Second Amendment is really so badly obsolete, let's amend the Constitution and get rid of that pesky amendment. Our Constitution only works as long as we agree to follow it. I don't like the idea of our legislative, executive and judicial branches deciding certain parts of the Constitution are outdated and therefore we can just ignore them. We should formally declare them to be obsolete.
Given most of the comments I've seen here, I'd be surprised if many of the readers actually even knew what a kernel was, much less what's wrong with Vista's.
The better question is how many computers will have touch screens in 2-4 years. I suspect there will be many more than now. Remember, Windows 7 is at least another year off.
Off topic, but I felt like sharing anyway. The word church originally comes from a Greek word, ekklesia. Ekklesia basically just meant a group of people. In the Bible, it usually gets translated church, but in at least one occasion the same word refers to an angry mob. In today's language, church is normally associated with Christianity, and especially if it's capitalized, but at least in my mind it doesn't necessarily have to even be religious.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, I don't know how to put it into practice. I personally think not only should people be able to read to vote in the US, they should demonstrate a knowledge of the way the US government is supposed to work. This includes things like the fact that the president has no constitutional authority for half (perhaps even all) the things they promise to do if elected.
The problem is I can't think of a good way to enforce it. In the past there have been literacy tests for voting, and my understanding is that they were primarily used to keep blacks and other minority groups from voting. Do we make a voter licensing test? Who gets to decide what's on the test? Hopefully it would just include relatively factual things, such as the branches of government, what duties the Constitution assigns to each branch, and how the people in each branch are chosen. However, I could just as easily see people using it to filter out someone who should be voting. If we used what I thought people should understand before voting as the standard, we would probably end up disenfranchising a lot of the left, because I believe the Constitution was designed on the principles of limited government and didn't intend for the federal government to dabble in things like universal healthcare. Someone else might disenfranchise me on account of the idea that it's immoral to let someone die in the street because they can't afford to buy food. (For the record, I don't like the idea either, I just think there are other ways of dealing with it than government)
The sum of all this is, I'd rather tolerate a few uninformed voters than risk excluding people's voices who may not fit the profile of what some authority thinks is a person suitable to vote. Hopefully the people who care enough to take the time to fill out a ballot also pay attention in civics class and learn something about how the system works.
The section you quoted about the drivers driving on to the shoulder or in the wrong lane 9 times in a minute in the undistracted case should have raised some flags on its own. Most people driving rarely go in the wrong lane or on the shoulder, certainly not once every 6 seconds. If this were the case, there would probably be far more accidents than there are now. It sounds like they were basically playing a video game. I know if I drove in real life the way I drive in video games, I would have been dead years ago.
One of the things that scientists have discovered with these fancy computer models and improved data gathering is chaos. This was discovered by studying, of all things, weather. If just simply rounding your numbers differently can cause your model to predict the complete opposite of what it did previously, I wonder why we are so confident in today's computer models and better data gathering.
The data listed in your post reminded me of when I did a project on Brownian Motion in my Fractals class a few years ago. A good example is this image.
One of the interesting things of a curve like that one is that you can view it on any scale, and it will never smooth out. If you look at a window of size 1/128, you might see a clear downward trend, but if you look at a larger window over the same point of size 1/64, you might realize that was just a small blip on an overall upward trend, and on and on. In the graph I linked, at the end you are at the same place you started, but it would be hard to predict that by looking at a small or even a fairly large subset of the data.
Even if we were on a general warming trend with small dips on the way since 1995, that trend could itself be a small upward blip when viewed on the scale of 100 or 1000 years. That said, I've only looked at the global temperature record enough to say "hmmm... that certainly looks like it could be a subset of a Brownian Motion curve." I'm sure you've studied the issue much more than I and are much better qualified to argue whether global warming is a problem.
And there you've touched on what I think is the biggest problem when you talk about archiving data for 1,400 years. Most of the ones I've seen proposed assume that you'll have a civilization that's able to keep the machines powered up through that entire time. Given what we know of the last 1,400 years, that's a pretty big assumption.
I know this wasn't really the point of your post, but you can put the center of the universe (i.e. your center of reference) pretty much wherever you want. If you have a nice, neat set of equations that describes the position of everything and you put the sun at (0,0,0), all you have to do is is replace all x's with x - Earth[x], y's with y - Earth[y], and z's with z - Earth[z] and then you suddenly have an equally descriptive model of a geocentric universe.
As far as I know, the reason we put the Sun in the center is because you can do a pretty good job of describing the planets' orbits with ellipses rather than weird spiral things. To be fair though, I think a geocentric theory assumes the planets move in circles centered at the Earth, instead of awkward sprirals, which is incorrect.
One reason I'm a fan of paper ballots is that you don't need a degree in Computer Science to understand how they work. Just about any second grader could devise a paper ballot system, which means almost everyone not denied the right to vote can easily reason about whether the system works the way it's supposed to. They don't have to trust experts to be able to trust the voting system.
Just because we're the Slashdot community doesn't mean we should be in favor at gratuitously throwing more technology at everything. Some things are better done the old-fashioned way.
Perhaps even more depressing is that this isn't even all that surprising. Democracies don't tend to stay democracies for much more than 200 years.
Why does your CPU need vector operations if you have a vector of CPUs?
They couldn't decide on 1000 or 1024, so they split the difference?
I've never observed an occasion where I pushed a ball off of a table and it fell to the ceiling. Would it be unscientific to form a theory of the behavior of balls pushed off of tables that predicted they always fall to the floor?