I'd agree with you if the developing countries actually bootstrapped themselves to their current position.
However, the west has been sending money, sending food, sending clothes, doing training, and performing other aid for decades to help propel 3rd world countries to the modern age. The taxes my family paid for those decades went to that development in those countries. Our money also paid for the development of large companies in our country. Now, all the money we've created and paid is being used to sell our jobs to the lowest bidder in the developing countries. What kind of thanks is that? So what should we do? Quietly disappear?
Given my choice, I'd rather see the money stay right where it was created. Let the 3rd world make their own. That's what we did. They obviously don't care about the help we've given them for decades to bring them where they are today. They just want to take everything that we've created and call it their own.
The immigrant IT workers might be better qualified due to a stronger education and technical background.
Hardly. The most foreign IT workers I've met have been young, fairly new out of college, and in entry level positions. They do not have any greater qualifications than local workers. Arguably, they have less qualifications due to their thick accent and lack of knowledge regarding the local culture and common business practises.
Workers could have similar skill levels, but the number of foreign applicants might far outnumber citizen applications.
Did you read the article? Australia has a high unemployment rate now in IT, similar to the situation in the US. Companies are literally getting hundreds of applications, all from qualified people.
Foreign nationals of particular national, ethnic, or racial background might be perceived (and I know this is against the law in at least the U.S. but it still can happen in the form of unofficial bias) as more skilled.
I don't know about Australia, but that is hardly the perception in the US. Generally, people there consider Indian, Chinese, or Russian programmers to produce crappy, poorly documented code. This code inevitably gets re-written by more knowledgeable American software engineers.
And in the US, it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on nationality, but not race. People from certain countries where race is defined by nationality don't understand that and think they are the same thing. They're not.
Sure, wage might be an issue. Not in IT from what I can see, though. Often it is more expensive to hire the non-citizen.
What planet are you on? Sure, there may be more up-front work and cost to get the immigrant here in the first place. However, once they're here employers can pay them a low wage, give them sub-standard raises, and keep them locked at their company.
Companies always want to hire the cheapest workers around. That's why you don't see PhD's flipping burgers at McDonald's. And that's why you do see immigrants working IT.
If you want to get that ridiculous, then we can add in all of the Windows Service packs. Each of those use a different kernel. So how many OSs is that Windows lump counting now?
If each distro has the same kernel, then I don't see how breaking out the distros translates to more work fixing the kernel. If each distro has the same applications, then I don't see how breaking out the distros translates to more work fixing the applications.
Umm, you can still trace bugs from Windows 2003 to Windows 95;) Its not like they dont re-use the same old code.
Yes, there is code similarity, as I pointed out. That is from using some unchanged code from previous versions. However, most of the code has been re-written since that time. It may surprise you, but Microsoft has actually been doing work on Windows since 1995 when Windows 95 came out.
However, to call Windows 2003 virtually the same as Windows 95 would be grossly incorrect. The most fundamental difference between the two is that one runs on DOS and the other does not. But, there are other vast differences between the two as well.
Now we have a comparison of a single operating system (Windows) + apps running on it with at least 12 distinct operating systems + 10x the number of apps that was counted for windows. The result is rather surprising: there are JUST 4x more bugs in 12 operating systems + 10x more apps than in windows + windows apps alone! This result is much more unfavorable for Microsoft than to any Unix/Linux OS!
To be fair, Windows is not the monolithic program you suggest. Windows NT is different from Windows 98. Windows 98 is different from Windows ME. ME is different from 2000. 2000 is different from XP. XP is different from 2003. Each has a similar, but different, code base with their own bugs.
To Microsoft's advantage, Window's code similarity means that a bug found in Windows 2003 can be traced and squashed in Windows 2000 and XP. This results in the bug being removed in all flavors of Windows simultaneously. However, that would be impossible with the various *nixes.
Either way, I agree with Mark Twain. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Yes, there are differences between societies. However, matriarchal societies are extremely rare. The vast majority are patriarchal societies. And in that majority, we see basically the exact sames roles mimicked across the vast majority of societies.
Sounds like your program was an aberration. That is not surprising given the policies of certain universities in actively recruiting women and minorities in certain programs, despite the illegality of outright quotas. Further, the fact that your school was in California, known for its support of affirmative action programs, only solidifies my opinion.
I went to UW a few years ago for my CS degree. Half of my classmates were foreigners. And half of the foreigners were women. Just a few months ago, I attended a CS class in a different University. All of the students were white, presumably American. And there were only two women in the class of about 30. What accounted for the difference? UW actively recruits women and minorities, especially in the programs that are traditionally overrepresented by white males.
If you want true statistics for the number of women who take math courses, then you have to look at national numbers. Local statistics can and are skewed by local policies and recruitment strategies that attempt to rectify the national statistics.
It's a problem becauses people self selecting away from a profession for reasons other than their lack of fitness for that profession will leave us with, overall, worse computer scientists (and nurses) than we could otherwise have.
No, the problem is when you start pushing the people who are the least likely to go into a certain profession and not the people who are most likely. We have a "leave no one behind" mentality in modern education, which is all fine and good when it comes to basic skills. But, you should never ignore the students who are the most likely to enter the major, which is what appears to be happening.
We've already seen it in the push to get women to enter college, which used to be predominantly male. Now, female students at universities outnumber male students 2-1, except in computer science. So now, the perceived problem isn't that there are too few male students entering college in general, but too few females entering computer science. This "problem" is so out of whack as to be completely ridiculous. And so by focusing on getting women into computer science, something they don't want to do, we have overall computer science enrollments going down because we've ignored the men.
Had we not left behind the boys in our push for children to go to college overall, then computer science enrollments would not have gone so far down in the first place.
If the problem is getting good mathematicians to go into computer science and women are choosing not to go into math nor computer science, then our job is only to take away any disadvantages they may have. We should not be changing anything for their advantage.
Pushing one sex for an advantage over the other is sexist. And it's still sexist if the one you're pushing the advantage for is a girl.
Women are the caregivers in the societies of the world. Men are the protectors. Given the fact that there are no neutral societies for your hypothesis to be tested, that in itself points to something other than socialization going on in children.
Given that we see these roles mimicked the exact same way in completely different societies, that would suggest something other than merely socialization.
As of 2004, half of all businesses in the US were owned by women. Good figure, right? However, only 8 Fortune 500 companies are run by women...and those that do receive substantially less pay than their male counterparts... women are largely barred from the top levels of established companies, left instead to work as "lesser" folk.
The problems with promotion are different from the problems of attracting women to the field in the first place, which you appear to confuse by comparing different numbers. You also seem to have ignored my other arguments for why women do not generally progress to high levels in the work force.
For promotion, the vast amount of female workers at some point go off and have children. They either drop out of the workforce entirely or they scale back the amount of effort they put into work compared with men or childless women. If you do a fraction of the work, then you get a fraction of the pay, benefits, and promotions. That is not sexist.
Further, I have heard arguments that powerful women say, "Men are expected to be ruthless and ambitious, while women who act in the same manner are considered bitchy." What that leaves out is that those men are also considered assholes. Yes, getting to the top means you have to step on some people. Women seem to want to be both successful and liked. Their male rivals however, just want to be successful. Women may point to the extra work they have to do to be both successful and liked as a form of sexism. But, it's not considering that it's self-imposed.
Me: Ya know, all my math courses were taught by women. In every single course as I moved up to calculus, fewer and fewer women stayed to the next level. There was no discrimination. The girls had role models that the boys didn't. The girls got extra encouragement that the boys didn't get. The girls simply were not interested. CS is very related to mathematics. In many ways, CS is applied mathematics like engineering is applied physics. If you want to address why girls are not interested in CS, then you have to address why they don't stay in math in the first place.
Your writing on law really doesn't pertain to this discussion. First off, law is a significantly different field from CS, with a whole different set of social views, ideas, ideals, expectations, and culture. The geek culture alone is enough to turn away most 18 year old female students.
You: Now then, until the 50% study was released, people were always saying that women had no interest in running a big business, that they "just didn't think that way" or that it was a difference in how they are constructed. But now, there is no real excuse
Again, you are confusing promotion with attraction.
Yes, I said girls are not interested in math. You want to argue with me? Then, look at the statistics. It may be a generality, but it's true. The only qualification that I would add would be to say American girls are not interested in math. Or, western girls are not interested, considering that their eastern counterparts do show interest in math.
If you want to call it sexism, then you have some work to do. My teachers were female, all the way through calculus. And, in fact, most teachers are female. Girls are given tons of extra encouragement to succeed academically that boys do not receive. This includes encouragement in mathematics. And again, I would point to the success of the asain female in western classes as evidence that sexism does not exist in the American school system, or is not as prevalent as people like yourself would suggest.
(And, I might point out, that extra encouragement given the girls that is not given to boys could be seen as reverse sexism.)
If anything, it is our culture that turns girls away from mathematics and computer science. I brought up the disdain for geek culture as one source as to why girls may not like mathematics and computer science. I never said women weren't "constructed" to perform mathematics, as you seem to insinuate.
So, we are arguing whether your claimed 9-1 difference between men and women in law is due to:
Women being unfairly held to a higher standard in law.
-Or-
Women having children, therefore either dropping out of the workforce or cutting back work hours.
Frankly, I see the second scenario far more often than the first. Women may feel singled out due to their sex, that doesn't necessarily mean they are. You are talking about the top positions in these firms. Any position of that magnitude is going to be extremely difficult to attain. If any candidate becomes too ruthless or ambitious, then they will be looked upon negatively. Certainly, women may be considered bitches. But, men will be considered assholes. If you want to be liked and you want to be successful, then it will be much more work. It sounds like the men just want to be successful and don't care about being liked.
Even so, this concerns promotion more than getting women into computer science (not law!) in the first place, which was the whole point of the article.
Ya know, all my math courses were taught by women. In every single course as I moved up to calculus, fewer and fewer women stayed to the next level. There was no discrimination. The girls had role models that the boys didn't. The girls got extra encouragement that the boys didn't get. The girls simply were not interested. CS is very related to mathematics. In many ways, CS is applied mathematics like engineering is applied physics. If you want to address why girls are not interested in CS, then you have to address why they don't stay in math in the first place.
Your writing on law really doesn't pertain to this discussion. First off, law is a significantly different field from CS, with a whole different set of social views, ideas, ideals, expectations, and culture. The geek culture alone is enough to turn away most 18 year old female students.
Further, the problem with promotion that you address in your writing is different to problem of attracting women to the field in the first place. And that can be addressed by more than just calling it a boys network. If you compare the careers of men and women in their 20s, you find that they are equal. What happens in their 30s? Generally, the men and women get married and then the women get pregnant. Then generally, the men focus on their careers while the women focus on the family. The woman may leave the workforce altogether. Or, she may stay. If she stays, it's rare that she'll continue to put in 60+ hours a week like her male counterparts. Either way, women do not continue putting in equal work, and so they do not get equal pay nor promotions. It is the rare woman, who does not follow the general "rules", who earns her position amongst the partners.
As for the socialization argument, that is just complete nonsense. Give a two year old a set of matchbox cars. The two year old boy is going to be running around everywhere with that car, sputtering car noises, and crashing that car into every other matchbox he sees. The two year old girl will take the big, medium, and small cars and rename them "daddy car", "mommy car", and "baby car". At two years old, this is not socialization.
Wikipedia is hardly a good source of information givin the structure of the website. There, good writers are drowned out by persistent buffoons who don't always know what they're talking about or with an axe to grind. You end up with a consensus on an idea, but it is inevitably incorrect or biased in some way.
As I said, "Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system." You can thank the Arabs for calculus. I'll continue thanking Isaac Newton who did the bulk of the work.
So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.
Fine with me... I haven't argued otherwise. I'm not even sure why you're bringing this up.
It was common knowledge that willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. Putting that on a CD still means it's common knowledge, only now it's documented. That might inspire someone to create something similar to aspirin, but it doesn't give anyone the knowledge to actually brew up a batch of the drug that you keep in your medicine cabinet.
Oh and while you're at it, you might as well give the Indians the decimal system back, since it's based on...you guessed it...ancient Arabic/Indian Numerals [wikipedia.org].
First off, any link to Wikipedia is hardly trustworthy given the nature of the website. But, that is beside the point: Your argument is crap.
It's like saying we should thank the Arabs for Calculus because Isaac Newton used Arab numerals for his work. Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system. But, we should give the thanks for the invention of calculus to the person who did the bulk of the work for the system we currently use: Isaac Newton.
That is the exact same argument I have with the main thrust of this story.
Knowing to use willow bark to reduce fever and inflammation doesn't give you the knowledge to make aspirin.
Further, who would you compensate for the original knowledge regarding willow bark? That was common knowledge in Europe, so maybe all the European countries? Oh wait, here comes China and they claim they knew about it first. No, you can't create a workable system like that.
The knowledge to turn the plant into a medicine that comes in a nice, white pill in a bottle with a specific dosage of the active ingredient is itself worthy of a patent. All this folk knowledge, whether prior art or not, doesn't change that fact.
First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine. Ancient people in Europe knew that chewing willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. In fact, the salicylic acid from willow bark was orginally used to synthesize aspirin. But, there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet. This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.
Even if I were convinced by that line of argument, just because India said they found some discovery first doesn't mean they actually did. Frankly, I find it more than just a little unbelievable that, as stated in the article, 80% of the US patents issued over medical plants up until 2000 were plants of Indian origin. India is not the only country around with ancient folk medicine.
What we do know is that India copies our pharmaceuticals just like they copy everything else. They pay no royalties to the companies that did the original research. They then sell these generic pharmaceuticals to other third world countries at prices far under the cost of the research, which our companies still need to recoup through sales.
In other words, India wants to justify the theft of our intellectual property by saying, "nyah, nyah, we found the plant first", whether they actually did or not. The logic is flawed anyway considering that finding the plant may or may not have ultimately been used in the final drug. We certainly don't go peeling the bark off of trees to make aspirin any more.
Reading books in addition to working on your own / OSS projects. In addition, you illiterate wonder!
Yes, I know what you wrote.
I did not address working on personal or OSS projects because that is not a good method of learning. In fact, that is where people can pick up many bad habits. People can only contribute at their own level of knowledge, which as a beginner is lacking. You may learn quite a bit if you treat it as a full time job, putting in over 40 hours per week and actually stretch your knowledge. However, unless you work on a wide variety of projects, you will not hit everything covered in a CS course.
Insulting me only implies that I struck a nerve. You'd rather insult me and denigrate my intelligence than address what I wrote, which on some level you must believe is true.
No college will ever compete with learning and practicing yourself, be it programming, mathmatics, or computer engineering.
You make the false assumption that college students do not do that themselves.
Only idiots need others to teach them. Intelligent people are perfectly capable of learning on their own.
Riiiight. My mom likes to say that when I started first grade I told her, "But... I went to school last year" as if Kindergarten taught me everything, I was completely done, and had nothing left to learn. That sounds exactly like your argument, which is completely laughable.
But advertisers aren't brainwashing people into buying stuff, for crying out loud.
Have you seen commercials? They're everywhere on TV, radio, billboards, products, the web, and email. By the time a person is old enough to become a teenager, they've literally been inundated with millions of these product messages. The advertisers are, in effect, brainwashing society. The Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, Dr Joseph Goebbels, said, "Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth." That lie only becomes more ingrained repeated a million times over decades.
Anyone who is so thoroughly convinced to buy whatever is being advertised, to the point that they end up spending all of their money while setting none aside for later, is someone who, quite frankly, is either an idiot, or who has absolutely no willpower, neither of which is the fault of the media.
Given the current, almost nonexistant savings rate of the US, we must be surrounded by idiots. That may certainly be possible and I've certainly thought that on occasion.
Or, it could be that all the trillions of dollars that companies poured into marketing their products over the last 100 years actually worked... No, it couldn't possibly be that. No, everyone in America must be an idiot or weak-willed. Companies are not out to get our every dollar... How could I possibly think that?!
Geez... quit drinking the kool-aid, open your eyes, and see reality for what it actually is.
Don't blame the media for consumerism?! Are you completely dumb, or just partially? Marketing is an entire subject dedicated to getting the average person hyped up to buy just about anything. Companies employ armies of salespeople and marketing gurus in order to convince you that you can't possibly live without brand x. Kids grow up in this overenergized, spend-crazy culture which parents can not block out. The media is to blame for this.
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I'd agree with you if the developing countries actually bootstrapped themselves to their current position.
However, the west has been sending money, sending food, sending clothes, doing training, and performing other aid for decades to help propel 3rd world countries to the modern age. The taxes my family paid for those decades went to that development in those countries. Our money also paid for the development of large companies in our country. Now, all the money we've created and paid is being used to sell our jobs to the lowest bidder in the developing countries. What kind of thanks is that? So what should we do? Quietly disappear?
Given my choice, I'd rather see the money stay right where it was created. Let the 3rd world make their own. That's what we did. They obviously don't care about the help we've given them for decades to bring them where they are today. They just want to take everything that we've created and call it their own.
The immigrant IT workers might be better qualified due to a stronger education and technical background.
Hardly. The most foreign IT workers I've met have been young, fairly new out of college, and in entry level positions. They do not have any greater qualifications than local workers. Arguably, they have less qualifications due to their thick accent and lack of knowledge regarding the local culture and common business practises.
Workers could have similar skill levels, but the number of foreign applicants might far outnumber citizen applications.
Did you read the article? Australia has a high unemployment rate now in IT, similar to the situation in the US. Companies are literally getting hundreds of applications, all from qualified people.
Foreign nationals of particular national, ethnic, or racial background might be perceived (and I know this is against the law in at least the U.S. but it still can happen in the form of unofficial bias) as more skilled.
I don't know about Australia, but that is hardly the perception in the US. Generally, people there consider Indian, Chinese, or Russian programmers to produce crappy, poorly documented code. This code inevitably gets re-written by more knowledgeable American software engineers.
And in the US, it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on nationality, but not race. People from certain countries where race is defined by nationality don't understand that and think they are the same thing. They're not.
Sure, wage might be an issue. Not in IT from what I can see, though. Often it is more expensive to hire the non-citizen.
What planet are you on? Sure, there may be more up-front work and cost to get the immigrant here in the first place. However, once they're here employers can pay them a low wage, give them sub-standard raises, and keep them locked at their company.
Companies always want to hire the cheapest workers around. That's why you don't see PhD's flipping burgers at McDonald's. And that's why you do see immigrants working IT.
If you want to get that ridiculous, then we can add in all of the Windows Service packs. Each of those use a different kernel. So how many OSs is that Windows lump counting now?
If each distro has the same kernel, then I don't see how breaking out the distros translates to more work fixing the kernel. If each distro has the same applications, then I don't see how breaking out the distros translates to more work fixing the applications.
Umm, you can still trace bugs from Windows 2003 to Windows 95 ;) Its not like they dont re-use the same old code.
Yes, there is code similarity, as I pointed out. That is from using some unchanged code from previous versions. However, most of the code has been re-written since that time. It may surprise you, but Microsoft has actually been doing work on Windows since 1995 when Windows 95 came out.
However, to call Windows 2003 virtually the same as Windows 95 would be grossly incorrect. The most fundamental difference between the two is that one runs on DOS and the other does not. But, there are other vast differences between the two as well.
windows 95/98/xp/2k are not distinct platforms.
Windows 95/98 ran on DOS while Windows 2000/XP does not. Using your own definition of distinct, you are incorrect.
Now we have a comparison of a single operating system (Windows) + apps running on it with at least 12 distinct operating systems + 10x the number of apps that was counted for windows. The result is rather surprising: there are JUST 4x more bugs in 12 operating systems + 10x more apps than in windows + windows apps alone! This result is much more unfavorable for Microsoft than to any Unix/Linux OS!
To be fair, Windows is not the monolithic program you suggest. Windows NT is different from Windows 98. Windows 98 is different from Windows ME. ME is different from 2000. 2000 is different from XP. XP is different from 2003. Each has a similar, but different, code base with their own bugs.
To Microsoft's advantage, Window's code similarity means that a bug found in Windows 2003 can be traced and squashed in Windows 2000 and XP. This results in the bug being removed in all flavors of Windows simultaneously. However, that would be impossible with the various *nixes.
Either way, I agree with Mark Twain. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Yes, there are differences between societies. However, matriarchal societies are extremely rare. The vast majority are patriarchal societies. And in that majority, we see basically the exact sames roles mimicked across the vast majority of societies.
Sounds like your program was an aberration. That is not surprising given the policies of certain universities in actively recruiting women and minorities in certain programs, despite the illegality of outright quotas. Further, the fact that your school was in California, known for its support of affirmative action programs, only solidifies my opinion.
I went to UW a few years ago for my CS degree. Half of my classmates were foreigners. And half of the foreigners were women. Just a few months ago, I attended a CS class in a different University. All of the students were white, presumably American. And there were only two women in the class of about 30. What accounted for the difference? UW actively recruits women and minorities, especially in the programs that are traditionally overrepresented by white males.
If you want true statistics for the number of women who take math courses, then you have to look at national numbers. Local statistics can and are skewed by local policies and recruitment strategies that attempt to rectify the national statistics.
Something to think about, indeed.
It's a problem becauses people self selecting away from a profession for reasons other than their lack of fitness for that profession will leave us with, overall, worse computer scientists (and nurses) than we could otherwise have.
No, the problem is when you start pushing the people who are the least likely to go into a certain profession and not the people who are most likely. We have a "leave no one behind" mentality in modern education, which is all fine and good when it comes to basic skills. But, you should never ignore the students who are the most likely to enter the major, which is what appears to be happening.
We've already seen it in the push to get women to enter college, which used to be predominantly male. Now, female students at universities outnumber male students 2-1, except in computer science. So now, the perceived problem isn't that there are too few male students entering college in general, but too few females entering computer science. This "problem" is so out of whack as to be completely ridiculous. And so by focusing on getting women into computer science, something they don't want to do, we have overall computer science enrollments going down because we've ignored the men.
Had we not left behind the boys in our push for children to go to college overall, then computer science enrollments would not have gone so far down in the first place.
If the problem is getting good mathematicians to go into computer science and women are choosing not to go into math nor computer science, then our job is only to take away any disadvantages they may have. We should not be changing anything for their advantage.
Pushing one sex for an advantage over the other is sexist. And it's still sexist if the one you're pushing the advantage for is a girl.
Women are the caregivers in the societies of the world. Men are the protectors. Given the fact that there are no neutral societies for your hypothesis to be tested, that in itself points to something other than socialization going on in children.
Given that we see these roles mimicked the exact same way in completely different societies, that would suggest something other than merely socialization.
As of 2004, half of all businesses in the US were owned by women. Good figure, right? However, only 8 Fortune 500 companies are run by women...and those that do receive substantially less pay than their male counterparts... women are largely barred from the top levels of established companies, left instead to work as "lesser" folk.
The problems with promotion are different from the problems of attracting women to the field in the first place, which you appear to confuse by comparing different numbers. You also seem to have ignored my other arguments for why women do not generally progress to high levels in the work force.
For promotion, the vast amount of female workers at some point go off and have children. They either drop out of the workforce entirely or they scale back the amount of effort they put into work compared with men or childless women. If you do a fraction of the work, then you get a fraction of the pay, benefits, and promotions. That is not sexist.
Further, I have heard arguments that powerful women say, "Men are expected to be ruthless and ambitious, while women who act in the same manner are considered bitchy." What that leaves out is that those men are also considered assholes. Yes, getting to the top means you have to step on some people. Women seem to want to be both successful and liked. Their male rivals however, just want to be successful. Women may point to the extra work they have to do to be both successful and liked as a form of sexism. But, it's not considering that it's self-imposed.
Me: Ya know, all my math courses were taught by women. In every single course as I moved up to calculus, fewer and fewer women stayed to the next level. There was no discrimination. The girls had role models that the boys didn't. The girls got extra encouragement that the boys didn't get. The girls simply were not interested. CS is very related to mathematics. In many ways, CS is applied mathematics like engineering is applied physics. If you want to address why girls are not interested in CS, then you have to address why they don't stay in math in the first place. Your writing on law really doesn't pertain to this discussion. First off, law is a significantly different field from CS, with a whole different set of social views, ideas, ideals, expectations, and culture. The geek culture alone is enough to turn away most 18 year old female students.
You: Now then, until the 50% study was released, people were always saying that women had no interest in running a big business, that they "just didn't think that way" or that it was a difference in how they are constructed. But now, there is no real excuse
Again, you are confusing promotion with attraction.
Yes, I said girls are not interested in math. You want to argue with me? Then, look at the statistics. It may be a generality, but it's true. The only qualification that I would add would be to say American girls are not interested in math. Or, western girls are not interested, considering that their eastern counterparts do show interest in math.
If you want to call it sexism, then you have some work to do. My teachers were female, all the way through calculus. And, in fact, most teachers are female. Girls are given tons of extra encouragement to succeed academically that boys do not receive. This includes encouragement in mathematics. And again, I would point to the success of the asain female in western classes as evidence that sexism does not exist in the American school system, or is not as prevalent as people like yourself would suggest.
(And, I might point out, that extra encouragement given the girls that is not given to boys could be seen as reverse sexism.)
If anything, it is our culture that turns girls away from mathematics and computer science. I brought up the disdain for geek culture as one source as to why girls may not like mathematics and computer science. I never said women weren't "constructed" to perform mathematics, as you seem to insinuate.
So, we are arguing whether your claimed 9-1 difference between men and women in law is due to:
Women being unfairly held to a higher standard in law.
-Or-
Women having children, therefore either dropping out of the workforce or cutting back work hours.
Frankly, I see the second scenario far more often than the first. Women may feel singled out due to their sex, that doesn't necessarily mean they are. You are talking about the top positions in these firms. Any position of that magnitude is going to be extremely difficult to attain. If any candidate becomes too ruthless or ambitious, then they will be looked upon negatively. Certainly, women may be considered bitches. But, men will be considered assholes. If you want to be liked and you want to be successful, then it will be much more work. It sounds like the men just want to be successful and don't care about being liked.
Even so, this concerns promotion more than getting women into computer science (not law!) in the first place, which was the whole point of the article.
Ya know, all my math courses were taught by women. In every single course as I moved up to calculus, fewer and fewer women stayed to the next level. There was no discrimination. The girls had role models that the boys didn't. The girls got extra encouragement that the boys didn't get. The girls simply were not interested. CS is very related to mathematics. In many ways, CS is applied mathematics like engineering is applied physics. If you want to address why girls are not interested in CS, then you have to address why they don't stay in math in the first place.
Your writing on law really doesn't pertain to this discussion. First off, law is a significantly different field from CS, with a whole different set of social views, ideas, ideals, expectations, and culture. The geek culture alone is enough to turn away most 18 year old female students.
Further, the problem with promotion that you address in your writing is different to problem of attracting women to the field in the first place. And that can be addressed by more than just calling it a boys network. If you compare the careers of men and women in their 20s, you find that they are equal. What happens in their 30s? Generally, the men and women get married and then the women get pregnant. Then generally, the men focus on their careers while the women focus on the family. The woman may leave the workforce altogether. Or, she may stay. If she stays, it's rare that she'll continue to put in 60+ hours a week like her male counterparts. Either way, women do not continue putting in equal work, and so they do not get equal pay nor promotions. It is the rare woman, who does not follow the general "rules", who earns her position amongst the partners.
As for the socialization argument, that is just complete nonsense. Give a two year old a set of matchbox cars. The two year old boy is going to be running around everywhere with that car, sputtering car noises, and crashing that car into every other matchbox he sees. The two year old girl will take the big, medium, and small cars and rename them "daddy car", "mommy car", and "baby car". At two years old, this is not socialization.
Wikipedia is hardly a good source of information givin the structure of the website. There, good writers are drowned out by persistent buffoons who don't always know what they're talking about or with an axe to grind. You end up with a consensus on an idea, but it is inevitably incorrect or biased in some way.
As I said, "Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system." You can thank the Arabs for calculus. I'll continue thanking Isaac Newton who did the bulk of the work.
So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.
Fine with me... I haven't argued otherwise. I'm not even sure why you're bringing this up.
Sense please?
Who said I was against public domain knowledge?
It was common knowledge that willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. Putting that on a CD still means it's common knowledge, only now it's documented. That might inspire someone to create something similar to aspirin, but it doesn't give anyone the knowledge to actually brew up a batch of the drug that you keep in your medicine cabinet.
Oh and while you're at it, you might as well give the Indians the decimal system back, since it's based on...you guessed it...ancient Arabic/Indian Numerals [wikipedia.org].
First off, any link to Wikipedia is hardly trustworthy given the nature of the website. But, that is beside the point: Your argument is crap.
It's like saying we should thank the Arabs for Calculus because Isaac Newton used Arab numerals for his work. Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system. But, we should give the thanks for the invention of calculus to the person who did the bulk of the work for the system we currently use: Isaac Newton.
That is the exact same argument I have with the main thrust of this story.
Knowing to use willow bark to reduce fever and inflammation doesn't give you the knowledge to make aspirin.
Further, who would you compensate for the original knowledge regarding willow bark? That was common knowledge in Europe, so maybe all the European countries? Oh wait, here comes China and they claim they knew about it first. No, you can't create a workable system like that.
The knowledge to turn the plant into a medicine that comes in a nice, white pill in a bottle with a specific dosage of the active ingredient is itself worthy of a patent. All this folk knowledge, whether prior art or not, doesn't change that fact.
First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine. Ancient people in Europe knew that chewing willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. In fact, the salicylic acid from willow bark was orginally used to synthesize aspirin. But, there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet. This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.
Even if I were convinced by that line of argument, just because India said they found some discovery first doesn't mean they actually did. Frankly, I find it more than just a little unbelievable that, as stated in the article, 80% of the US patents issued over medical plants up until 2000 were plants of Indian origin. India is not the only country around with ancient folk medicine.
What we do know is that India copies our pharmaceuticals just like they copy everything else. They pay no royalties to the companies that did the original research. They then sell these generic pharmaceuticals to other third world countries at prices far under the cost of the research, which our companies still need to recoup through sales.
In other words, India wants to justify the theft of our intellectual property by saying, "nyah, nyah, we found the plant first", whether they actually did or not. The logic is flawed anyway considering that finding the plant may or may not have ultimately been used in the final drug. We certainly don't go peeling the bark off of trees to make aspirin any more.
Reading books in addition to working on your own / OSS projects. In addition, you illiterate wonder!
Yes, I know what you wrote.
I did not address working on personal or OSS projects because that is not a good method of learning. In fact, that is where people can pick up many bad habits. People can only contribute at their own level of knowledge, which as a beginner is lacking. You may learn quite a bit if you treat it as a full time job, putting in over 40 hours per week and actually stretch your knowledge. However, unless you work on a wide variety of projects, you will not hit everything covered in a CS course.
Insulting me only implies that I struck a nerve. You'd rather insult me and denigrate my intelligence than address what I wrote, which on some level you must believe is true.
No college will ever compete with learning and practicing yourself, be it programming, mathmatics, or computer engineering.
You make the false assumption that college students do not do that themselves.
Only idiots need others to teach them. Intelligent people are perfectly capable of learning on their own.
Riiiight. My mom likes to say that when I started first grade I told her, "But... I went to school last year" as if Kindergarten taught me everything, I was completely done, and had nothing left to learn. That sounds exactly like your argument, which is completely laughable.
But advertisers aren't brainwashing people into buying stuff, for crying out loud.
Have you seen commercials? They're everywhere on TV, radio, billboards, products, the web, and email. By the time a person is old enough to become a teenager, they've literally been inundated with millions of these product messages. The advertisers are, in effect, brainwashing society. The Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, Dr Joseph Goebbels, said, "Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth." That lie only becomes more ingrained repeated a million times over decades.
Anyone who is so thoroughly convinced to buy whatever is being advertised, to the point that they end up spending all of their money while setting none aside for later, is someone who, quite frankly, is either an idiot, or who has absolutely no willpower, neither of which is the fault of the media.
Given the current, almost nonexistant savings rate of the US, we must be surrounded by idiots. That may certainly be possible and I've certainly thought that on occasion.
Or, it could be that all the trillions of dollars that companies poured into marketing their products over the last 100 years actually worked... No, it couldn't possibly be that. No, everyone in America must be an idiot or weak-willed. Companies are not out to get our every dollar... How could I possibly think that?!
Geez... quit drinking the kool-aid, open your eyes, and see reality for what it actually is.
Don't blame the media for consumerism?! Are you completely dumb, or just partially? Marketing is an entire subject dedicated to getting the average person hyped up to buy just about anything. Companies employ armies of salespeople and marketing gurus in order to convince you that you can't possibly live without brand x. Kids grow up in this overenergized, spend-crazy culture which parents can not block out. The media is to blame for this.
Sorry, I don't have a sister. You'll have to stay whereever the hell you are!