There's quite a bit more to it, which I won't have time to fully get into but would like to make a few short additions after commenting on something.
As a side note, why should anyone else even give a shit about my gender? In a great many ways, allowing a flexible gender identity should be considered the right-wing, libertarian position.
I'd consider it the left trying to have their cake and eat it too. It is trying to enforce the association of a particular behaviour to a particular biological sex. Which may or may not be the case. To those who grew up with "do what you want to do in life" identity politics is not consistent and often seems to be used for power plays.
Next, we turn to the even more complicated issues of sexual identity. In other words, how does any given person identify their own gender?
What do you mean by "gender" historically the gendering of words was a grammatical construct. You could gender a word not just by sex but by location, time of day, etc many languages do this.
Commonly it can be used as a euphemism for biological sex, but that makes little sense in the 'gender identity' aspects as a non-outlier plain case could easily claim to be a different biological sex.
To those that push identity politics it seems to almost be like a religion, making claims about some 'innate sense of being' about a particular sex.
It's all well and good for people to have weird and wonderful senses of spirituality, but it isn't cool to push them on others. Some clearly male person with stereo-typically feminine traits claims to be female? fine, but others don't have to agree and are entitled to think the person is deluded, that instead it's fine for guys to be how they are and it doesn't change them being guys.
Not the original poster, but in the examples of people just purposefully trying to make mountains out of molehills and stir crap to the detriment of all in an open source project realm, would this suffice?
There are those out there with too much time on their hands that just want to either seize power through questionable means or watch the world burn. Using moral panic and fear of a mob as means to their ends.
There are common trends in the way these things start/are enforced, and while it may not be of great concern now patterns have been established towards the behavior. In the worst of cases the mob can refuse to stop even in the face of evidence appearing that no wrong doing was ever done.
It may be an overreaction, but it the fear seems to be that this will be the wedge used to allow those willing to use purposeful over-sensitivity and bad faith to accrue power.
Mob mentalities should be feared, but we shouldn't succumb to them or to actors acting in bad faith for their own gain.
What kinds of measures specifically are being spoken of? Does it help or hinder end users doing what they wish? Are end users even a consideration or is this solely to keep a stranglehold on the device from a manufacturers perspective?
As with many things there will never be a single answer, what is presented is a set of varying trade-offs whose value will change depending on the desired goals and whose perspective it is desired from.
LiFePo is likely more suited, 3.6v peak with 3.2v nominal as opposed to 4.2v peak 3.7 nominal.
Considering that NiMH is a consistent 1.2v/cell 2.4v should function for typical two cell setups. Which means that a single LiFePo cell with a low dropout linear regulator would work a treat. Something like a LT1763-2.5 should do the trick fairly efficiently.
Combined with a low voltage cutoff for protecting the battery and that could be nice. A quick scan of amazon shows that they already make AA size lifepo batteries that fit, a single cell in one side and the regulator and the other and you're set.
Someone somewhere must already be selling this, but I've yet to stumble across it after a quick google.
Depends on what country you are in, Australia's recent metadata laws collect all, no warrant required to look up.
The trouble with using encryption when such sweeping items become the norm is that using encryption places you as a target. Even if you have nothing to hide simply not wanting to be passively stalked can mark you as a person of interest for further scrutiny. Which could be a less than fun position to be put in.
Catch public transport recently? The scan cards used in different states can be linked to identities and profile your usage and location. While giving your names for the card is optional even if you always pay cash to top up and regularly change cards, the cctv footage combined with facial recognition can be enough to still get a pattern on you.
Welcome to the future, 1984 has nothing on our present. The craziest thing is not even the lack of oversight of the organizations in charge, but how quickly the public has become complacent with it all.
I suppose those that are critical of the security circus and try to bring attention to potential abuses are either dismissed as nutters or do not last if they are competent at bringing awareness to the many issues mass surveillance can bring to a society.
The night of long knives was amateurish and crude compared to what is capable with such sweeping surveillance of the populace. Anyone even partially trying to evade it becoming a potential target.
So long as the pot is boiled slowly, the frogs never jump.
Well for sampled I tend towards using LinuxSampler with one of it's gui frontends.. For non-sampled it depends on what you want. Bristol takes care of all of the modelled analog synths that you could care for (and for free, the commercial packages for those synths for other platforms can cost a mint).
Yoshimi is a lot lighter synth on the cpu than the analog modelling bristol. There's a few others like fluidsynth that I rarely use but are about. And if you want to use a different more tracker like workflow with a commercial product there's Renoise that has a more all-in-one approach than the lego set that the other packages provide.
As someone who has had a quite decent midi keyboard for some years, and a linux user for close to 20.. yes, she would be quite happy.
The jack backend is absolutely lovely for connecting everything together, and there are a myriad of sampled synths and modelled synths available. In terms of mixing/recording ardour is a popular choice but again with jacks architecture there are plenty of choices.
While there still may be some things that can be hard to do on linux.. I cannot off hand think of any.
Why not keep clocks representing the actual local time, and simply make work hours more flexible?
People want to start work earlier and finish earlier? Do it. Just don't pretend that the sun is in a different location than it is (what with midday really being 11am in a one hour shift daylight savings system).
I'd consider it similar to people wanting a larger tennis court, but instead of just adjusting the dimensions in meters they adjust how long a meter is.. ridiculous.
I do find it curious that the most educated parts of the population tend as a general group to lean left in their politics.
There are differences between education, intelligence and wisdom.
It is easy for those who eternally stay in academia to avoid a reality that differs from their views, or ignore that there can be more factors than what are included in their favoured models that push the story they wish to tell.
Education by itself just measures how much they can recall what they've been taught. It says nothing at all about their critical faculties or the epistemological basis of their favoured conjectures.
Try reading english from 200 years ago... you'll find it quite easy to read. Pre-17th century I'll give you can be quite hard to read, but very few (comparatively) people wrote in those times.
A lot of the "changing' of definition of words seems to be by those who never understood what the meaning of it was when they heard it being spoken. Quite often to paint villains of the past through purposeful or ignorant misinterpretation.
When the goal of a change in language is purposeful confusion/painting things as bad/villains rather than the conveying of ideas eloquently, I think people have a right to be sceptical of new uses.
We don't just let people define red as blue when it's convenient for their arguments.
It depends, redhat is made of individuals, and there seems to be a massive cultural change happening between the old guard and the new.
A lot of redhats older work was actually quite nice, it seems to be as the newer people come to prominence (relative, say the last ten years or so) that old lessons are forgotten, it is assumed that newer=better or "This can be a lot simpler if I just screw everyone who doesn't have my use case".
I like redhat, and have been using them since around 2003. As time progresses the leadership seems to be becoming more and more clueless as the march of time progresses, and the old hats retire for the new to take prominence.
Surely (depending on your simulation software) cpu would be mostly irrelevant when it comes to strongly parallel floating point heavy math?
Sure coding for OpenCL is certainly more restrictive in a lot of ways, but done properly where appropriate the performance gains can be immense (understatement).
I've heard many different types of criteria for sex, but I've never seen that used as one. To my knowledge what's between your legs when you're born is often used, but failing that what chromosomes you have unless you are intersex. Have you seen cultures where brain scans are used as the primary criteria as to whether someone is male or female? I think even oestrogen/testosterone levels would be more commonly used than that as criteria.
Gender is something society constructs and assigns. However when sex and gender is misaligned this can cause severe stress for people, so they ought to be free to express a gender that matches their sex.
If gender is entirely socially constructed, and has nothing to do with sex, how is there any "misalignment" since after all, "gender" can mean anything, and has nothing to do with sex by your own admission.
Either gender identity is based on sex, which is biological, or it is completely a social construct, in which case it has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with mri's or any other physical trait.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Of note there is a significant difference between having "gender norms" culturally vs presenting some kind of "I'm male" (even when they are female) case. One is cultural norms to do with a sex, the other is just hogswash (The "I innately feel like x which I'm not" style argument).
But the long and short of it, identity politics is pretty horrible stuff.
Why ? Why do you have this desperate need to classify other people ? Humans really are not classifiable. The only USEFUL classification you can ever give to anybody else is "a member of my species" - everything else is the first step to a deathcamp.
The ability to tell the difference between things is quite useful. If you are advocating the complete removal of telling people apart from each other that has serious consequences.
The ability to tell the difference between people with diabetes is a useful categorization that will affect the treatment of people...
Same with cancer.
categorization is not of itself bad in any way. It is simply there to convey properties of a group.
If the ability to discern the differences between people is so concerning for you, perhaps you should endeavour to get the government to outlaw giving people names or unique identifiers of any kind. I wish you luck with that.
?>Behavioural norms for sexes exist and have existed for a long time,
So what ? At best that's an appeal to tradition fallacy. Fallacies do not convince me of anything.
I think you missed the point, _you_ were talking about the history of behavioural norms for the sexes, and referring to them as gender identities.
I was not saying whether they were right or wrong, only pointing out that what you were referring to as "gender" was really "societal behaviour norm for a sex"
Again, a false analogy. Transgenderism is not an illusion that is contradicted by visible physical evidence. You can't SEE they are wrong with your eyes. Only an MRI can see if they are right or not. The trouble for you is that the MRI's are agreeing with them.
If gender itself means absolutely nothing, then those MRI's are completely irrelevant aren't they?
If the point is about biological sex and at what point stereotypical features determine the line between male and female that's a discussion that can be had. But you are on the one hand saying gender means nothing, and on the other that MRI's can determine the properties of this "nothing".
Again, a false analogy. Transgenderism is not an illusion that is contradicted by visible physical evidence. You can't SEE they are wrong with your eyes. Only an MRI can see if they are right or not. The trouble for you is that the MRI's are agreeing with them.
Many people justifiably assume that the word ‘transgender’ is synonymous with ‘transsexual’, and means something like: having dysphoria and distress about your sexed body, and having a desire to alter that body to make it more closely resemble the body of the opposite sex. But according to the current terminology of gender identity politics, being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change your sexed body. What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.
It is a key tenet of the doctrine that the vast majority of people can be described as ‘cisgender’, which means that our innate gender identity matches the one we were assigned at birth. But as we have seen, if gender identity is a spectrum, then we are all non-binary, because none of us inhabits the points represented by the ends of that spectrum. Every single one of us will exist at some unique point along that spectrum, determined by the individual and idiosyncratic nature of our own particular identity, and our own subjective experience of gender. Given that, it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender. None of us was assigned our correct gender identity at birth, for how could we possibly have been? At the moment of my birth, how could anyone have known that I would later go on to discover that my gender identity is ‘frostgender’, a gender which is apparently ‘very cold and snowy’
Once we recognise that the number of gender identities is potentially infinite, we are forced to concede that nobody is deep down cisgender, because nobody is assigned the correct gender identity at birth. In fact, none of us was assigned a gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals. We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for people of that sex. This is done long before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on some form of "gender continuum".
So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people.
The logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this a profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion.
The way to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential,
Gender has no physical existence or meaning. It's a societal construct, a purely artificial idea.
Why were the words "male" and "female" used to describe these constructs then? Surely if a _new_ concept was made, _new_ words could be used for it and this whole crapshoot could be bypassed.
I think confusion and hatred were the goal of using that terminology.
So is the idea of pulsars,
You see how a different word is used for a different concept and different categorization/description?
New ideas arrive and displace old ideas because they have stronger evidence.
When the "new ideas" are by admitted by themselves as entirely socially constructed and don't necessarily have any bearing on reality, how can they ever be shown to be false if they are? without the ability to falsify a conjecture evidence is impossible (evidence are simply tests that could falsify a conjecture and have been done but have not, we prefer the conjectures that have had the most tests done of the most types but has yet to be shown to be false)
Well firstly - even if there was a "my gender is pizza" person- what exactly makes them wrong ?
This is the problem, the concept of what is being spoken about is so vague, so devoid of meaning that it can mean whatever people want.
The use of male and female in such a way strips the words of conveying any actual meaning, and language is all the poorer for it. When people want to talk about things to do with aspects of males and females there is a whole boatload of unnecessary confusion which has been created.
If the point of language is to convey meaning, things that reduce languages expressive ability work against it.
People can be however they want to be, but people should be able to call a spade a spade without offensive intent being assumed.
What about freedom of thought ?
People are free to think whatever they like, such as 2+2=58, but I am also free to point out to them that that is not the case. Freedom works both ways.
It's like people claiming the earth is only a few thousand years old, they are free to think that, I am free to think them silly and point out that current evidence is not in their favour and their preferred theory has epistemological issues.
It's like otherkin and wolfkin, people who honestly believe they are an animal in a humans body, they are free to think that, and I am free to point out to them that they are in fact human and that no evidence could ever be presented of a supernatural world because the claims aren't falsifiable.
Anyway, a more accurate analogy would be to say that intersex people are like red/green colourblind people. They may wear a red shirt and green pants together and believe they are wearing matching clothes. Just because red and green looks different to you - does it make them worthy of discrimination that it looks the same to them ?
Well for starters discrimination is simply the ability to discern the differences between things, if a person can tell the differences between things they are already discriminating.
There is a difference between discrimination and unfair treatment based on discriminating against someone on something based on irrelevant criteria.
People should be able to tell different things apart without it being assumed something nasty is being said. People should be able to tell a dolphin and a fish apart without having people say "dolphins are big enough and live in the sea, they should be called a fish"
There are standards, they may change, but I think it best for words to be at least capable of having descriptive power. Having something mean anything someone wants (the concept of gender identity) causes problems when people try to wield that as a weapon against people.
It all comes back to, if someone honestly thinks themselves a wolf in a humans bod
This is not a common human trait, abnormalities and mutations exist, as is to be expected.
I'd consider the more extreme biological abnormalities as neither male or female but "other" biologically. They are different, neither male or female in the typical sense.
But biology aren't what people are fighting here, people tend to accept biology a lot more than they do "my gender is pizza because I like it".
The idea that being male or female has anything to do with anything other than sex is an invention of the 60's.
It pushes certain things as associated with males and females that aren't necessarily the case. If you support people being able to be people you should support the reduction/cessation for male/female for use for anything other than what it is actually talking about, the biological sex.
2) Humans come in at at least 12 sexes - these includes visible hermaphrodites (of several kinds) but the vast majority of whom are utterly indistinguishable from "male" or "female" because none of the differences are external. Sex is determined by chromosomes. XX is female, XY is male. But those are not the only ones out there. XXY is extremely common - and physically indistinguishable from female - but tend to have higher average testosterone levels - several olympic gold medalists have been XXY and the olympic committee banned XXY women from competing until the 1990s unless they also suffered from another condition that prevented the absorbtion of testosterone (see now there is yet another mechanism - even if you have male or female hormons of the right amounts many people are born unable to absorb those hormones properly).
I am very aware of those types, and would consider them "genetic abnormalities" rather than the norm, nobody said there can't be "male, female, other" when speaking entirely on biology
The idiocy we want to stop is "my gender is pizza", "I am a man because I like beer" and things of that nature, basically the entire idea of gender.
Some interesting reading. I don't think this whole "lets call gender anything we want" business was entirely thought through. It seems quite lazy and makeshift, being whatever people want while condemning those who refuse to "see the light".
If it's what's between the ears that counts, there is no and can be no argument for any kind of sex reassignment surgery, because what is between their legs does not count at all.
It's your brain that's acting, and it is influenced by the structure of the brain. (How it) function(s) follows form.
Yes, and people are allowed to have different brain structures, a male having a stereotypically female structure does not make them any less a male. Likewise with female but with stereotypically male structure.
Quite often females in engineering pursuits can have stereotypical male traits such as better spatial awareness and poorer emotional awareness, but that does not make them any less female.
It seems odd to me that on the one hand those on the left-wing can often demonize sex stereotypes but on the other use those stereotypes prescriptively as "you aren't an x unless you conform to these behaviours that I've decided this physical sex must have".
Used to be that once married a woman was pretty much your servant, legally required to have sex with you as often as you reasonably desired, cook and clean, give you children and raise them etc.
Let us first take our existing marriage laws. We shall find that in England whilst the woman is practically relieved of all responsibility for the maintenance of her husband, he can be compelled by poor law to maintain her under a penalty of three months’ hard labour for leaving her without provision, should she choose to apply to the parish. On anything that by latitude of interpretation can be deemed ill-usage or neglect, she can, if rich, obtain judicial separation with alimony from the divorce court, or, if poor, a magisterial order for separation with weekly maintenance from the police court. Jackson versus Jackson has decided that a wife can leave her husband at will, that he cannot raise a finger to compel her to remain with him or to come back, neither can she be imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to obey an order for restitution of conjugal rights; in other words, it is decided that the contract of marriage is the single case of a contract which one of the contracting parties is at liberty to break without reason given, and without compensating the other party. But it is well to remember that it is only one of the parties that has this liberty, for Bunhill versus Bunhill gives the wife the right to follow an absconding husband and break into his house, if necessary, for the purpose of compelling cohabitation. He, on his part, is precluded by the decision in Weldon versus Weldon from obtaining restitution of conjugal rights even by way of action; he is liable, however, for his wife’s postnuptial torts, so that she has only to slander or libel some person without his knowledge or consent, and whilst she comes off scot free, even though possessed of property, the husband can be cast in damages. Trespass to land, trespass to goods, injuries done through negligence, all these actions coming under the legal definition of “torts,” render the husband liable, no matter what private wealth the wife may possess.
Turning now from the civil law to the criminal law, we find a similar – or even greater – disparity of treatment. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, of course, whilst flogging, the tread-mill, and other brutal forms of punishment have been retained for male offenders, they have been abolished for females, so that though a man may be subjected to torture and degradation for mere breaches of prison discipline, a woman is exempted from them for the most heinous crimes. As happened a few years ago in Ireland, a woman may torture her children to death and there is no outcry for the lash, yet surely if you do not flog the female child-torturer you have no right to flog any other human being. The sex-favouritism of modern penal law is made more conspicuous by the ever-recurring howl of the “base, bloody, and brutal” grand juror for the lash to be applied to new classes of offences (for men of course). But the most atrocious instances of sex-privilege occur in connection with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Whilst the abduction of a girl under eighteen, or the seduction of one under sixteen, involves the man concerned in serious penalties, the girl or the woman gets off scot free, and this even though she may have been the inciting party. This is carried to the extent that a young boy of fourteen may be himself induced to commit a sexual offence by a girl just under sixteen – that is to say, nearly two years his senior – and he can be sentenced to imprisonment, followed by several years in a reformatory, whilst the law holds the inciting girl absolutely
Well for starters I'm always on full-frame, so your 35 is basically my 50 and your 50 is basically my 85
It does depend greatly on the lighting setup of the venue, but while a poor lighting setup can be made better with external lights anything where it's workable it will kill it.
I do consider the two examples you gave as fairly samey.
Here's an example I took on the weekend on a dance floor, I cannot think how a flash would have improved this situation. The lens was full open at iso 6400. While it isn't an action shot it is an example of the kind of lighting I get sans flash. Using a flash would have killed the orange-blue contrast on either side of her shirt at the very least.
as for wedding receptions, I was at one as a guest recently when the official photographers bailed before the cake cutting/first dance recently. With only a prime in my hands I took this. I still fail to see how flash would have improved that image.
A very different style sure, and you are absolutely right that using a flash allows you to stop the lens down for greater depth of field/clarity. But they all feel the same and overdone, because it's too easy.
and the majority of the time, the best answer is just off-camera flash, or bounce flash if the situation is right.
I find that kills the natural lighting of the place, and makes everywhere look "samey" not to mention drawing attention to yourself and distracting the people from what they're engaged in. Flash is an enemy of candid natural photography imho. Most people can't pose well, so I try to blend in and just always be around with my camera doing things. Making bright flashes every now and then can be kind of distracting and not appreciated in a lot of places.
Everybody has their own style, but for myself I find that all my favorite dark reception hall shots are made with a setup along those lines - and honestly, the wide aperture is more of a hazard than a benefit so I find myself at 4.0 as often as not, because things are moving so fast that getting a razor-thin DOF dialed in exactly where you want it is next to impossible. The off-camera lighting provides the drama and subject isolation that you usually rely on bokeh for.
Before I was using the 85mm f/1.4 I was using an 85mm f/1.2 canon. Why did I switch? focus speed. Manual focus on the 1.2 was slow as molasses because it still used the autofocus motor to do it which is notoriously slow. Whereas the 1.4 has real manual focus and a great deal faster autofocus.
That being said, even with super slow focusing f/1.2 with extremely fast moving targets a solid focus is achievable. Prefocusing to a specific plane and waiting for the subjects to come in line with that plane while being in an interesting position.
A tad difficult, but I find almost all of the worthwhile shots are, otherwise they'd be common as mud.
Slashdot Mirror
There's quite a bit more to it, which I won't have time to fully get into but would like to make a few short additions after commenting on something.
As a side note, why should anyone else even give a shit about my gender? In a great many ways, allowing a flexible gender identity should be considered the right-wing, libertarian position.
I'd consider it the left trying to have their cake and eat it too. It is trying to enforce the association of a particular behaviour to a particular biological sex. Which may or may not be the case. To those who grew up with "do what you want to do in life" identity politics is not consistent and often seems to be used for power plays.
Next, we turn to the even more complicated issues of sexual identity. In other words, how does any given person identify their own gender?
What do you mean by "gender" historically the gendering of words was a grammatical construct. You could gender a word not just by sex but by location, time of day, etc many languages do this.
Commonly it can be used as a euphemism for biological sex, but that makes little sense in the 'gender identity' aspects as a non-outlier plain case could easily claim to be a different biological sex.
To those that push identity politics it seems to almost be like a religion, making claims about some 'innate sense of being' about a particular sex.
It's all well and good for people to have weird and wonderful senses of spirituality, but it isn't cool to push them on others. Some clearly male person with stereo-typically feminine traits claims to be female? fine, but others don't have to agree and are entitled to think the person is deluded, that instead it's fine for guys to be how they are and it doesn't change them being guys.
Not the original poster, but in the examples of people just purposefully trying to make mountains out of molehills and stir crap to the detriment of all in an open source project realm, would this suffice?
There are those out there with too much time on their hands that just want to either seize power through questionable means or watch the world burn. Using moral panic and fear of a mob as means to their ends.
There are common trends in the way these things start/are enforced, and while it may not be of great concern now patterns have been established towards the behavior. In the worst of cases the mob can refuse to stop even in the face of evidence appearing that no wrong doing was ever done.
It may be an overreaction, but it the fear seems to be that this will be the wedge used to allow those willing to use purposeful over-sensitivity and bad faith to accrue power.
Mob mentalities should be feared, but we shouldn't succumb to them or to actors acting in bad faith for their own gain.
This is not a one-case-fits-all item.
What kinds of measures specifically are being spoken of? Does it help or hinder end users doing what they wish? Are end users even a consideration or is this solely to keep a stranglehold on the device from a manufacturers perspective?
As with many things there will never be a single answer, what is presented is a set of varying trade-offs whose value will change depending on the desired goals and whose perspective it is desired from.
LiFePo is likely more suited, 3.6v peak with 3.2v nominal as opposed to 4.2v peak 3.7 nominal.
Considering that NiMH is a consistent 1.2v/cell 2.4v should function for typical two cell setups. Which means that a single LiFePo cell with a low dropout linear regulator would work a treat. Something like a LT1763-2.5 should do the trick fairly efficiently.
Combined with a low voltage cutoff for protecting the battery and that could be nice. A quick scan of amazon shows that they already make AA size lifepo batteries that fit, a single cell in one side and the regulator and the other and you're set.
Someone somewhere must already be selling this, but I've yet to stumble across it after a quick google.
Apologies for not reading your link, I had skipped it assuming it was american seeming as NSA etc mentioned.
I hope that is the reality, a lot of the ISP's claims of added expenses make little sense if that is the case.
Depends on what country you are in, Australia's recent metadata laws collect all, no warrant required to look up.
The trouble with using encryption when such sweeping items become the norm is that using encryption places you as a target. Even if you have nothing to hide simply not wanting to be passively stalked can mark you as a person of interest for further scrutiny. Which could be a less than fun position to be put in.
Even not using the internet at all would not render you immune. It is one piece of a far larger puzzle Have a drivers license? congratulations your face is now in the national face recognition database.
Catch public transport recently? The scan cards used in different states can be linked to identities and profile your usage and location. While giving your names for the card is optional even if you always pay cash to top up and regularly change cards, the cctv footage combined with facial recognition can be enough to still get a pattern on you.
Welcome to the future, 1984 has nothing on our present. The craziest thing is not even the lack of oversight of the organizations in charge, but how quickly the public has become complacent with it all.
I suppose those that are critical of the security circus and try to bring attention to potential abuses are either dismissed as nutters or do not last if they are competent at bringing awareness to the many issues mass surveillance can bring to a society.
The night of long knives was amateurish and crude compared to what is capable with such sweeping surveillance of the populace. Anyone even partially trying to evade it becoming a potential target.
So long as the pot is boiled slowly, the frogs never jump.
Well for sampled I tend towards using LinuxSampler with one of it's gui frontends.. For non-sampled it depends on what you want. Bristol takes care of all of the modelled analog synths that you could care for (and for free, the commercial packages for those synths for other platforms can cost a mint).
Yoshimi is a lot lighter synth on the cpu than the analog modelling bristol. There's a few others like fluidsynth that I rarely use but are about. And if you want to use a different more tracker like workflow with a commercial product there's Renoise that has a more all-in-one approach than the lego set that the other packages provide.
But seriously, you could have just googled.
As someone who has had a quite decent midi keyboard for some years, and a linux user for close to 20.. yes, she would be quite happy.
The jack backend is absolutely lovely for connecting everything together, and there are a myriad of sampled synths and modelled synths available. In terms of mixing/recording ardour is a popular choice but again with jacks architecture there are plenty of choices.
While there still may be some things that can be hard to do on linux.. I cannot off hand think of any.
Bit of a straw man there, easy to attack.
Why not keep clocks representing the actual local time, and simply make work hours more flexible?
People want to start work earlier and finish earlier? Do it. Just don't pretend that the sun is in a different location than it is (what with midday really being 11am in a one hour shift daylight savings system).
I'd consider it similar to people wanting a larger tennis court, but instead of just adjusting the dimensions in meters they adjust how long a meter is.. ridiculous.
I do find it curious that the most educated parts of the population tend as a general group to lean left in their politics.
There are differences between education, intelligence and wisdom.
It is easy for those who eternally stay in academia to avoid a reality that differs from their views, or ignore that there can be more factors than what are included in their favoured models that push the story they wish to tell.
Education by itself just measures how much they can recall what they've been taught. It says nothing at all about their critical faculties or the epistemological basis of their favoured conjectures.
Try reading english from 200 years ago... you'll find it quite easy to read. Pre-17th century I'll give you can be quite hard to read, but very few (comparatively) people wrote in those times.
A lot of the "changing' of definition of words seems to be by those who never understood what the meaning of it was when they heard it being spoken. Quite often to paint villains of the past through purposeful or ignorant misinterpretation.
When the goal of a change in language is purposeful confusion/painting things as bad/villains rather than the conveying of ideas eloquently, I think people have a right to be sceptical of new uses.
We don't just let people define red as blue when it's convenient for their arguments.
It depends, redhat is made of individuals, and there seems to be a massive cultural change happening between the old guard and the new.
A lot of redhats older work was actually quite nice, it seems to be as the newer people come to prominence (relative, say the last ten years or so) that old lessons are forgotten, it is assumed that newer=better or "This can be a lot simpler if I just screw everyone who doesn't have my use case".
I like redhat, and have been using them since around 2003. As time progresses the leadership seems to be becoming more and more clueless as the march of time progresses, and the old hats retire for the new to take prominence.
Surely (depending on your simulation software) cpu would be mostly irrelevant when it comes to strongly parallel floating point heavy math?
Sure coding for OpenCL is certainly more restrictive in a lot of ways, but done properly where appropriate the performance gains can be immense (understatement).
I will let people doing scientific studies that they are no longer allowed control groups then.
and yes I'm done with this, all you've shown me is effectively that you have no clue.
MRI's can determine sex.
I've heard many different types of criteria for sex, but I've never seen that used as one. To my knowledge what's between your legs when you're born is often used, but failing that what chromosomes you have unless you are intersex. Have you seen cultures where brain scans are used as the primary criteria as to whether someone is male or female? I think even oestrogen/testosterone levels would be more commonly used than that as criteria.
Gender is something society constructs and assigns. However when sex and gender is misaligned this can cause severe stress for people, so they ought to be free to express a gender that matches their sex.
If gender is entirely socially constructed, and has nothing to do with sex, how is there any "misalignment" since after all, "gender" can mean anything, and has nothing to do with sex by your own admission.
Either gender identity is based on sex, which is biological, or it is completely a social construct, in which case it has nothing to do with sex and nothing to do with mri's or any other physical trait.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Of note there is a significant difference between having "gender norms" culturally vs presenting some kind of "I'm male" (even when they are female) case. One is cultural norms to do with a sex, the other is just hogswash (The "I innately feel like x which I'm not" style argument).
But the long and short of it, identity politics is pretty horrible stuff.
Why ? Why do you have this desperate need to classify other people ? Humans really are not classifiable. The only USEFUL classification you can ever give to anybody else is "a member of my species" - everything else is the first step to a deathcamp.
The ability to tell the difference between things is quite useful. If you are advocating the complete removal of telling people apart from each other that has serious consequences.
The ability to tell the difference between people with diabetes is a useful categorization that will affect the treatment of people...
Same with cancer.
categorization is not of itself bad in any way. It is simply there to convey properties of a group.
If the ability to discern the differences between people is so concerning for you, perhaps you should endeavour to get the government to outlaw giving people names or unique identifiers of any kind. I wish you luck with that.
?>Behavioural norms for sexes exist and have existed for a long time,
So what ? At best that's an appeal to tradition fallacy. Fallacies do not convince me of anything.
I think you missed the point, _you_ were talking about the history of behavioural norms for the sexes, and referring to them as gender identities.
I was not saying whether they were right or wrong, only pointing out that what you were referring to as "gender" was really "societal behaviour norm for a sex"
Again, a false analogy. Transgenderism is not an illusion that is contradicted by visible physical evidence. You can't SEE they are wrong with your eyes. Only an MRI can see if they are right or not. The trouble for you is that the MRI's are agreeing with them.
If gender itself means absolutely nothing, then those MRI's are completely irrelevant aren't they?
If the point is about biological sex and at what point stereotypical features determine the line between male and female that's a discussion that can be had. But you are on the one hand saying gender means nothing, and on the other that MRI's can determine the properties of this "nothing".
Again, a false analogy. Transgenderism is not an illusion that is contradicted by visible physical evidence. You can't SEE they are wrong with your eyes. Only an MRI can see if they are right or not. The trouble for you is that the MRI's are agreeing with them.
Many people justifiably assume that the word ‘transgender’ is synonymous with ‘transsexual’, and means something like: having dysphoria and distress about your sexed body, and having a desire to alter that body to make it more closely resemble the body of the opposite sex. But according to the current terminology of gender identity politics, being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change your sexed body. What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another.
It is a key tenet of the doctrine that the vast majority of people can be described as ‘cisgender’, which means that our innate gender identity matches the one we were assigned at birth. But as we have seen, if gender identity is a spectrum, then we are all non-binary, because none of us inhabits the points represented by the ends of that spectrum. Every single one of us will exist at some unique point along that spectrum, determined by the individual and idiosyncratic nature of our own particular identity, and our own subjective experience of gender. Given that, it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender. None of us was assigned our correct gender identity at birth, for how could we possibly have been? At the moment of my birth, how could anyone have known that I would later go on to discover that my gender identity is ‘frostgender’, a gender which is apparently ‘very cold and snowy’
Once we recognise that the number of gender identities is potentially infinite, we are forced to concede that nobody is deep down cisgender, because nobody is assigned the correct gender identity at birth. In fact, none of us was assigned a gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals. We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for people of that sex. This is done long before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on some form of "gender continuum".
So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people.
The logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this a profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion.
The way to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential,
Gender has no physical existence or meaning. It's a societal construct, a purely artificial idea.
Why were the words "male" and "female" used to describe these constructs then? Surely if a _new_ concept was made, _new_ words could be used for it and this whole crapshoot could be bypassed.
I think confusion and hatred were the goal of using that terminology.
So is the idea of pulsars,
You see how a different word is used for a different concept and different categorization/description?
New ideas arrive and displace old ideas because they have stronger evidence.
When the "new ideas" are by admitted by themselves as entirely socially constructed and don't necessarily have any bearing on reality, how can they ever be shown to be false if they are? without the ability to falsify a conjecture evidence is impossible (evidence are simply tests that could falsify a conjecture and have been done but have not, we prefer the conjectures that have had the most tests done of the most types but has yet to be shown to be false)
Well firstly - even if there was a "my gender is pizza" person- what exactly makes them wrong ?
This is the problem, the concept of what is being spoken about is so vague, so devoid of meaning that it can mean whatever people want.
The use of male and female in such a way strips the words of conveying any actual meaning, and language is all the poorer for it. When people want to talk about things to do with aspects of males and females there is a whole boatload of unnecessary confusion which has been created.
If the point of language is to convey meaning, things that reduce languages expressive ability work against it.
People can be however they want to be, but people should be able to call a spade a spade without offensive intent being assumed.
What about freedom of thought ?
People are free to think whatever they like, such as 2+2=58, but I am also free to point out to them that that is not the case. Freedom works both ways.
It's like people claiming the earth is only a few thousand years old, they are free to think that, I am free to think them silly and point out that current evidence is not in their favour and their preferred theory has epistemological issues.
It's like otherkin and wolfkin, people who honestly believe they are an animal in a humans body, they are free to think that, and I am free to point out to them that they are in fact human and that no evidence could ever be presented of a supernatural world because the claims aren't falsifiable.
Anyway, a more accurate analogy would be to say that intersex people are like red/green colourblind people. They may wear a red shirt and green pants together and believe they are wearing matching clothes. Just because red and green looks different to you - does it make them worthy of discrimination that it looks the same to them ?
Well for starters discrimination is simply the ability to discern the differences between things, if a person can tell the differences between things they are already discriminating.
There is a difference between discrimination and unfair treatment based on discriminating against someone on something based on irrelevant criteria.
People should be able to tell different things apart without it being assumed something nasty is being said. People should be able to tell a dolphin and a fish apart without having people say "dolphins are big enough and live in the sea, they should be called a fish"
There are standards, they may change, but I think it best for words to be at least capable of having descriptive power. Having something mean anything someone wants (the concept of gender identity) causes problems when people try to wield that as a weapon against people.
It all comes back to, if someone honestly thinks themselves a wolf in a humans bod
This is not a common human trait, abnormalities and mutations exist, as is to be expected.
I'd consider the more extreme biological abnormalities as neither male or female but "other" biologically. They are different, neither male or female in the typical sense.
But biology aren't what people are fighting here, people tend to accept biology a lot more than they do "my gender is pizza because I like it".
An interesting read on some issues with the concept of "gender". Sometimes I think people just don't think things through.
The idea that being male or female has anything to do with anything other than sex is an invention of the 60's.
It pushes certain things as associated with males and females that aren't necessarily the case. If you support people being able to be people you should support the reduction/cessation for male/female for use for anything other than what it is actually talking about, the biological sex.
2) Humans come in at at least 12 sexes - these includes visible hermaphrodites (of several kinds) but the vast majority of whom are utterly indistinguishable from "male" or "female" because none of the differences are external. Sex is determined by chromosomes. XX is female, XY is male. But those are not the only ones out there. XXY is extremely common - and physically indistinguishable from female - but tend to have higher average testosterone levels - several olympic gold medalists have been XXY and the olympic committee banned XXY women from competing until the 1990s unless they also suffered from another condition that prevented the absorbtion of testosterone (see now there is yet another mechanism - even if you have male or female hormons of the right amounts many people are born unable to absorb those hormones properly).
I am very aware of those types, and would consider them "genetic abnormalities" rather than the norm, nobody said there can't be "male, female, other" when speaking entirely on biology
The idiocy we want to stop is "my gender is pizza", "I am a man because I like beer" and things of that nature, basically the entire idea of gender.
Some interesting reading. I don't think this whole "lets call gender anything we want" business was entirely thought through. It seems quite lazy and makeshift, being whatever people want while condemning those who refuse to "see the light".
Because it's what's between the ears that counts.
If it's what's between the ears that counts, there is no and can be no argument for any kind of sex reassignment surgery, because what is between their legs does not count at all.
It's your brain that's acting, and it is influenced by the structure of the brain. (How it) function(s) follows form.
Yes, and people are allowed to have different brain structures, a male having a stereotypically female structure does not make them any less a male. Likewise with female but with stereotypically male structure.
Quite often females in engineering pursuits can have stereotypical male traits such as better spatial awareness and poorer emotional awareness, but that does not make them any less female.
It seems odd to me that on the one hand those on the left-wing can often demonize sex stereotypes but on the other use those stereotypes prescriptively as "you aren't an x unless you conform to these behaviours that I've decided this physical sex must have".
Used to be that once married a woman was pretty much your servant, legally required to have sex with you as often as you reasonably desired, cook and clean, give you children and raise them etc.
This is a bit of a simplification.
Here is some interesting reading from around 1907.
Some excerpts
Let us first take our existing marriage laws. We shall find that in England whilst the woman is practically relieved of all responsibility for the maintenance of her husband, he can be compelled by poor law to maintain her under a penalty of three months’ hard labour for leaving her without provision, should she choose to apply to the parish. On anything that by latitude of interpretation can be deemed ill-usage or neglect, she can, if rich, obtain judicial separation with alimony from the divorce court, or, if poor, a magisterial order for separation with weekly maintenance from the police court. Jackson versus Jackson has decided that a wife can leave her husband at will, that he cannot raise a finger to compel her to remain with him or to come back, neither can she be imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to obey an order for restitution of conjugal rights; in other words, it is decided that the contract of marriage is the single case of a contract which one of the contracting parties is at liberty to break without reason given, and without compensating the other party. But it is well to remember that it is only one of the parties that has this liberty, for Bunhill versus Bunhill gives the wife the right to follow an absconding husband and break into his house, if necessary, for the purpose of compelling cohabitation. He, on his part, is precluded by the decision in Weldon versus Weldon from obtaining restitution of conjugal rights even by way of action; he is liable, however, for his wife’s postnuptial torts, so that she has only to slander or libel some person without his knowledge or consent, and whilst she comes off scot free, even though possessed of property, the husband can be cast in damages. Trespass to land, trespass to goods, injuries done through negligence, all these actions coming under the legal definition of “torts,” render the husband liable, no matter what private wealth the wife may possess.
Turning now from the civil law to the criminal law, we find a similar – or even greater – disparity of treatment. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, of course, whilst flogging, the tread-mill, and other brutal forms of punishment have been retained for male offenders, they have been abolished for females, so that though a man may be subjected to torture and degradation for mere breaches of prison discipline, a woman is exempted from them for the most heinous crimes. As happened a few years ago in Ireland, a woman may torture her children to death and there is no outcry for the lash, yet surely if you do not flog the female child-torturer you have no right to flog any other human being. The sex-favouritism of modern penal law is made more conspicuous by the ever-recurring howl of the “base, bloody, and brutal” grand juror for the lash to be applied to new classes of offences (for men of course). But the most atrocious instances of sex-privilege occur in connection with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Whilst the abduction of a girl under eighteen, or the seduction of one under sixteen, involves the man concerned in serious penalties, the girl or the woman gets off scot free, and this even though she may have been the inciting party. This is carried to the extent that a young boy of fourteen may be himself induced to commit a sexual offence by a girl just under sixteen – that is to say, nearly two years his senior – and he can be sentenced to imprisonment, followed by several years in a reformatory, whilst the law holds the inciting girl absolutely
Well for starters I'm always on full-frame, so your 35 is basically my 50 and your 50 is basically my 85
It does depend greatly on the lighting setup of the venue, but while a poor lighting setup can be made better with external lights anything where it's workable it will kill it.
I do consider the two examples you gave as fairly samey.
Here's an example I took on the weekend on a dance floor, I cannot think how a flash would have improved this situation. The lens was full open at iso 6400. While it isn't an action shot it is an example of the kind of lighting I get sans flash. Using a flash would have killed the orange-blue contrast on either side of her shirt at the very least.
as for wedding receptions, I was at one as a guest recently when the official photographers bailed before the cake cutting/first dance recently. With only a prime in my hands I took this. I still fail to see how flash would have improved that image.
A very different style sure, and you are absolutely right that using a flash allows you to stop the lens down for greater depth of field/clarity. But they all feel the same and overdone, because it's too easy.
and the majority of the time, the best answer is just off-camera flash, or bounce flash if the situation is right.
I find that kills the natural lighting of the place, and makes everywhere look "samey" not to mention drawing attention to yourself and distracting the people from what they're engaged in. Flash is an enemy of candid natural photography imho. Most people can't pose well, so I try to blend in and just always be around with my camera doing things. Making bright flashes every now and then can be kind of distracting and not appreciated in a lot of places.
Everybody has their own style, but for myself I find that all my favorite dark reception hall shots are made with a setup along those lines - and honestly, the wide aperture is more of a hazard than a benefit so I find myself at 4.0 as often as not, because things are moving so fast that getting a razor-thin DOF dialed in exactly where you want it is next to impossible. The off-camera lighting provides the drama and subject isolation that you usually rely on bokeh for.
Before I was using the 85mm f/1.4 I was using an 85mm f/1.2 canon. Why did I switch? focus speed. Manual focus on the 1.2 was slow as molasses because it still used the autofocus motor to do it which is notoriously slow. Whereas the 1.4 has real manual focus and a great deal faster autofocus.
That being said, even with super slow focusing f/1.2 with extremely fast moving targets a solid focus is achievable. Prefocusing to a specific plane and waiting for the subjects to come in line with that plane while being in an interesting position.
A tad difficult, but I find almost all of the worthwhile shots are, otherwise they'd be common as mud.