I dunno, people with crap ADSL tend to blame the ISP when their Youtube doesn't play right away and needs minutes to buffer... Especially because they know their neighbors who pay a comparable amount for the 'same' bandwidth can play the video right away without interruptions... Guess which ISP they will switch to next month.
For e-commerce sites this is a different story, they will lose customers when their site responds slowly. But generally this is not the kind of thing people will use to evaluate their ISP bandwidth 'value-for-your-money' and decide if they want to upgrade to a competitor. When bandwidth is prioritized and limited (scarce) at the same time the effect will be most pronounced on high bandwidth sites, so these sites can certainly affect the customer experience for ISPs by limiting their bandwidth to those ISPs.
In my opinion this is a can of worms they should not open, and customers will punish them for trying to pull shit like this. There are other legitimate ways of achieving acceleration (like local caching at the ISP) that can be sold without resorting to double dipping and selling bandwidth twice.
Solution: Press the bookmark 100x, it will be slow as shit but so much fun when you press fire and annihilate the site and your browser at the same time.:)
Hardly, they can already request the details on the 'suspicion' of infringement. With wording like that it would amaze me if it requires substantial proof other than "we detected this IP, look it's in the list". That is something that *will* happen when no court is required to approve the request, there is a reason things should work like that. They see it as cumbersome, we see it as legally required protection against blatant abuse.
They win insurance... Or probably other interesting state secrets that are encrypted. Presuming there are some yet unknown-to-the-public-flaws in AES for example (and like with all algorithms there are) governments could possibly be able to decrypt these kind of files in a matter of years instead of billions. In which case it can be quite beneficial to be a month ahead of 'the other guys' with decryption, with some information a few extra petaflop (or soon exaflop) could mean a world of difference.
Yeah, but they generally don't go around suing for (illegal) bullshit reasons, and I would not suspect them of selling a list of addresses linked to IPs to the highest bidder... With these big media I'm not sure of anything they'll do anymore, as long as it makes them money it will happen at some time, and they have proven that extortion is their game now... It's an easy cash-cow, all the government has to do is look the other way and take bribes, uhhh campaign contributions, from lobbyists.
You are smart enough to use 'faux' to describe this news, but not to google on the French words: 'voleurs paris aspirateur'...
For example the first link I found.
Other than that: Nice try, It's good to check for faux news, but be sure not to make a faux pas youself.;-)
Sorry for the self-reply, I made a mistake... It's 150.000 per *day*, not per month! I actually calculated it right the first time and thought: "wait, that can't be right, I probably switched days and months...". Nope, I did that by mistake after that... So sadly the real calculation is:
150.000 IPs per day = 13,5 million households in 90 days = 3 months!!! So assuming the they have a lot more broadband connections since 2008 it would be around 4 months!
in just 4 months the media company will already own the personal details of *all* French households with internet!!!
Fuck, how crazy are they! The 21st century French revolution is pretty much guaranteed if people are screwed over by the millions at this pace.
Yes, carte blanche indeed... they can basically brute force all French citizens IPs to trace everyone. According to this article France has 13.5 million households with internet. When they request the details of the IPs of 150.000 of those each month it will take 7,5 years to get the details of *all* households in France. Since the article is from 2008 they probably have a higher level of households with internet now, extrapolating increase from 2008 that would be just under 10 years to let them get the details of everyone. After that they only have to keep up with new broadband connections and people that move...
I expect that in roughly 5 years half of France will be without an internet connection (they will of course request actual torrenting IPs first, before going after the rest anyway).
And who wants to bet that they will create a new law in around 10 years that limits the amount of requests they can send 'for community privacy concerns' but simultaneously requires ISPs to notify the media companies when someone moves...
The French better start protesting right now to make it real hard on the lobbyists to hold that new law back for 10 years.
You hit the nail on it's head. What is offensive to some is only natural to others, and the other way around.
Objectively I'm inclined to agree that 'bomb' registers higher on a natural 'offensive-scale'. But I firmly believe no word can truly be 'offensive', it's only the intent...
I personally only take offense at people taking offense...
You know this guy is Samy Kamkar, the hacker who also unleashed the first-ever XSS worm on the world that infected a million MySpace profiles in a matter of hours...
Tomorrow I happen to attend a meeting of OWASP where Samy will speak about the latest XSS exploits, other JavaScript tricks, and other things (like a nice new method of NAT penetration)... I could say the title 'security guy' is earned by him for finding some great hacks and sharing them with the world, and even taking time to talk about it in person to the open source community.
From a non-lawyer point of view you can still apply logic and reason to find out this answer. Just ask yourself the question: "which law will benefit the party with the deeper pockets?", in this case the big corporations. Statistically the laws that benefit them have precedence over laws that benefit the consumer with a fairly large margin, so you can assume that this time won't be any different. This is no legal advise, just a layman view of how these things commonly play out...
Yeah, a wildly inefficient demonstration... What's next? Will they attempt to use cloud computing to add 1+1+1+1+1 etc. until they know how many ones you need to add to reach 'infinite'?
I didn't have the time to properly read your posts and respond, so sorry for the late reply. Like you I also enjoy an intelligent conversation, and I've learned a lot of deeply interesting new things. Please allow me to reply to some of the things you said and hopefully show you some new insights into the status of stereotypes about men...
We don't need a "men's liberation movement". A large part of women's lib was about ending the legal restraints against women [...] Those legal restraints impeded women from having control of their own money. [...]
Contrast that with the situation today. Women aren't in sole control of men's finances. Rape is still mostly a crime committed by men, against both men and women. It's not like women have some legal right to rape men, and men need to be "liberated." [...]
This is a stereotype that is typical for what is commonly accepted, that "men don't need liberation or equal rights since they already have equal rights in law and are much less victims than women". If you read about Men's rights and specifically Masculism (especially on the page of Masculism there are some very valid concerns listed that are often trivialized). In the legal system men are often discriminated against and contrary to their constitutional right assumed guilty until proven innocent. This happens especially in the case of divorce where men disproportionately get no custody, have say about their children basically lose both their children and their money. This is the reason for the existence of the Fathers' Rights Movement. Also interesting to note is that some lawyers will advise women to accuse their husbands of crimes like beating, child molestation or rape exactly because they know the men won't have a chance to defend themselves and will be presumed guilty. The statistics differ but indicate that a large percentage of women who accuse men of rape just lie and are almost always believed. Statistics from the FBI indicate at least 8% is obviously proven to be false in court, but when asked more than 40% admits to false accusations, in college this is even over 50%... (False Rape Accusations Are Not Rare, Prevalence of False Rape Claims). A reason for the shift in burden of proof to the man is that it's often the word of one person against the other, and some people (feminists) claimed that it was 2% false accusation at most so this is justified. I still believe men are more likely to rape another person, but a women who was raped is treated with respect, is taken seriously and gets help, while a man who is raped... well have you ever heard a man admit that he was raped? I know someone, he was raped by other men and people joke about it (I'm ashamed to admit that I have participated in this at one time)... But the thing people really joke about even to the point that people who do manage to put themselves over it and go the the police are sent home by laughing cops is men who are raped by women. It does happen, but rarely does a man tell and even more rarely does he file charges (Rape often isn't a crime when women do it - very interesting but shocking article). The idea that men can't be raped by women is ingrained in our culture, and it's extremely sexist. It trivializes a terrible crime... It's right up there with the argument formerly used by men that 'she said no, but actually wanted it'.
Equality of men and women only works if the same standards and definitions are applied equally to men and women, especially in law! Women made a stand for equal rights but the harsh battle they had to endure to get there resulted in an overzealous appr
Yes, you hit the nail on it's head, and it's especially true for programming. It's impossible to know every algorithm off the top of your head, but you have to know something like that exists that solves your problem and know where to find it.
And for that matter does anyone even *know* Pi, or any other useful number, just knowing it's use and perhaps an approximation is enough... 3,141592... that's all I ever need. Just like the quote from Einstein, I know the 'never memorize' and 'look up' part, and Google will find the literal version for me.
Knowing a little of a lot is much better than knowing a lot of a little. By remembering the gist of things and knowing where to look it up you can accomplish much more within the limitations of your brain. It would be fairly pointless if you only memorize Pi until 100.000 decimals and know nothing else, you could accomplish nothing besides show off your fairly pointless skill.
Actually, 363 people want to pay for creating it. At least when I checked... More now I am sure.
At the time of this writing 744, or more than twice the amount, so you can be sure it's more now.:-)
It only takes 'a few' people willing to back a great initiative like this, and I for one have put my money where my mouth is.
I hope there will be more people donating, but more importantly more projects like this to benefit the public by releasing media under a CC license.
It's money much better spent than buying a CD, DVD or even going to a concert since you and everyone else can keep enjoying it *forever*. Keyword 'forever' means infinite more value for your money.;-)
I don't see it as purely medical history... Especially when writing something like a biography referring to a boy as 'she' seems odd. From the perspective of the person who may have known by then that 'he' was actually a 'she' it may make sense, but other people remembering that moment in time remember her as the boy in class, the son, the brother, etcetera, who only later became a woman. It seems like rewriting history when someone perceived from the outside to be a boy is referred to as 'she'. It makes sense and doesn't at the same time so both ways should work depending on source, but especially when something is written from the perspective from an outside source I would prefer the historically correct one as opposed to the personal feeling correct one.
We are talking about the subject freely, that's to your credit. But when people in general become so scared to offend and try to make everyone behave as PC as possible it remains an indication that the subject is 'touchy'. Forcing people to use a PC choice of words makes it a discussion about words, not about the content or topic, and even more it detracts from the question if there is actually intent to insult or cause hurt... that is not caused by a specific word (although admittedly some words may be closely associated with it, but they will fall from grace naturally). This a problem with all PC-craze, not specifically for this topic.
I would like to let you know I am very impressed by the ease you talk about this subject, and would like to thank you for this interesting and enlightening conversation(s). I learned a lot of new things.
Please understand that I do not advocate a defense of 'she made me do it' or anything close to shifting blame. I am trying to point out that the statistics may be misleading since they do not mention accomplices, and given common gender roles when a man and a women are accomplices at the scene of a murder it is likely that the man performs the actual murder and is shown in the graph... (or put the other way around, I consider it a possibility that a lot of those 12% of murders committed by women were committed without a man present). It also does not mean that I think most accomplices are women, it only means that statistics as simple as this can offer a slightly obscured view of the truth. We are only guessing as to why there are more men in the graph...
You make an excellent point with the shoes (interesting statistics also), the biological evolutionary principle of gender roles can indeed be seen in many animal species and should apply to human females just as well. But beside the differences that can be pointed out to exist in the biological sense a lot of other stereotypes are certainly cultural, and although we may be able to explain how this came to be trough cultural evolution. Historically a lot of differences between sexes (that are not physiological) are assumed genetic predispositions in psyche (same goes for race etc.), but turn out to be cultural later on... it's very tricky to properly assess this purely on statistics, even if the statistic clearly shows the difference. It could also mean the gender roles are just stronger than we suspect. So a correct conclusion would be that women tend to take better care of their appearance in general. The shoes and clothes fit that definition, but the specificity of claiming that women have 10x more shoes than man just because they are women is becoming a stereotype. Given a different culture the care women take of themselves could easily come to expression in a different fashion than the shoes (some cultures don't even wear shoes for example).
On the equality part: of course no two people are the same, and there are some inherent differences between men and women, but we are equal in the sense that we are each others peers and deserve the same human rights regardless of gender, sexual preference, or race. I do agree with you that people are taking the 'equal' too literal and deny that there are any differences... We should embrace the differences and especially point out the strong points people have.
You may be right that it's mostly men limiting men at this point, I agree that men in general have not awoken to this realization. It's like I said: the sexual revolution for men has not even started! The transformation and empowerment of women with the rise of feminism is what needs to happen in a way for men. Most men feel obligated to live their life in a very narrow culturally accepted stereotype of a man. Slowly more and more men fight free from this, but resistance is high.
I've experienced this all my life, when I was 4 I liked pink and wore pink clothes and the other children felt obligated to point out it was 'for girls'. When I was older I had long hair, or shorter hair dyed pink (and all kinds of other styles) and I was called girl, gay, and all kinds of other names because of that. I still don't give a shit about what people think about stupid things like clothes or hair, and go to work on my purple-pink bicycle. I've never tried to conform to the accepted male standard, and found that even the slightest deviation will result in idiots feeling the need to make their problems your problem... In my experience men can be really hard about expected male gender types, but women just as well. I dunno, you probably have a much better understanding of things like this, I can only imagine the sort of resistance you may have encountered. I must say I expected some profound insights about both sexes from you, and you certainly have... but it also feels like you feel some resentment toward men. Correct me if I'm wrong (or out of line)
Yeah, we used to love cowboys... they were our lone heroes! Although I would describe Wikileaks a little bit more like Zorro... Not that I've seen them running around with a mask, but the big Z carved into the military uniform kinda gave away it was him sticking it to the man.:)
As someone who is not well versed in the PC way to describe a transgender person I do not even know if 'transgender man' means formerly male or currently male... it seems ambiguous to me especially given the fact that you can have multiple definitions of what is male, would you point out the gender of the psyche or the gender of the genes? And when do you stop calling a man a man, at the point they dress differently, or at the point they get the surgery and lose their penis, and in the case of Hijra from India it becomes more of a distinct class of men instead of women so can you call them men? It raises questions like that because it's a fairly rare phenomenon, for example: how would you address the even more rare person who had a sex change operation twice (it happened)? The problem is that this is outside of the comfort zone of what is well known for most people (this is also the reason for homophobia I guess), and it's not something you can just look up in standard etiquette books. You must understand that it's not easy for people who aren't insiders to know all the answers and proper ways people want others to talk about them.
Why not just 'man' and when the need to clarify arises 'man born a woman' I wonder?
Perhaps it's because in the Netherlands it's become more acceptable and thus less important to adhere to a strict PC way of talking or writing about it... For example the Wikipedia article about the most famous transsexual dutch person start by stating she was born as a boy, and in the text they use 'she' and 'he' in one sentence... It's a natural way of the language, and the Dutch aren't so uptight about PC-ness. The English version of the article specifically does not mention her being born a boy, and never uses the term 'he'... clearly much more PC, but in the eyes of the Dutch that is just hypocritical and 'forcing people not to talk about the elephant in the room'. When it's normal you can talk about it freely, until that time the strong demand for PC-ness only indicates that it is controversial and not yet regarded as normal and equal to other things people are allowed to talk about...
Your statements confuse me a little, for example when you claim that men are killers when men kill... it's a tautology! But it still implies that because men are more likely the killer females are more likely the victim, while the statistics I pointed to show that over 65 percent of the murders are a man killing another man. The fact is that men kill more, but the stereotype that women suffer disproportionately under the aggression of men isn't.
When I talked about anecdotal evidence I meant in regard to that point, most certainly nothing to do with house cleaning. Like the anecdote heard all too often of nightlife incidents involving groups of both males and females where the men are driven to defend the women, often cheered on by them, which sometimes results in one man killing a man from the other group. The women are most certainly involved, but given cultural disposition of men as defenders of the group and their physical strength it's very much more likely to be the man committing the act. This does not prove anything, but places into context a factor as to why men commit more murders. An explanation that men commit more murders because the statics show they commit more murders will not do, and scientific facts like testosterone leading to higher aggression does not explain the whole story. So I am interested in the social, psychological and cultural aspects that also play a role. Hence also the explanation as to why men would culturally be reluctant to ask for directions (I personally don't have that limitation)... to assume it is inherently male is shortsighted to say the least. Feminism proved that a lot of presumed inherently female aspects are stereotypical, why is it so hard for people to understand the same applies to a lot of male gender roles?
I am a firm believer that the sexual revolution did a lot to free women from a lot of stereotypes and expected gender roles. But the revolution is not over yet because men are for the most part still forced into gender roles, and worse they are told they are inherently this way. Have we learned nothing from feminism? For men and women to be truly equal we must also recognize that the same culturally limiting factors that apply to women also apply to men, it's just less obvious if you assume that men rule the world and thus have control over these things... Culture is not decided by a few men, it's all people together creating these roles in an evolutionary fashion, and only be identifying and recognizing this can we change it.
So especially when you have a problem with some things you perceive to be male behavior, attempt to change this not by blaming this on something inherent to the sex... it's so 1950s (just reverse the male-female parts and you'll see that those arguments were exactly the same then). Instead attempt to help give men a chance to change by recognizing that some roles are not inherent to being male. For example: a 'typical' male behavior is to be homophobic, is that inherently male? Hell no! It's only cultural, and specifically cultural conservatism.
Yes, he's also burning the Talmud, but apparently we only care that he's burning the Qur'an. Oddly enough, he's not burning any books from non-Abrahamic religions.
Interesting little detail, do you have a source? But it makes sense, Christians feel most threatened by other Abrahamic religions especially because they are so much alike, it's some evolutionary principle that something just a tiny bit different from you is a bigger competition that something totally different. Buddhism isn't really a direct competition to Christianity for example...
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, people with crap ADSL tend to blame the ISP when their Youtube doesn't play right away and needs minutes to buffer... Especially because they know their neighbors who pay a comparable amount for the 'same' bandwidth can play the video right away without interruptions... Guess which ISP they will switch to next month.
For e-commerce sites this is a different story, they will lose customers when their site responds slowly. But generally this is not the kind of thing people will use to evaluate their ISP bandwidth 'value-for-your-money' and decide if they want to upgrade to a competitor. When bandwidth is prioritized and limited (scarce) at the same time the effect will be most pronounced on high bandwidth sites, so these sites can certainly affect the customer experience for ISPs by limiting their bandwidth to those ISPs.
In my opinion this is a can of worms they should not open, and customers will punish them for trying to pull shit like this. There are other legitimate ways of achieving acceleration (like local caching at the ISP) that can be sold without resorting to double dipping and selling bandwidth twice.
Solution: Press the bookmark 100x, it will be slow as shit but so much fun when you press fire and annihilate the site and your browser at the same time. :)
Lisa, get in here! In this house we obey the laws of thermonuclear war!
:-) I just don't hope they pull a Homer with a nuke!
Oh no, that was another fat stupid American everybody loves...
Hardly, they can already request the details on the 'suspicion' of infringement. With wording like that it would amaze me if it requires substantial proof other than "we detected this IP, look it's in the list". That is something that *will* happen when no court is required to approve the request, there is a reason things should work like that. They see it as cumbersome, we see it as legally required protection against blatant abuse.
They win insurance... Or probably other interesting state secrets that are encrypted. Presuming there are some yet unknown-to-the-public-flaws in AES for example (and like with all algorithms there are) governments could possibly be able to decrypt these kind of files in a matter of years instead of billions. In which case it can be quite beneficial to be a month ahead of 'the other guys' with decryption, with some information a few extra petaflop (or soon exaflop) could mean a world of difference.
Yeah, but they generally don't go around suing for (illegal) bullshit reasons, and I would not suspect them of selling a list of addresses linked to IPs to the highest bidder... With these big media I'm not sure of anything they'll do anymore, as long as it makes them money it will happen at some time, and they have proven that extortion is their game now... It's an easy cash-cow, all the government has to do is look the other way and take bribes, uhhh campaign contributions, from lobbyists.
You are smart enough to use 'faux' to describe this news, but not to google on the French words: 'voleurs paris aspirateur'... For example the first link I found.
;-)
Other than that: Nice try, It's good to check for faux news, but be sure not to make a faux pas youself.
Sorry for the self-reply, I made a mistake... It's 150.000 per *day*, not per month! I actually calculated it right the first time and thought: "wait, that can't be right, I probably switched days and months...". Nope, I did that by mistake after that... So sadly the real calculation is:
150.000 IPs per day = 13,5 million households in 90 days = 3 months!!! So assuming the they have a lot more broadband connections since 2008 it would be around 4 months!
in just 4 months the media company will already own the personal details of *all* French households with internet!!!
Fuck, how crazy are they! The 21st century French revolution is pretty much guaranteed if people are screwed over by the millions at this pace.
Yes, carte blanche indeed... they can basically brute force all French citizens IPs to trace everyone. According to this article France has 13.5 million households with internet. When they request the details of the IPs of 150.000 of those each month it will take 7,5 years to get the details of *all* households in France. Since the article is from 2008 they probably have a higher level of households with internet now, extrapolating increase from 2008 that would be just under 10 years to let them get the details of everyone. After that they only have to keep up with new broadband connections and people that move...
I expect that in roughly 5 years half of France will be without an internet connection (they will of course request actual torrenting IPs first, before going after the rest anyway).
And who wants to bet that they will create a new law in around 10 years that limits the amount of requests they can send 'for community privacy concerns' but simultaneously requires ISPs to notify the media companies when someone moves... The French better start protesting right now to make it real hard on the lobbyists to hold that new law back for 10 years.
You hit the nail on it's head. What is offensive to some is only natural to others, and the other way around.
Objectively I'm inclined to agree that 'bomb' registers higher on a natural 'offensive-scale'. But I firmly believe no word can truly be 'offensive', it's only the intent...
I personally only take offense at people taking offense...
a 'security' guy
You know this guy is Samy Kamkar, the hacker who also unleashed the first-ever XSS worm on the world that infected a million MySpace profiles in a matter of hours...
Tomorrow I happen to attend a meeting of OWASP where Samy will speak about the latest XSS exploits, other JavaScript tricks, and other things (like a nice new method of NAT penetration)... I could say the title 'security guy' is earned by him for finding some great hacks and sharing them with the world, and even taking time to talk about it in person to the open source community.
but most of all, Samy is my hero
From a non-lawyer point of view you can still apply logic and reason to find out this answer. Just ask yourself the question: "which law will benefit the party with the deeper pockets?", in this case the big corporations. Statistically the laws that benefit them have precedence over laws that benefit the consumer with a fairly large margin, so you can assume that this time won't be any different. This is no legal advise, just a layman view of how these things commonly play out...
If they are from management they probably figured that out already...
Yeah, a wildly inefficient demonstration... What's next? Will they attempt to use cloud computing to add 1+1+1+1+1 etc. until they know how many ones you need to add to reach 'infinite'?
We don't need a "men's liberation movement". A large part of women's lib was about ending the legal restraints against women [...] Those legal restraints impeded women from having control of their own money. [...] Contrast that with the situation today. Women aren't in sole control of men's finances. Rape is still mostly a crime committed by men, against both men and women. It's not like women have some legal right to rape men, and men need to be "liberated." [...]
This is a stereotype that is typical for what is commonly accepted, that "men don't need liberation or equal rights since they already have equal rights in law and are much less victims than women". If you read about Men's rights and specifically Masculism (especially on the page of Masculism there are some very valid concerns listed that are often trivialized). In the legal system men are often discriminated against and contrary to their constitutional right assumed guilty until proven innocent. This happens especially in the case of divorce where men disproportionately get no custody, have say about their children basically lose both their children and their money. This is the reason for the existence of the Fathers' Rights Movement. Also interesting to note is that some lawyers will advise women to accuse their husbands of crimes like beating, child molestation or rape exactly because they know the men won't have a chance to defend themselves and will be presumed guilty. The statistics differ but indicate that a large percentage of women who accuse men of rape just lie and are almost always believed. Statistics from the FBI indicate at least 8% is obviously proven to be false in court, but when asked more than 40% admits to false accusations, in college this is even over 50%... (False Rape Accusations Are Not Rare, Prevalence of False Rape Claims). A reason for the shift in burden of proof to the man is that it's often the word of one person against the other, and some people (feminists) claimed that it was 2% false accusation at most so this is justified. I still believe men are more likely to rape another person, but a women who was raped is treated with respect, is taken seriously and gets help, while a man who is raped... well have you ever heard a man admit that he was raped? I know someone, he was raped by other men and people joke about it (I'm ashamed to admit that I have participated in this at one time)... But the thing people really joke about even to the point that people who do manage to put themselves over it and go the the police are sent home by laughing cops is men who are raped by women. It does happen, but rarely does a man tell and even more rarely does he file charges (Rape often isn't a crime when women do it - very interesting but shocking article). The idea that men can't be raped by women is ingrained in our culture, and it's extremely sexist. It trivializes a terrible crime... It's right up there with the argument formerly used by men that 'she said no, but actually wanted it'.
Equality of men and women only works if the same standards and definitions are applied equally to men and women, especially in law! Women made a stand for equal rights but the harsh battle they had to endure to get there resulted in an overzealous appr
I dare you to click (NSFA): http://bit.ly/4ieaw :-)
Yeah, I would love to see her shoveling manure in a confined space, maybe then she'll be able to breathe... metaphorically of course.
Yes, you hit the nail on it's head, and it's especially true for programming. It's impossible to know every algorithm off the top of your head, but you have to know something like that exists that solves your problem and know where to find it.
And for that matter does anyone even *know* Pi, or any other useful number, just knowing it's use and perhaps an approximation is enough... 3,141592... that's all I ever need. Just like the quote from Einstein, I know the 'never memorize' and 'look up' part, and Google will find the literal version for me.
Knowing a little of a lot is much better than knowing a lot of a little. By remembering the gist of things and knowing where to look it up you can accomplish much more within the limitations of your brain. It would be fairly pointless if you only memorize Pi until 100.000 decimals and know nothing else, you could accomplish nothing besides show off your fairly pointless skill.
Actually, 363 people want to pay for creating it. At least when I checked... More now I am sure.
At the time of this writing 744, or more than twice the amount, so you can be sure it's more now. :-)
;-)
It only takes 'a few' people willing to back a great initiative like this, and I for one have put my money where my mouth is.
I hope there will be more people donating, but more importantly more projects like this to benefit the public by releasing media under a CC license.
It's money much better spent than buying a CD, DVD or even going to a concert since you and everyone else can keep enjoying it *forever*. Keyword 'forever' means infinite more value for your money.
I don't see it as purely medical history... Especially when writing something like a biography referring to a boy as 'she' seems odd. From the perspective of the person who may have known by then that 'he' was actually a 'she' it may make sense, but other people remembering that moment in time remember her as the boy in class, the son, the brother, etcetera, who only later became a woman. It seems like rewriting history when someone perceived from the outside to be a boy is referred to as 'she'. It makes sense and doesn't at the same time so both ways should work depending on source, but especially when something is written from the perspective from an outside source I would prefer the historically correct one as opposed to the personal feeling correct one.
We are talking about the subject freely, that's to your credit. But when people in general become so scared to offend and try to make everyone behave as PC as possible it remains an indication that the subject is 'touchy'. Forcing people to use a PC choice of words makes it a discussion about words, not about the content or topic, and even more it detracts from the question if there is actually intent to insult or cause hurt... that is not caused by a specific word (although admittedly some words may be closely associated with it, but they will fall from grace naturally). This a problem with all PC-craze, not specifically for this topic.
I would like to let you know I am very impressed by the ease you talk about this subject, and would like to thank you for this interesting and enlightening conversation(s). I learned a lot of new things.
Please understand that I do not advocate a defense of 'she made me do it' or anything close to shifting blame. I am trying to point out that the statistics may be misleading since they do not mention accomplices, and given common gender roles when a man and a women are accomplices at the scene of a murder it is likely that the man performs the actual murder and is shown in the graph... (or put the other way around, I consider it a possibility that a lot of those 12% of murders committed by women were committed without a man present). It also does not mean that I think most accomplices are women, it only means that statistics as simple as this can offer a slightly obscured view of the truth. We are only guessing as to why there are more men in the graph...
You make an excellent point with the shoes (interesting statistics also), the biological evolutionary principle of gender roles can indeed be seen in many animal species and should apply to human females just as well. But beside the differences that can be pointed out to exist in the biological sense a lot of other stereotypes are certainly cultural, and although we may be able to explain how this came to be trough cultural evolution. Historically a lot of differences between sexes (that are not physiological) are assumed genetic predispositions in psyche (same goes for race etc.), but turn out to be cultural later on... it's very tricky to properly assess this purely on statistics, even if the statistic clearly shows the difference. It could also mean the gender roles are just stronger than we suspect. So a correct conclusion would be that women tend to take better care of their appearance in general. The shoes and clothes fit that definition, but the specificity of claiming that women have 10x more shoes than man just because they are women is becoming a stereotype. Given a different culture the care women take of themselves could easily come to expression in a different fashion than the shoes (some cultures don't even wear shoes for example).
On the equality part: of course no two people are the same, and there are some inherent differences between men and women, but we are equal in the sense that we are each others peers and deserve the same human rights regardless of gender, sexual preference, or race. I do agree with you that people are taking the 'equal' too literal and deny that there are any differences... We should embrace the differences and especially point out the strong points people have.
You may be right that it's mostly men limiting men at this point, I agree that men in general have not awoken to this realization. It's like I said: the sexual revolution for men has not even started! The transformation and empowerment of women with the rise of feminism is what needs to happen in a way for men. Most men feel obligated to live their life in a very narrow culturally accepted stereotype of a man. Slowly more and more men fight free from this, but resistance is high.
I've experienced this all my life, when I was 4 I liked pink and wore pink clothes and the other children felt obligated to point out it was 'for girls'. When I was older I had long hair, or shorter hair dyed pink (and all kinds of other styles) and I was called girl, gay, and all kinds of other names because of that. I still don't give a shit about what people think about stupid things like clothes or hair, and go to work on my purple-pink bicycle. I've never tried to conform to the accepted male standard, and found that even the slightest deviation will result in idiots feeling the need to make their problems your problem... In my experience men can be really hard about expected male gender types, but women just as well. I dunno, you probably have a much better understanding of things like this, I can only imagine the sort of resistance you may have encountered. I must say I expected some profound insights about both sexes from you, and you certainly have... but it also feels like you feel some resentment toward men. Correct me if I'm wrong (or out of line)
Yeah, we used to love cowboys... they were our lone heroes! Although I would describe Wikileaks a little bit more like Zorro... Not that I've seen them running around with a mask, but the big Z carved into the military uniform kinda gave away it was him sticking it to the man. :)
As someone who is not well versed in the PC way to describe a transgender person I do not even know if 'transgender man' means formerly male or currently male... it seems ambiguous to me especially given the fact that you can have multiple definitions of what is male, would you point out the gender of the psyche or the gender of the genes? And when do you stop calling a man a man, at the point they dress differently, or at the point they get the surgery and lose their penis, and in the case of Hijra from India it becomes more of a distinct class of men instead of women so can you call them men? It raises questions like that because it's a fairly rare phenomenon, for example: how would you address the even more rare person who had a sex change operation twice (it happened)? The problem is that this is outside of the comfort zone of what is well known for most people (this is also the reason for homophobia I guess), and it's not something you can just look up in standard etiquette books. You must understand that it's not easy for people who aren't insiders to know all the answers and proper ways people want others to talk about them.
Why not just 'man' and when the need to clarify arises 'man born a woman' I wonder?
Perhaps it's because in the Netherlands it's become more acceptable and thus less important to adhere to a strict PC way of talking or writing about it... For example the Wikipedia article about the most famous transsexual dutch person start by stating she was born as a boy, and in the text they use 'she' and 'he' in one sentence... It's a natural way of the language, and the Dutch aren't so uptight about PC-ness. The English version of the article specifically does not mention her being born a boy, and never uses the term 'he'... clearly much more PC, but in the eyes of the Dutch that is just hypocritical and 'forcing people not to talk about the elephant in the room'. When it's normal you can talk about it freely, until that time the strong demand for PC-ness only indicates that it is controversial and not yet regarded as normal and equal to other things people are allowed to talk about...
Your statements confuse me a little, for example when you claim that men are killers when men kill... it's a tautology! But it still implies that because men are more likely the killer females are more likely the victim, while the statistics I pointed to show that over 65 percent of the murders are a man killing another man. The fact is that men kill more, but the stereotype that women suffer disproportionately under the aggression of men isn't.
When I talked about anecdotal evidence I meant in regard to that point, most certainly nothing to do with house cleaning. Like the anecdote heard all too often of nightlife incidents involving groups of both males and females where the men are driven to defend the women, often cheered on by them, which sometimes results in one man killing a man from the other group. The women are most certainly involved, but given cultural disposition of men as defenders of the group and their physical strength it's very much more likely to be the man committing the act. This does not prove anything, but places into context a factor as to why men commit more murders. An explanation that men commit more murders because the statics show they commit more murders will not do, and scientific facts like testosterone leading to higher aggression does not explain the whole story. So I am interested in the social, psychological and cultural aspects that also play a role. Hence also the explanation as to why men would culturally be reluctant to ask for directions (I personally don't have that limitation)... to assume it is inherently male is shortsighted to say the least. Feminism proved that a lot of presumed inherently female aspects are stereotypical, why is it so hard for people to understand the same applies to a lot of male gender roles?
I am a firm believer that the sexual revolution did a lot to free women from a lot of stereotypes and expected gender roles. But the revolution is not over yet because men are for the most part still forced into gender roles, and worse they are told they are inherently this way. Have we learned nothing from feminism? For men and women to be truly equal we must also recognize that the same culturally limiting factors that apply to women also apply to men, it's just less obvious if you assume that men rule the world and thus have control over these things... Culture is not decided by a few men, it's all people together creating these roles in an evolutionary fashion, and only be identifying and recognizing this can we change it.
So especially when you have a problem with some things you perceive to be male behavior, attempt to change this not by blaming this on something inherent to the sex... it's so 1950s (just reverse the male-female parts and you'll see that those arguments were exactly the same then). Instead attempt to help give men a chance to change by recognizing that some roles are not inherent to being male. For example: a 'typical' male behavior is to be homophobic, is that inherently male? Hell no! It's only cultural, and specifically cultural conservatism.
Yes, he's also burning the Talmud, but apparently we only care that he's burning the Qur'an. Oddly enough, he's not burning any books from non-Abrahamic religions.
Interesting little detail, do you have a source? But it makes sense, Christians feel most threatened by other Abrahamic religions especially because they are so much alike, it's some evolutionary principle that something just a tiny bit different from you is a bigger competition that something totally different. Buddhism isn't really a direct competition to Christianity for example...