Girls score higher than boys in most subject areas in school. Women make up more than half of all college students. A high percentage of law and medical students are female. Women are not penalized socially for being smart or articulate.
all of that is true, until they have kids. many women choose (or are pressured) to stay home for a number of years and may or may not return to the workplace. men, who according to some, are statisitcally inferior, choose (or are pressured) to stay in the work force. they continue to advance professionally until they hit the critical age of 45-55, which is considered the height of earning potential. women who have left the workplace for an extended period of time often lag behind men (in professional terms) who have never left.
i think that while the workplace has made huge strides for women's equality, however, the home has not.
"Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question."
well said. the thing with the united states as it is today is that logical arguments, however true they may be, make for terrible soundbytes. sadly, soundbytes are what makes the country go 'round. for example, there are a dozen points to be made in the net neutrality debate, but the anti-neutrality side simply said "net-neutrality means that you pay more". that would have been the deathblow to all those who support net-neutrality, but thankfully "old intertubes" shot his mouth off and did, by way of the almighty soundbyte, what no bit of net neutrality reason or logic could... produce a useful soundbyte.
the trouble with winning elections based on soundbytes is, to quote a line from eddie murphy's "the distinguished gentleman": soundbytes are not sworn testimony... and therefore not legally enforcable.
there is hope tho... steven colbert's "truthiness" is a big hit. he pokes fun at the power that emotion and soundbytes have and people love it. assuming of course that the unwashed masses actually understand what he is talking about.
Why aren't cars illegal, then? Why aren't there driver terror lists? Alchohol watch lists?
dude, booze and cars are great sources of tax revenue. if you could get terra-ists to pay enough in taxes and have their own lobby on capitol hill, boards of education would teach kids how to make bombs in shop class.
i thought open source was all about being cooler than people that use software from microsoft and laughing at them when new vulnerabilities are annouonced... or was that why we all love macs?
while i haven't played AA, i would imagine that it is wholesome compared to GTA because you are playing an american fighting in the desert against "terrorists" instead of playing a black teenager in california listening to rap music and shooting at white people. there is probably a lower occurence of prostitutes in AA. tho, running over a hooker in an abrams tank would be way cooler than running over one in a car. perhaps we will see that in GTA: kabalah city
the logic is simple: setting muslims on fire is good, stealing cars from white people is bad. AA is good, GTA is bad.
my dad was a scout in vietnam and two VC's set off a giant bomb in a riverbed while his squad was crossing it. my dad was largely unharmed. the VCs were running away from the scene and my dad took them out with an airburst round fired from a grenade launcher. i know this because i read the writeup for his bronze star. my dad never really talked about vietnam.
i know he had nightmares and a few flashbacks. the sound of helicopters always made him nervous. other than that, he was a very regular guy, even boring at times. he was a pharmacist and went to work everyday, right up until he died.
my point is that i know my dad killed at least two people, and probably a few more. i don't know if he felt guilty or not, but i can tell you that he never did it again. he was a dog handler in the army and used dogs to threaten prisoners into talking. i don't know if he felt guilty about that or not either, but i know he never did that again either.
guilt and circumstances have nothing to do with whether or not a person will do something again. you can't account for anything that people do.
So there's no hook from gaming to learning. The result? A whole generation of WoW addicts who couldn't go 1 day without touching a keyboard, but who haven't the faintest idea what's happening inside those magic boxes.
that's is my wife in a nutshell. she was in the asheron's call beta and was one of the only female monarchs in the game. she was even interviewed by time magazine for an article on female MMORPG'ers. i opened her dell to upgrade the harddrive and she was nervous that i would break something. when i asked her if her 1000hour sims game was backed up (just in case) she was like "i have no idea what you are talking about".
she is not just an avid gamer, but she uses the internet for pretty much everything. she can produce an itinerary and coupons for just about any activity that we can come up with. she can text way faster than i can and we IM all day long while we are at work... yet she has very little knowlege of how computers, phones, websites, or networks operate. she represents this new phylum of geek that is steeped in geek culture, without actually posessing true geek powers.
in the harry potter books these types are known as "squibs"... people who grew up in the wizarding world, yet have no innate wizarding powers.
i remember in the 90's when getting linux installed made you a geek god. ubuntu is a breeze to set up and pretty much just works right out of the box. customizing the kernel for your processor and everything is super easy as well. thanks ubuntu for ruining linux for elitist pricks like me:-(
I will concede that most Windows instability these days is due to crappy drivers
why are the drivers so crappy? because the guys that write the drivers [should] have knowlege of the documented windows APIs, but they know very little about it's internals. why are *BSD drivers so much better? because most of them are written by the same teams that maintain the respective BSD, with intimate understanding of the OS. why are there so few *BSD drivers? because most of them are written by the same teams that maintain the respective BSD, with intimate understanding of the OS.
FreeBSD/Linux has *no* control at all over the hardware platform, supports more hardware (well, hardware that people actually *use*) out of the box
freeBSD and Linux don't support random hardware. there are Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) so you know what to buy *before* you install or so you can pick your distro based on the gear you have at hand, tho no one actually does that. an HCL is control over the hardware platform because they tell you what will work and what won't. cheap/crappy hardware vendors do not often ship linux drivers, and rarely provide BSD ones, so it's up to the communities to provide them, hence the reduced capacity for device support. *BSD/linux teams can add to and subtract from the hardware platform based on what they support (see the openBSD team and RAID adapters). is there more stability and performance on *BSD/linux when you use compatible/supported hardware? hell yes.
no one buys a PCI card or a USB peripheral and worries about it working with windows, and they are shocked if the device fails to work. try buying a sony tablet PC and dropping slackware on it and see how far you get, or plugging a $100 3-in-1 USB scanner/copier/printer into your freeBSD box and see if you can scan (or even print for that matter), and as for your treo smart phone... forget about it.
i am not taking up for MS, nor am i bashing osX, BSD, or linux but in the case of "random/cheap hardware support" the smart money bets on windows. if you happen to have all the gear that linux/*BSD has support for and is compiled into the stock kernel, then you are absolutely right that it will work out of the box, and do it beautifully. however, if you have something bleeding edge or really obscure, that's a completely different story. the caveat with windows that i *know* i will sacrifice stability, performance, and possibly even security for that level of hardware support (not even god knows what security flaws live in that ATI suite you have to run with their card). it's like building your house out of straw versus building it out of bricks (or in the case of openBSD, chiseling your house out of a block of solid granite), you get out of it what you put into it.
i'll bet that 3 out of 5 hardware related posts by n00bs to *BSD/linux community boards are about random (as in "not on the HCL") hardware: i.e. integrated sound/video on a cheap mobo, stuff integrated into laptops, modems, WiFi cards, SATA raid, etc. it is absolutely true that most of the big linux distros have good support for *most* *common* hardware (especially the desktop/server variety), but it's also true that most BSD users' first complaint about those same big linux distros is bloat and instability. compare that with openBSD, where you have far less support for cheap/recent/crappy hardware, but the OS itself is nigh unstoppable. there are many more criteria to judge an OS by than it's support for random hardware.
i hate to sound like i am taking up for MS, or bashing the "anything but microsoft" camp, but the most of the reason that sun and apple can claim such great stability is because of their tight control over the hardware platform. most of the bloat in windows is plug and play and legacy software support.
if OsX had to support all the random hardware out there, i am sure that it's complexity (and bloat, instability, and tendency to crash) would skyrocket.
98's actually gone? someone tell the researchers at my university that. about once a month i have to do some sort of windows98 voodoo on a machine plugged into a microscope.
I thought sex was something only adults who are married did and that it served no purpose beyond procreation. I still see no reason for anyone to have sex other than procreation, but apparently most of the world puts sex on some pedastal and considers it the greatest thing ever...for absolutely no reason. Now, guys could get all excited about vaginas if they were this really rare and precious thing, but ya know what? They're not. Half the population has them, so who really cares?
have you ever met a male of your species? it wouldn't matter if vaginas grew on trees or fell from the sky when it rained... dudes would *still* fight wars over them.
vagina, or rather the pursuit of it, is what makes the western world go 'round. it's the reason men get jobs, buy houses, and try to drive nice cars. it's why there are fancy restaurants, jewelry stores, chocolate, wine, and flowers. it's the reason that poems are written and why guys learn to play guitar. i'm pretty sure dudes win the nobel prize just so they can impress vaginas... i mean women. if there were no vaginas, there would be no reason for men to do anything.
this is a classic example of an artist of no small accomplishment not being taken care of by the industry he sold his work to. much like musicians that make platinum albums or win grammies and end up in debt to their labels. clearly the content industry model works and everyone is adequately protected.
i personally handed out a hundred or so deffective by design pamphlets at the university of cincinnati today. we didn't set anything on fire. sadly, i didn't get arrested either. tho i am hopeful for next year.
it doesn't surprise me... dudes sign up to cruise for booty and give up when they find out that getting girls online is as hard if not harder than in the real world. women sign up and hang out with other women and the handful of sycopahnts who lavish praise upon them.
Slashdot Mirror
Girls score higher than boys in most subject areas in school. Women make up more than half of all college students. A high percentage of law and medical students are female. Women are not penalized socially for being smart or articulate.
all of that is true, until they have kids. many women choose (or are pressured) to stay home for a number of years and may or may not return to the workplace. men, who according to some, are statisitcally inferior, choose (or are pressured) to stay in the work force. they continue to advance professionally until they hit the critical age of 45-55, which is considered the height of earning potential. women who have left the workplace for an extended period of time often lag behind men (in professional terms) who have never left.
i think that while the workplace has made huge strides for women's equality, however, the home has not.
i think he means that if the RIAA can "prove" that capping bandwidth reduces "piracy" they will push for it in AMERICA.
i would read his blog, but it looks like it was handwritten by a 3 year old. jesus ahmadinejad, ever heard of the "arial" font?
"Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question."
well said. the thing with the united states as it is today is that logical arguments, however true they may be, make for terrible soundbytes. sadly, soundbytes are what makes the country go 'round. for example, there are a dozen points to be made in the net neutrality debate, but the anti-neutrality side simply said "net-neutrality means that you pay more". that would have been the deathblow to all those who support net-neutrality, but thankfully "old intertubes" shot his mouth off and did, by way of the almighty soundbyte, what no bit of net neutrality reason or logic could... produce a useful soundbyte.
the trouble with winning elections based on soundbytes is, to quote a line from eddie murphy's "the distinguished gentleman": soundbytes are not sworn testimony... and therefore not legally enforcable.
there is hope tho... steven colbert's "truthiness" is a big hit. he pokes fun at the power that emotion and soundbytes have and people love it. assuming of course that the unwashed masses actually understand what he is talking about.
I thought America was the place where people believed "live free or die", not "live under oppression or move on".
i think you mean "give me convenience or give me death". liberty just isn't very convenient.
Why aren't cars illegal, then? Why aren't there driver terror lists? Alchohol watch lists?
dude, booze and cars are great sources of tax revenue. if you could get terra-ists to pay enough in taxes and have their own lobby on capitol hill, boards of education would teach kids how to make bombs in shop class.
nah, like how mozilla^H^H^H^H^H^Hfirefox eclipsed^H^H^H^H^H^Hfragmented the netscape userbase.
i thought open source was all about being cooler than people that use software from microsoft and laughing at them when new vulnerabilities are annouonced... or was that why we all love macs?
while i haven't played AA, i would imagine that it is wholesome compared to GTA because you are playing an american fighting in the desert against "terrorists" instead of playing a black teenager in california listening to rap music and shooting at white people. there is probably a lower occurence of prostitutes in AA. tho, running over a hooker in an abrams tank would be way cooler than running over one in a car. perhaps we will see that in GTA: kabalah city
the logic is simple: setting muslims on fire is good, stealing cars from white people is bad. AA is good, GTA is bad.
my dad was a scout in vietnam and two VC's set off a giant bomb in a riverbed while his squad was crossing it. my dad was largely unharmed. the VCs were running away from the scene and my dad took them out with an airburst round fired from a grenade launcher. i know this because i read the writeup for his bronze star. my dad never really talked about vietnam.
i know he had nightmares and a few flashbacks. the sound of helicopters always made him nervous. other than that, he was a very regular guy, even boring at times. he was a pharmacist and went to work everyday, right up until he died.
my point is that i know my dad killed at least two people, and probably a few more. i don't know if he felt guilty or not, but i can tell you that he never did it again. he was a dog handler in the army and used dogs to threaten prisoners into talking. i don't know if he felt guilty about that or not either, but i know he never did that again either.
guilt and circumstances have nothing to do with whether or not a person will do something again. you can't account for anything that people do.
that's awesome.
sometimes we old folks change email addresses and lose our ability to log in with our old accounts.
they bought blogger, and before they did, the blogger website was a shining monument to instability.
dude, you just described every PC i have ever fixed for a friend/family member.
So there's no hook from gaming to learning. The result? A whole generation of WoW addicts who couldn't go 1 day without touching a keyboard, but who haven't the faintest idea what's happening inside those magic boxes.
that's is my wife in a nutshell. she was in the asheron's call beta and was one of the only female monarchs in the game. she was even interviewed by time magazine for an article on female MMORPG'ers. i opened her dell to upgrade the harddrive and she was nervous that i would break something. when i asked her if her 1000hour sims game was backed up (just in case) she was like "i have no idea what you are talking about".
she is not just an avid gamer, but she uses the internet for pretty much everything. she can produce an itinerary and coupons for just about any activity that we can come up with. she can text way faster than i can and we IM all day long while we are at work... yet she has very little knowlege of how computers, phones, websites, or networks operate. she represents this new phylum of geek that is steeped in geek culture, without actually posessing true geek powers.
in the harry potter books these types are known as "squibs"... people who grew up in the wizarding world, yet have no innate wizarding powers.
i remember in the 90's when getting linux installed made you a geek god. ubuntu is a breeze to set up and pretty much just works right out of the box. customizing the kernel for your processor and everything is super easy as well. thanks ubuntu for ruining linux for elitist pricks like me :-(
I will concede that most Windows instability these days is due to crappy drivers
why are the drivers so crappy? because the guys that write the drivers [should] have knowlege of the documented windows APIs, but they know very little about it's internals. why are *BSD drivers so much better? because most of them are written by the same teams that maintain the respective BSD, with intimate understanding of the OS. why are there so few *BSD drivers? because most of them are written by the same teams that maintain the respective BSD, with intimate understanding of the OS.
FreeBSD/Linux has *no* control at all over the hardware platform, supports more hardware (well, hardware that people actually *use*) out of the box
freeBSD and Linux don't support random hardware. there are Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) so you know what to buy *before* you install or so you can pick your distro based on the gear you have at hand, tho no one actually does that. an HCL is control over the hardware platform because they tell you what will work and what won't. cheap/crappy hardware vendors do not often ship linux drivers, and rarely provide BSD ones, so it's up to the communities to provide them, hence the reduced capacity for device support. *BSD/linux teams can add to and subtract from the hardware platform based on what they support (see the openBSD team and RAID adapters). is there more stability and performance on *BSD/linux when you use compatible/supported hardware? hell yes.
no one buys a PCI card or a USB peripheral and worries about it working with windows, and they are shocked if the device fails to work. try buying a sony tablet PC and dropping slackware on it and see how far you get, or plugging a $100 3-in-1 USB scanner/copier/printer into your freeBSD box and see if you can scan (or even print for that matter), and as for your treo smart phone... forget about it.
i am not taking up for MS, nor am i bashing osX, BSD, or linux but in the case of "random/cheap hardware support" the smart money bets on windows. if you happen to have all the gear that linux/*BSD has support for and is compiled into the stock kernel, then you are absolutely right that it will work out of the box, and do it beautifully. however, if you have something bleeding edge or really obscure, that's a completely different story. the caveat with windows that i *know* i will sacrifice stability, performance, and possibly even security for that level of hardware support (not even god knows what security flaws live in that ATI suite you have to run with their card). it's like building your house out of straw versus building it out of bricks (or in the case of openBSD, chiseling your house out of a block of solid granite), you get out of it what you put into it.
i'll bet that 3 out of 5 hardware related posts by n00bs to *BSD/linux community boards are about random (as in "not on the HCL") hardware: i.e. integrated sound/video on a cheap mobo, stuff integrated into laptops, modems, WiFi cards, SATA raid, etc. it is absolutely true that most of the big linux distros have good support for *most* *common* hardware (especially the desktop/server variety), but it's also true that most BSD users' first complaint about those same big linux distros is bloat and instability. compare that with openBSD, where you have far less support for cheap/recent/crappy hardware, but the OS itself is nigh unstoppable. there are many more criteria to judge an OS by than it's support for random hardware.
about being a 32 year old white guy with a myspace profile :-)
i hate to sound like i am taking up for MS, or bashing the "anything but microsoft" camp, but the most of the reason that sun and apple can claim such great stability is because of their tight control over the hardware platform. most of the bloat in windows is plug and play and legacy software support.
if OsX had to support all the random hardware out there, i am sure that it's complexity (and bloat, instability, and tendency to crash) would skyrocket.
98's actually gone? someone tell the researchers at my university that. about once a month i have to do some sort of windows98 voodoo on a machine plugged into a microscope.
listen in on the calls at your company's helpdesk. they weren't trained in the first place, so why re-train them?
have you ever met a male of your species? it wouldn't matter if vaginas grew on trees or fell from the sky when it rained... dudes would *still* fight wars over them.
vagina, or rather the pursuit of it, is what makes the western world go 'round. it's the reason men get jobs, buy houses, and try to drive nice cars. it's why there are fancy restaurants, jewelry stores, chocolate, wine, and flowers. it's the reason that poems are written and why guys learn to play guitar. i'm pretty sure dudes win the nobel prize just so they can impress vaginas... i mean women. if there were no vaginas, there would be no reason for men to do anything.
this is a classic example of an artist of no small accomplishment not being taken care of by the industry he sold his work to. much like musicians that make platinum albums or win grammies and end up in debt to their labels. clearly the content industry model works and everyone is adequately protected.
i personally handed out a hundred or so deffective by design pamphlets at the university of cincinnati today. we didn't set anything on fire. sadly, i didn't get arrested either. tho i am hopeful for next year.
it doesn't surprise me... dudes sign up to cruise for booty and give up when they find out that getting girls online is as hard if not harder than in the real world. women sign up and hang out with other women and the handful of sycopahnts who lavish praise upon them.