I never said it was a problem. I think it gives credence to free software in a corporate-based society like America.
Re:Require digital signing; people will catch on f
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 1
Ah, forgot to mention that part. Yes, presumably, if the overwhelming majority of legitimate emails were digitally signed, spam filtering would be a lot easier, at least if there was a good PKI in place. Even if spammers managed to get trusted signatures on their certificates, the amount of CPU time required to digitally sign a message would decrease the volume of spam they could send out (and those trusted signatures could be quickly revoked when if became clear they were used for spam).
You say you have no mercy for commercial distributors, but the truth is that this sort of obscuration will only increase their business. Companies like Red Hat and Novell have the resources to pay people to spend all day reading through changelogs and deciding whether or not a patch is worth applying (in addition to people to are paid to submit patches). Universities may not have those resources, and their computer centers may only have enough time to quickly check a patch for common security fixes using grep. If it becomes impossible to do that, then all that we'll see is an increase in the number of people who buy support from commercial distributors, because they won't be able to support themselves.
Re:Require digital signing; people will catch on f
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but they will tolerate it for certain purposes. For example, my bank insists upon verifying "unknown" computers by sending text messages to my phone. It is annoying, but they haven't seen a drop in traffic on their website, because people are willing to deal with the annoyance, even if they have no understanding of why it was imposed on them. Likewise, if we started forcing people to sign messages in order to gain access to the latest Internet fad, we would see a vast increase in the number of people digitally signing their email, and a very sharp decline in the amount of spam.
How is that any better? If I need to weigh security against stability, I need to know whether or not a patch fixes a major security bug on production machines or just changes obscure drivers that I don't even use. If I were to see a sudden increase in the number of attempted buffer overflows, I'm gonna want to check for known overflow attacks on the kernel and userspace programs I am administrating.
My theory? Linus is losing his mind, and he slips too far, we will wind up with a fork of the kernel (NetBSD/OpenBSD style).
I wonder if this combination of attacks will lead to an increase in the number of people who fall for the typical, "Hello, I am prince Abracadabra and I need a safe place to store $150000000; what's your bank account number?" I could see it now:
Dear Betterunixthanunix,
Upon reviewing your banking history, we think that you are an ideal candidate for a business deal we need a partner for. It involves the transfer of $2000000, from an offshore account. You will receive a 25% commission on this. If you are interested, please send a scanned copy of your birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and a copy of your last bank statement...
Require digital signing; people will catch on fast
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's a quick way to solve the problem: require digital signatures for "important" emails. Want to sign up for Facebook? Digitally sign your reply to the "verify" email. It is quick, effective, and people who don't know what signing is will catch on really fast.
Shall I also mention that women are usually paid less than men? It isn't PC, but a study once found that women are less likely to demand a raise than men.
I am not personally in this field, but my girlfriend chose neuroscience as her undergraduate major. Race hasn't come up very much, but sexual differences in the brain come up all the time, and no paper can ever contain the phrase, "Men are better at xyz than women." It must always be in very specific, very "scientific" language: Sexual differences have been shown to have an affect on the subjects' ability to perform the given task under the tested conditions. If the conclusion is that "men are better," it is usually phrased, "The average performance of male subjects was x while the average performance of female subjects was y." In my field (electrical engineering), we can be a bit more relaxed when we state our findings: Silicon transistors have faster switching speeds than germanium transistors.
It isn't very PC, but there is no question that a woman's brain is biologically different from a man's brain. Women's brains do respond differently to certain stimuli than men's, and the only open question is why. Feminists outside of the scientific community have embraced the hypothesis that the differences are a result of different areas of the brain being stimulated during the childhood years, because it fits in very nicely with their ideas on women. Within the community, nobody has really been able to figure out whether or not a Y chromosome affects the brain, beyond those sections that are specifically male.
By extension, I can only imagine that race, which is an even more sensitive issue, must always be stated with even more rigorous language, and that open questions are immediately answered by people with preconceived notions on the subject.
Except that one night at the club does not foster resentment by men. Free tuition for many years will undoubtedly foster an enormous resentment among those not getting free tuition, especially if the beneficiaries of that tuition don't have to show an economic disparity in order to receive it. It is difficult to question programs that allow poor people to go through college for free without sounding selfish; it is a little less difficult to say, "Why should that woman, whose family is making more than mine, get free tuition when I don't?"
Like I said, this problem cannot addressed at the college level. It must be addressed at the middle school level, right when kids hit puberty. The shows that target middle school and high school girls should contain subtle hints that science and engineering are not "just for men" if we are going to close this gap. Why aren't the "mother" characters on these shows portrayed as computer programmers or physics researchers? (It doesn't matter if it is an accurate depiction of reality, because such shows almost never reflect the reality of the world anyway).
Pretty much. People get offended at the very question, "Is race a factor in intelligence." Of course they will be offended by any answer other than "No," so unless you plan on writing the world's shortest research paper (one word), you have to use very obscure language to make a point on the subject.
My point was about quotas; quotas are a sort of global topic in this article. My point was that it really doesn't matter why there are different interests across genders, since you said:
"What these 'PC jerks' believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical 'women's interests' are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical 'men's interests.'"
The OP simply noted that men and women have different interests, and that people are refusing to admit that. My point was that he is correct, regardless of why the interests are different, and that the article, which does mention quotas and is about putting science under title IX, is reporting on a completely misguided approach to the problem.
I'll clarify: men and women have different interests. Doesn't matter what the cause is, quotas are not a way to change those interests, just to piss off all the people who have no legitimate bias.
If it is a result of social conditioning, then the way to actually solve it is to stop conditioning girls to dislike/fear science and math. Perhaps we could start by not making shows that cater to teenage girls be centered around fashion.
It is inherently misguided to assume that, whenever there is an imbalance in gender, race, or any other factor in a given field, it is a result of bias by the "gatekeepers" of that field. Sometimes, there is a legitimate imbalance in the interest in that field, to say nothing of the reason for that imbalance.
I've said this about 5 times now, but I'll repeat it for you: my school's electrical engineering department has never had a single allegation of bias, and recently went through a desperate push for female applicants in order to meet the goal of "doubling female enrollment" (recently changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating class has zero women, and there are only 2 in the years that follow). All a quota would do is annoy us, or worse, force us to lower the standard for enrollment so that we can increase the ratio of women to men.
We recognize the merit in our women, by the way. By the same standard that we recognize merit in our men. I've been tutoring my peers for a while, and the few women who've asked me for help have had the EXACT same problems as the men who asked for help, and the exact same complaints about professors (this one grades too hard, this one demands too much in our papers, this one only teaches from the book). I have yet to witness or hear, in any capacity, a woman being discriminated against because of her gender. Maybe at your institution, things are different, but around here, we have absolutely no problem with women.
My university's electrical engineering department recently revised its "double female enrollment" policy with "increase female enrollment," because we no longer have any women in the undergraduate program. There was a desperate push for getting more girls to apply, going as far as publishing posters and pamphlets that deliberately misrepresented the ratio of men to women in the program, and sending those to high schools. We have never had an allegation of bias against our department, whether over gender, race, sexual preference, religion, or nationality, but we still have zero women in my graduating class and only 3 black students (of roughly 80 graduates). Our faculty is certainly diverse; we even have a transsexual professor, and nobody passes any judgment (I have yet to even hear people snicker about it, at least within the department).
What would a quota do? Do you really mean to tell me that there is discrimination of some sort in our department? We don't have zero women because some committee thought men were more able; we have zero women because high school girls are not as interested in electrical or computer engineering as high school boys. It's not just my university; engineering is a field that has possibly the lowest interest among women, and electrical engineering is the lowest among the engineering disciplines.
Why is that so hard to admit? Why do people, who are not even scientists, insist that there is discrimination and demand that those of us who are seeing this first hand agree with them?
[insert witty comment about an institution that must "meat" a quota]
Really though, that is exactly the problem. The people mandating these quotas are assuming that there is an overwhelming number of talented women who are not getting into schools because of a (yet unproven) bias. The reality? Most women just have less interest in certain fields, just like most men have less interest in certain fields. Case-in-point:
My school's electrical engineering program has had a long-running goal: double female enrollment. This recently had to be changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating year has zero women (this includes computer engineering, which is considered a semi-separate department). It's not that the female applicants were discriminated against; in fact, there have been no allegations of discrimination of any type in the department, and we have faculty of all races and genders (and one member who had a sex-change operation a few years ago). There just aren't many female applicants. In fact, the policy for meeting that goal was to increase advertising to female high school seniors, including deliberately skewing the ratio of pictures of male engineers to females (which required us to get pictures from other departments).
If there was a quota for female enrollment, we wouldn't even have an EE department. It is one thing to be politically correct, and I certainly wouldn't go around claiming that women are inherently inferior to men (I would have nothing to base such a claim on anyway, since I have no points of comparison). It is quite another to demand that the statistics be changed through legislation.
So? That still means they have different interests. If the reason for that is that women are encouraged to be interested in non-scientific fields, fine, you can address that issue all you want. Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
This is specifically described in the NIST/NSA protection profiles: when a user's access is revoked, all active sessions and running programs should be terminated as well.
Terrorism? The system is still fully operational. He didn't shut down the city, and I wouldn't be so quick to believe that he granted access to a third party. This man is just a moron who wanted to stick it to his boss.
I believe that was the point of the city claiming that he might have granted access to the system to a third party: make him out to be a really bad guy, rather than some moron trying to get back at his boss, so that the city looks less incompetent. Also note that the system is still operational. The city is trying real hard to paint this guy as some sort of IT-terrorist, but if TFA is any indication, the guy really is just an idiot with a grudge.
Slashdot Mirror
I must have missed the part where Gmail was OSS. Like, with the exception of the presentation logic, you can't really look at the code?
I never said it was a problem. I think it gives credence to free software in a corporate-based society like America.
Ah, forgot to mention that part. Yes, presumably, if the overwhelming majority of legitimate emails were digitally signed, spam filtering would be a lot easier, at least if there was a good PKI in place. Even if spammers managed to get trusted signatures on their certificates, the amount of CPU time required to digitally sign a message would decrease the volume of spam they could send out (and those trusted signatures could be quickly revoked when if became clear they were used for spam).
You say you have no mercy for commercial distributors, but the truth is that this sort of obscuration will only increase their business. Companies like Red Hat and Novell have the resources to pay people to spend all day reading through changelogs and deciding whether or not a patch is worth applying (in addition to people to are paid to submit patches). Universities may not have those resources, and their computer centers may only have enough time to quickly check a patch for common security fixes using grep. If it becomes impossible to do that, then all that we'll see is an increase in the number of people who buy support from commercial distributors, because they won't be able to support themselves.
Yeah, but they will tolerate it for certain purposes. For example, my bank insists upon verifying "unknown" computers by sending text messages to my phone. It is annoying, but they haven't seen a drop in traffic on their website, because people are willing to deal with the annoyance, even if they have no understanding of why it was imposed on them. Likewise, if we started forcing people to sign messages in order to gain access to the latest Internet fad, we would see a vast increase in the number of people digitally signing their email, and a very sharp decline in the amount of spam.
How is that any better? If I need to weigh security against stability, I need to know whether or not a patch fixes a major security bug on production machines or just changes obscure drivers that I don't even use. If I were to see a sudden increase in the number of attempted buffer overflows, I'm gonna want to check for known overflow attacks on the kernel and userspace programs I am administrating.
My theory? Linus is losing his mind, and he slips too far, we will wind up with a fork of the kernel (NetBSD/OpenBSD style).
I wonder if this combination of attacks will lead to an increase in the number of people who fall for the typical, "Hello, I am prince Abracadabra and I need a safe place to store $150000000; what's your bank account number?" I could see it now:
Dear Betterunixthanunix,
Upon reviewing your banking history, we think that you are an ideal candidate for a business deal we need a partner for. It involves the transfer of $2000000, from an offshore account. You will receive a 25% commission on this. If you are interested, please send a scanned copy of your birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and a copy of your last bank statement...
Here's a quick way to solve the problem: require digital signatures for "important" emails. Want to sign up for Facebook? Digitally sign your reply to the "verify" email. It is quick, effective, and people who don't know what signing is will catch on really fast.
It's still in beta. Bugs like massive amounts of spam originating from the service are bound to turn in up in beta software.
Much good it did him: he is sitting in a jail cell.
Shall I also mention that women are usually paid less than men? It isn't PC, but a study once found that women are less likely to demand a raise than men.
I am not personally in this field, but my girlfriend chose neuroscience as her undergraduate major. Race hasn't come up very much, but sexual differences in the brain come up all the time, and no paper can ever contain the phrase, "Men are better at xyz than women." It must always be in very specific, very "scientific" language: Sexual differences have been shown to have an affect on the subjects' ability to perform the given task under the tested conditions. If the conclusion is that "men are better," it is usually phrased, "The average performance of male subjects was x while the average performance of female subjects was y." In my field (electrical engineering), we can be a bit more relaxed when we state our findings: Silicon transistors have faster switching speeds than germanium transistors.
It isn't very PC, but there is no question that a woman's brain is biologically different from a man's brain. Women's brains do respond differently to certain stimuli than men's, and the only open question is why. Feminists outside of the scientific community have embraced the hypothesis that the differences are a result of different areas of the brain being stimulated during the childhood years, because it fits in very nicely with their ideas on women. Within the community, nobody has really been able to figure out whether or not a Y chromosome affects the brain, beyond those sections that are specifically male.
By extension, I can only imagine that race, which is an even more sensitive issue, must always be stated with even more rigorous language, and that open questions are immediately answered by people with preconceived notions on the subject.
Except that one night at the club does not foster resentment by men. Free tuition for many years will undoubtedly foster an enormous resentment among those not getting free tuition, especially if the beneficiaries of that tuition don't have to show an economic disparity in order to receive it. It is difficult to question programs that allow poor people to go through college for free without sounding selfish; it is a little less difficult to say, "Why should that woman, whose family is making more than mine, get free tuition when I don't?"
Like I said, this problem cannot addressed at the college level. It must be addressed at the middle school level, right when kids hit puberty. The shows that target middle school and high school girls should contain subtle hints that science and engineering are not "just for men" if we are going to close this gap. Why aren't the "mother" characters on these shows portrayed as computer programmers or physics researchers? (It doesn't matter if it is an accurate depiction of reality, because such shows almost never reflect the reality of the world anyway).
Pretty much. People get offended at the very question, "Is race a factor in intelligence." Of course they will be offended by any answer other than "No," so unless you plan on writing the world's shortest research paper (one word), you have to use very obscure language to make a point on the subject.
It might be better received if it were stated like this:
Populations and specific subgroups with ancestors from a specific geographical regions show varying levels of average intelligence.
My point was about quotas; quotas are a sort of global topic in this article. My point was that it really doesn't matter why there are different interests across genders, since you said:
"What these 'PC jerks' believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical 'women's interests' are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical 'men's interests.'"
The OP simply noted that men and women have different interests, and that people are refusing to admit that. My point was that he is correct, regardless of why the interests are different, and that the article, which does mention quotas and is about putting science under title IX, is reporting on a completely misguided approach to the problem.
I'll clarify: men and women have different interests. Doesn't matter what the cause is, quotas are not a way to change those interests, just to piss off all the people who have no legitimate bias.
If it is a result of social conditioning, then the way to actually solve it is to stop conditioning girls to dislike/fear science and math. Perhaps we could start by not making shows that cater to teenage girls be centered around fashion.
It is inherently misguided to assume that, whenever there is an imbalance in gender, race, or any other factor in a given field, it is a result of bias by the "gatekeepers" of that field. Sometimes, there is a legitimate imbalance in the interest in that field, to say nothing of the reason for that imbalance.
I've said this about 5 times now, but I'll repeat it for you: my school's electrical engineering department has never had a single allegation of bias, and recently went through a desperate push for female applicants in order to meet the goal of "doubling female enrollment" (recently changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating class has zero women, and there are only 2 in the years that follow). All a quota would do is annoy us, or worse, force us to lower the standard for enrollment so that we can increase the ratio of women to men.
We recognize the merit in our women, by the way. By the same standard that we recognize merit in our men. I've been tutoring my peers for a while, and the few women who've asked me for help have had the EXACT same problems as the men who asked for help, and the exact same complaints about professors (this one grades too hard, this one demands too much in our papers, this one only teaches from the book). I have yet to witness or hear, in any capacity, a woman being discriminated against because of her gender. Maybe at your institution, things are different, but around here, we have absolutely no problem with women.
My university's electrical engineering department recently revised its "double female enrollment" policy with "increase female enrollment," because we no longer have any women in the undergraduate program. There was a desperate push for getting more girls to apply, going as far as publishing posters and pamphlets that deliberately misrepresented the ratio of men to women in the program, and sending those to high schools. We have never had an allegation of bias against our department, whether over gender, race, sexual preference, religion, or nationality, but we still have zero women in my graduating class and only 3 black students (of roughly 80 graduates). Our faculty is certainly diverse; we even have a transsexual professor, and nobody passes any judgment (I have yet to even hear people snicker about it, at least within the department).
What would a quota do? Do you really mean to tell me that there is discrimination of some sort in our department? We don't have zero women because some committee thought men were more able; we have zero women because high school girls are not as interested in electrical or computer engineering as high school boys. It's not just my university; engineering is a field that has possibly the lowest interest among women, and electrical engineering is the lowest among the engineering disciplines.
Why is that so hard to admit? Why do people, who are not even scientists, insist that there is discrimination and demand that those of us who are seeing this first hand agree with them?
[insert witty comment about an institution that must "meat" a quota]
Really though, that is exactly the problem. The people mandating these quotas are assuming that there is an overwhelming number of talented women who are not getting into schools because of a (yet unproven) bias. The reality? Most women just have less interest in certain fields, just like most men have less interest in certain fields. Case-in-point:
My school's electrical engineering program has had a long-running goal: double female enrollment. This recently had to be changed to "increase female enrollment" because my graduating year has zero women (this includes computer engineering, which is considered a semi-separate department). It's not that the female applicants were discriminated against; in fact, there have been no allegations of discrimination of any type in the department, and we have faculty of all races and genders (and one member who had a sex-change operation a few years ago). There just aren't many female applicants. In fact, the policy for meeting that goal was to increase advertising to female high school seniors, including deliberately skewing the ratio of pictures of male engineers to females (which required us to get pictures from other departments).
If there was a quota for female enrollment, we wouldn't even have an EE department. It is one thing to be politically correct, and I certainly wouldn't go around claiming that women are inherently inferior to men (I would have nothing to base such a claim on anyway, since I have no points of comparison). It is quite another to demand that the statistics be changed through legislation.
So? That still means they have different interests. If the reason for that is that women are encouraged to be interested in non-scientific fields, fine, you can address that issue all you want. Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Honestly, why is that so hard to admit?
This is specifically described in the NIST/NSA protection profiles: when a user's access is revoked, all active sessions and running programs should be terminated as well.
Terrorism? The system is still fully operational. He didn't shut down the city, and I wouldn't be so quick to believe that he granted access to a third party. This man is just a moron who wanted to stick it to his boss.
I believe that was the point of the city claiming that he might have granted access to the system to a third party: make him out to be a really bad guy, rather than some moron trying to get back at his boss, so that the city looks less incompetent. Also note that the system is still operational. The city is trying real hard to paint this guy as some sort of IT-terrorist, but if TFA is any indication, the guy really is just an idiot with a grudge.
I guess he was pretty happy, until he was fired.