Even if they don't allow it, maybe they would rather their employees donated in their own free time and not on their network?
You could at least read and understand the summary (RAUTFS?). It is not just Microsoft's own network; this is something a Microsoft product that is used on numerous corporate networks is doing.
It is not impossible to block Tor. A standard approach is to have the firewall block all Tor entry nodes, which forces people to use bridge nodes instead. Increasingly, though, there is an approach that is much harder to evade: blocking of connections that match Tor's "fingerprint" i.e. because Tor uses OpenSSL in a way that can be distinguished from Firefox+NSS etc.
Of course, there is a bright side if you are dealing with a school or corporate firewall: you can always set up a system at your house that you SSH to, and use as a proxy server. That was something friends of mine used to do in high school.
Would you also suggest that in the United States nobody can make the argument that the court system is the appropriate for dealing with accusations of criminal conduct in this century?
Considering how vast, broad, and overwhelmingly complex our criminal code is, I absolutely would make that argument. It was recently pointed out that if everyone who is arrested did exercise their right to a jury trial, the system would come grinding to a halt:
When more people are criminals than the court system can deal with, the problem is the law, not the behavior of the people. Most people are not murderers, robbers, rapists, arsonists, etc., yet almost everyone living in America is guilty of some felony offense. We need legal reforms, we need them to be sweeping and we need them to happen soon.
The problem here is that due process means courts -- long, expensive procedures are used to decide if copyright infringement took place. Nobody can make the argument that such a system is appropriate in this century. As the RIAA discovered, you simply cannot sue everyone who infringes copyrights online, there are too many people doing it.
The copyright industry thinks that the problem is with due process, as opposed to attempting to apply a concept that originated in an age of printing presses to a society where everyone has the equipment needed to make perfect copies in their homes.
Have some fun with your last summer before college. Spend time with your friends, especially those who you will not be seeing in college. You should also study fun things, things that schools do not teach you. Read books (not just programming books), study interesting approaches to programming (Forth comes to mind -- not commonly taught in schools, not strictly applicable to most careers, but definitely an interesting language that is worth studying, if you have time). College should be about having your mind opened; if you want a head start, spend some time opening your mind before you arrive.
Can someone please remind me why people should be unable to examine the software in their medical devices, software that their lives may depend on? Why these programs are not open to public review?
Oh wait, I got sidetracked thinking that the point of medical devices is to keep people healthy, rather than to rake in profits for the companies that make them.
Of course the software the L3 scanners use doesn't show any 'nude' pics anymore
Irrelevant; the nudity was just humiliation added to the violation of our rights. The fact that we are being scanned, and that refusal to submit to such a scan results in a disgusting invasion of personal privacy, is the problem.
Ironically, when the software was updated the worry was that it would be less effective and it seems they might be correct
Really, that was the worry? I am more concerned about the huge crowd of people waiting to be scanned. You know, the huge, unprotected target that practically screams "suicide bomb!"
However, were I planning to smuggle something on the plane myself I would hardly count on the scanner not picking it up
If someone were hell-bent on hijacking a plane and the scanner picked up their bomb / gun, don't you think they would just attack all the people within range of the scanner? See above about the huge crowd, and don't think for a second that the crowd would become anything less than a deadly stampede if someone pulled a gun out.
Locking cabin doors, putting guards on airplanes, and having passengers who know that they are not just going to be held hostage is how we stop terrorists from using our airplanes as weapons. Abandoning our rights and going through a useless charade at the airport will neither stop terrorists nor keep us safe from people who wish to do us harm (hint: many of those people hold positions of power in our government, and are only being restrained by the very rights we seem to be eager to abandon).
If people want to fight the TSA, they should consider the following:
Vote against any politician who has not pushed to remove the TSA from their role in airport security. That means the majority of Democrats and Republicans, as if there were not enough reasons to vote against the major parties.
Refuse to be scanned. Force the TSA to pat people down, and as soon as you feel that they are making you unnecessarily uncomfortable, report the agents' misconduct. The agents in the airports are complicit in this program; don't show them mercy or make excuses for them. The TSA's program depends on the availability of willing agents who believe they can follow orders with impunity.
Also, coordinate these refusals, so they occur during busy travel holidays. Overwhelm the TSA, turn the airports into a nightmare, and force people to confront the realities of the TSA's program.
Boycott the airlines. Take trains, take buses, take boats, and drive whenever it is possible and not too much of a burden. The current set of politicians cares about business interests, so put the pressure on businesses.
Actually, the men i generally hang out with don't do that. There will occasionally be teasing and gently ribbing, but women are perfectly able to hand that kind of interaction
It varies from place to place; some of my observations on work environments are based on the blue collar work that my mother did, where people are "fresh" and perhaps a little less mature (e.g. long tools being held to stick out of one's crotch, jokes about firefighters and long hosts [there was a fire once], etc.). My mother and the other women who worked there were able to handle such jokes just as well as the men, and were just as able as the men to remind their coworkers when a joke has gone too far and what the limits of acceptable jokes are (which is very important -- I have seen similar things in undergrad engineering programs. In general, people who can keep their peers within boundaries will not face harassment, or at least that is what I have observed.).
Really, I was being rhetorical when I spoke of men not being able to handle that sort of environment. There are men who find it difficult to remind their peers where the boundaries are, and they wind up getting trampled. There just seem to be fewer such men, which is a phenomenon that is probably worth investigating, if it has not been already. Telling people that joking around is not allowed because jokes can get out of hand just makes the work environment more stressful (when I last worked for a corporation, we were told that jokes that might be deemed offensive were strictly prohibited -- which basically meant that almost all jokes that could be made in a given day were off the table, and even non-offensive jokes seemed to not happen).
My experience is pretty limited, but what i've heard from other people indicates that many other companies aren't nearly as pleasant. "Surprisingly" a lot of those companies don't have anywhere near as many female employees in the technical sections as we do.
What makes you think that one has anything to do with the other? There are certainly unpleasant, stressful environments where women work; the New York City public school system comes to mind.
As for your idea that people shouldn't work in a field if they can't handle the requirements is fair, but getting harassed by your coworkers is hardly a requirement.
No, getting harassed is bad; but harassment is something that builds up over time, as people stray further and further from the appropriate boundaries. Someone who can remind people where the boundaries are early on is someone who is going to face little harassment in their profession.
Now, there may be environments where even the toughest woman would not stand a chance, because there is a culture of harassment that begins from day one. I agree, that is something that needs to be fixed where it exists. I have yet to encounter such an environment in any school, online forum, blue collar or white collar work environment that I have been exposed to. If people say such places exist, I do not doubt them, but I have difficulty believing that such places are anything close to the norm in this century.
Uh, have you been paying attention? The whole point of the article is that part of the problem may be the internet, which girls are certainly using these days well before high school. (Which means your point about girls not being more likely to drop out is irrelevant. If this theory is true those who can be intimidated out of the field have already been eliminated before college.)
No, the point is not irrelevant. High school girls are not being exposed to the culture of engineering schools when they go online, they are only being exposed to idiots. There are two possibilities here:
The problem has nothing to do with the culture of engineering schools; once women enter engineering programs, they do not leave at a higher rate than men.
There is nothing inherent to the repository / app store model that is incompatible with the GPL. It's Apple's policies that are incompatible with the GPL, whic was a deliberate decision on the part of Apple to maintain their power over users.
Seriously, you might as well have said that about the US. You know, how our leaders would just be chilling in the UK while our cities were destroyed with nuclear bombs.
There are also a number of comments about how the women who are in the industry know how to handle the macho bullshit that gets tossed around, implying that it's therefore okay i guess, since some women can put up with it and not all of them are being forced out of the industry. Well of course the women who are still around can handle it, selection bias much? That doesn't mean they should _have_ to handle it though.
Men manage to deal with it -- we horse around, joke around, and generally say offensive things to each other all the time. Shouldn't that imply that women and men would be equally represented? Are you daring to suggest that women are less able to deal with something that men generally have little difficulty dealing with?
Yes, yes, I know, modern feminist theory is split on that issue, and some feminists posit that women are not as well suited to this sort of thing, so we should never have any social system that favors people who are well suited. Get over it -- who do you think is going to take on leadership roles, where tough decisions that are guaranteed to piss people off need to be made? Some jobs require a thick skin, and if women are less able to develop a thick skin, then women are not going to be successful in those jobs. Strangely, women seem to be better represented there than they are in engineering disciplines, so maybe women are not as psychologically weak as half of modern feminists seem to think.
It's funny how when a company/industry/environment treats all their employees badly it's the company that's at fault.
Getting back on topic, women are not bothering to enroll in CS programs in college. What environment are you blaming for that one? Do you think high school girls somehow "know" what sort of environment they'll face when they arrive at college and start attending their CS classes?
It's not the environment that's the problem here. Engineering schools bend over backwards to bring women in; we do everything feminists say we should do to make women feel comfortable, we publish pictures where men and women are equally represented (regardless of whether or not that reflects the actual student body), we use feminine pronouns in our presentations and even published research papers, and so forth. Women have many times more opportunities in engineering schools than men -- more scholarships, more professional societies (SWE and others), more positions available after graduation, etc. Yet despite all of that, young women are just not applying to or enrolling in our engineering schools. What more will we have to do before you accept that it is not our fault?
Take your feminist crap somewhere else. Feminists won big victories in the 20th century, but in this century they seem to have lost the ability to identify the causes of inequality in society.
Maybe, but then, why are high school- and college-aged boys not falling into a similar trap? Do you think teenage boys are not interested in popularity or peer acceptance? Do you think they would not shy away from a field that has that sort of "nerd image" associated with it?
No, there is something more gender-specific going on here. Perhaps our culture is somehow telling young women that CS is a man's game. Perhaps young women are just less interested in CS as a field, perhaps there is something about CS that is just unappealing to female psychology (and don't think for a second that men and women do not have distinct psychologies). Maybe the real answer is somewhere in the middle.
My only point in all of this is that the blame does not fall upon engineering schools, yet for some reason people seem to think that engineering schools need to do something to attract more female applicants.
high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause
Like, say, causing a bunch of centrifuges to self-destruct? I mean, if that is not the sort of disruption that a well-placed bomb would cause, I am not really sure what is...
So I am curious to know on a scale from 1 - 10 (1 being no threat and a 10 being we should be shitting ourselves) how members of this community view the threat of a nuclear armed Iran.
2, maybe 3 if I were feeling pessimistic. Iran is not at war, and the only countries I could conceive of Iran trying to attack are in possession of plenty of reliable, well-designed nuclear weapons. Iran is not run by complete idiots, they know there is no way they could win a nuclear war with Israel or the US.
Iran wants nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip, a way to assert itself during negotiations by hanging the threat of a nuclear attack over everyone's heads. Iran knows that the US and Israel have not ruled out the possibility of a war; Iran having a nuclear bomb is a deterrent to such a war. That's the point of their nuclear program.
It's more like, "so what if women don't come to my restaurant? Plenty of men do, and the only women who complain about the situation are ones that never tried my style of food."
I do not have anything to back this up, but my suspicion is that women are not only underrepresented but HUGELY underrepresented in this field.
So? The question was, "Why should we care?"
So, tell us: Why should we care? Do you even have a reason to care, or is it just because everyone told you that you should care?
It's a white collar job.
Typical concern of 21st century feminists. Women are also underrepresented in blue collar jobs, but feminists stopped caring about that decades ago.
Am I on to something here or is this nonsense?
No, it is nonsense. Women are not applying to CS, EE, CpE, or IT programs; the problem is not in those programs, which have gotten to the point of bending over backwards to attract women. Nobody is being denied access, and women are not facing a harsh environment, at least not to the point where they are fleeing. The cause lies outside of these fields, but feminist theory excludes that as a possible explanation.
if gender equality is so very important then why aren't... women encouraged to join professions such as 'coal miner' or 'oil rig workers'
Long ago, in an earlier age of feminism, that was considered a worth goal. Feminists worked hard to give women opportunities to work in blue collar jobs -- sanitation, factory work, railroads, mining, etc. Then one day, the libertarians convinced everyone that the only jobs that matter are white collar jobs, and the next generation of feminists fell into the trap of believing that. Suddenly, feminists stopped worry about blue collar work, and started focusing on white collar professions, since as everyone knows, white collar work is the only kind of work people should aspire to. Simultaneously, feminists grew to despise lower class women, because those women did not fall into feminists' idealized vision of the successful, professional (i.e. white collar professional) woman who has "equal access" to joining the 1% (equal to men, which is to say, only an illusion of access).
This century's feminists love the upper middle class, white-collar, middle-management suburban woman. That is all they are worried about. When forced to answer questions about women in blue collar professions, today's feminists base all their answers on the assumption that those women are desperately fighting to get a white collar position (not true).
Spoken like the ignorant white middle class male you most likely are
Yeah, speaking of prejudice...
Last time you checked?
Last time I checked, my undergrad EE program received 0 female applicants my year. What do you think we should have done about that? Women were not applying; that was not our fault, so stop blaming us. By the way, women do as well as men when they do bother to apply to engineering programs:
those are for the most part low-status, low-paying servant style jobs
Oh, so I guess we do not really care about gender equality in lower status jobs. What was that you said about the middle class? You know, that stupid, insulting, derogatory reference you made to middle class white men? Sounds like you think the middle class is the only thing worth focusing on, and moreover, only the upper middle class.
Yet as anyone who has dealt with feminists knows, that's the story with 21st century feminism. Back in the 70s, feminists were trying to ensure that women had equal opportunities in both high-status and low-status jobs -- like sanitation work. Today, feminists have fallen into the same trap as everyone else, belittling and ignoring blue collar work and focusing only on glamorous, "You can be part of the 1% if you try hard enough!" careers.
The environment in schools and industry -- women are not failing to apply to engineering programs because they somehow know what the environment in those programs will be like. Women are not dropping out at a higher rate than men:
Genetics --there is just no evidence here. Find the evidence, then we'll talk.
Lack of opportunity -- women are given more opportunities than men, recruited more heavily by engineering schools, etc.
Is the problem cultural? Maybe, but what the heck are engineering schools or companies supposed to do about the general culture outside of their organizations? If feminists want to address this problem, they should complain about how few mothers and fathers are buying tinker-toys, erector sets, magnets, etc. for their daughters. At least part of the reason I (disclaimer: "cis" male) went into EE as an undergrad was my early exposure to magnets, electric motors, and computers. Maybe little girls should be given toolboxes, wires, batteries, and LEDs to play with instead of Barbie dolls.
My undergrad EE department was told that the environment was driving women away, and that was supposed to explain why we had no qualified female applicants. Obviously they knew what sort of atmosphere our department had before they had even arrived!
What amuses me is the number of feminists who criticizing the disproportionate representation of women in science and math who never tried to advance beyond a high school education in those subjects. The women I have met in engineering were tough, knew how to put down sexually offensive comments before things got out of hand (I do not think anyone can reasonably expect offensive comments to never occur -- but there is a point at which those comments become a problem, and the women I am referring could stop that from happening with a few well-chosen words), and hated the special status women receive during admissions to engineering schools (they felt it belittled their abilities).
You wouldn't accept the bona fides of Sweden, but would trust the government of Ecuador to behave honestly and protect your interests? Really?
No, of course not. However, Ecuador will not extradite Assange to the US or any other country, and Assange is apparently on good terms with the president of Ecuador (RTFA). Ecuador could serve as a temporary base of operations with Assange reorganizes and plans his next move, or as an escape route through which Assange could go into hiding.
Well, I suppose he could continue to do his work from there, assuming they have a reliable Internet connection etc. Not sure if he really wants to spend the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy though -- it is a step up from house arrest in a mansion, but not exactly "freedom."
Slashdot Mirror
Why is everyone so paranoid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Even if they don't allow it, maybe they would rather their employees donated in their own free time and not on their network?
You could at least read and understand the summary (RAUTFS?). It is not just Microsoft's own network; this is something a Microsoft product that is used on numerous corporate networks is doing.
You can also use Tor to bypass blocks like these.
Eh....
It is not impossible to block Tor. A standard approach is to have the firewall block all Tor entry nodes, which forces people to use bridge nodes instead. Increasingly, though, there is an approach that is much harder to evade: blocking of connections that match Tor's "fingerprint" i.e. because Tor uses OpenSSL in a way that can be distinguished from Firefox+NSS etc.
Of course, there is a bright side if you are dealing with a school or corporate firewall: you can always set up a system at your house that you SSH to, and use as a proxy server. That was something friends of mine used to do in high school.
Would you also suggest that in the United States nobody can make the argument that the court system is the appropriate for dealing with accusations of criminal conduct in this century?
Considering how vast, broad, and overwhelmingly complex our criminal code is, I absolutely would make that argument. It was recently pointed out that if everyone who is arrested did exercise their right to a jury trial, the system would come grinding to a halt:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html
When more people are criminals than the court system can deal with, the problem is the law, not the behavior of the people. Most people are not murderers, robbers, rapists, arsonists, etc., yet almost everyone living in America is guilty of some felony offense. We need legal reforms, we need them to be sweeping and we need them to happen soon.
The problem here is that due process means courts -- long, expensive procedures are used to decide if copyright infringement took place. Nobody can make the argument that such a system is appropriate in this century. As the RIAA discovered, you simply cannot sue everyone who infringes copyrights online, there are too many people doing it.
The copyright industry thinks that the problem is with due process, as opposed to attempting to apply a concept that originated in an age of printing presses to a society where everyone has the equipment needed to make perfect copies in their homes.
The content industry does not seem to recognize that society has already given them all sorts of concessions
That is because despite all those concessions, they still do not have the things they want:
I'd like to know where the RIAA/MPAA draw the line
Multiply the total amount of money in circulation by 5, and if the profit is less than that figure, it is a problem for the **AA.
Have some fun with your last summer before college. Spend time with your friends, especially those who you will not be seeing in college. You should also study fun things, things that schools do not teach you. Read books (not just programming books), study interesting approaches to programming (Forth comes to mind -- not commonly taught in schools, not strictly applicable to most careers, but definitely an interesting language that is worth studying, if you have time). College should be about having your mind opened; if you want a head start, spend some time opening your mind before you arrive.
Can someone please remind me why people should be unable to examine the software in their medical devices, software that their lives may depend on? Why these programs are not open to public review?
Oh wait, I got sidetracked thinking that the point of medical devices is to keep people healthy, rather than to rake in profits for the companies that make them.
Of course the software the L3 scanners use doesn't show any 'nude' pics anymore
Irrelevant; the nudity was just humiliation added to the violation of our rights. The fact that we are being scanned, and that refusal to submit to such a scan results in a disgusting invasion of personal privacy, is the problem.
Ironically, when the software was updated the worry was that it would be less effective and it seems they might be correct
Really, that was the worry? I am more concerned about the huge crowd of people waiting to be scanned. You know, the huge, unprotected target that practically screams "suicide bomb!"
However, were I planning to smuggle something on the plane myself I would hardly count on the scanner not picking it up
If someone were hell-bent on hijacking a plane and the scanner picked up their bomb / gun, don't you think they would just attack all the people within range of the scanner? See above about the huge crowd, and don't think for a second that the crowd would become anything less than a deadly stampede if someone pulled a gun out.
Locking cabin doors, putting guards on airplanes, and having passengers who know that they are not just going to be held hostage is how we stop terrorists from using our airplanes as weapons. Abandoning our rights and going through a useless charade at the airport will neither stop terrorists nor keep us safe from people who wish to do us harm (hint: many of those people hold positions of power in our government, and are only being restrained by the very rights we seem to be eager to abandon).
If people want to fight the TSA, they should consider the following:
Also, coordinate these refusals, so they occur during busy travel holidays. Overwhelm the TSA, turn the airports into a nightmare, and force people to confront the realities of the TSA's program.
Actually, the men i generally hang out with don't do that. There will occasionally be teasing and gently ribbing, but women are perfectly able to hand that kind of interaction
It varies from place to place; some of my observations on work environments are based on the blue collar work that my mother did, where people are "fresh" and perhaps a little less mature (e.g. long tools being held to stick out of one's crotch, jokes about firefighters and long hosts [there was a fire once], etc.). My mother and the other women who worked there were able to handle such jokes just as well as the men, and were just as able as the men to remind their coworkers when a joke has gone too far and what the limits of acceptable jokes are (which is very important -- I have seen similar things in undergrad engineering programs. In general, people who can keep their peers within boundaries will not face harassment, or at least that is what I have observed.).
Really, I was being rhetorical when I spoke of men not being able to handle that sort of environment. There are men who find it difficult to remind their peers where the boundaries are, and they wind up getting trampled. There just seem to be fewer such men, which is a phenomenon that is probably worth investigating, if it has not been already. Telling people that joking around is not allowed because jokes can get out of hand just makes the work environment more stressful (when I last worked for a corporation, we were told that jokes that might be deemed offensive were strictly prohibited -- which basically meant that almost all jokes that could be made in a given day were off the table, and even non-offensive jokes seemed to not happen).
My experience is pretty limited, but what i've heard from other people indicates that many other companies aren't nearly as pleasant. "Surprisingly" a lot of those companies don't have anywhere near as many female employees in the technical sections as we do.
What makes you think that one has anything to do with the other? There are certainly unpleasant, stressful environments where women work; the New York City public school system comes to mind.
As for your idea that people shouldn't work in a field if they can't handle the requirements is fair, but getting harassed by your coworkers is hardly a requirement.
No, getting harassed is bad; but harassment is something that builds up over time, as people stray further and further from the appropriate boundaries. Someone who can remind people where the boundaries are early on is someone who is going to face little harassment in their profession.
Now, there may be environments where even the toughest woman would not stand a chance, because there is a culture of harassment that begins from day one. I agree, that is something that needs to be fixed where it exists. I have yet to encounter such an environment in any school, online forum, blue collar or white collar work environment that I have been exposed to. If people say such places exist, I do not doubt them, but I have difficulty believing that such places are anything close to the norm in this century.
Uh, have you been paying attention? The whole point of the article is that part of the problem may be the internet, which girls are certainly using these days well before high school. (Which means your point about girls not being more likely to drop out is irrelevant. If this theory is true those who can be intimidated out of the field have already been eliminated before college.)
No, the point is not irrelevant. High school girls are not being exposed to the culture of engineering schools when they go online, they are only being exposed to idiots. There are two possibilities here:
There is nothing inherent to the repository / app store model that is incompatible with the GPL. It's Apple's policies that are incompatible with the GPL, whic was a deliberate decision on the part of Apple to maintain their power over users.
[citation needed]
Seriously, you might as well have said that about the US. You know, how our leaders would just be chilling in the UK while our cities were destroyed with nuclear bombs.
There are also a number of comments about how the women who are in the industry know how to handle the macho bullshit that gets tossed around, implying that it's therefore okay i guess, since some women can put up with it and not all of them are being forced out of the industry. Well of course the women who are still around can handle it, selection bias much? That doesn't mean they should _have_ to handle it though.
Men manage to deal with it -- we horse around, joke around, and generally say offensive things to each other all the time. Shouldn't that imply that women and men would be equally represented? Are you daring to suggest that women are less able to deal with something that men generally have little difficulty dealing with?
Yes, yes, I know, modern feminist theory is split on that issue, and some feminists posit that women are not as well suited to this sort of thing, so we should never have any social system that favors people who are well suited. Get over it -- who do you think is going to take on leadership roles, where tough decisions that are guaranteed to piss people off need to be made? Some jobs require a thick skin, and if women are less able to develop a thick skin, then women are not going to be successful in those jobs. Strangely, women seem to be better represented there than they are in engineering disciplines, so maybe women are not as psychologically weak as half of modern feminists seem to think.
It's funny how when a company/industry/environment treats all their employees badly it's the company that's at fault.
Getting back on topic, women are not bothering to enroll in CS programs in college. What environment are you blaming for that one? Do you think high school girls somehow "know" what sort of environment they'll face when they arrive at college and start attending their CS classes?
It's not the environment that's the problem here. Engineering schools bend over backwards to bring women in; we do everything feminists say we should do to make women feel comfortable, we publish pictures where men and women are equally represented (regardless of whether or not that reflects the actual student body), we use feminine pronouns in our presentations and even published research papers, and so forth. Women have many times more opportunities in engineering schools than men -- more scholarships, more professional societies (SWE and others), more positions available after graduation, etc. Yet despite all of that, young women are just not applying to or enrolling in our engineering schools. What more will we have to do before you accept that it is not our fault?
the women choose to go elsewhere
Wrong, women who enroll in engineering programs are no more likely to drop out than men: http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2009b/090804OhlandEngineering.html
Take your feminist crap somewhere else. Feminists won big victories in the 20th century, but in this century they seem to have lost the ability to identify the causes of inequality in society.
Maybe, but then, why are high school- and college-aged boys not falling into a similar trap? Do you think teenage boys are not interested in popularity or peer acceptance? Do you think they would not shy away from a field that has that sort of "nerd image" associated with it?
No, there is something more gender-specific going on here. Perhaps our culture is somehow telling young women that CS is a man's game. Perhaps young women are just less interested in CS as a field, perhaps there is something about CS that is just unappealing to female psychology (and don't think for a second that men and women do not have distinct psychologies). Maybe the real answer is somewhere in the middle.
My only point in all of this is that the blame does not fall upon engineering schools, yet for some reason people seem to think that engineering schools need to do something to attract more female applicants.
high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause
Like, say, causing a bunch of centrifuges to self-destruct? I mean, if that is not the sort of disruption that a well-placed bomb would cause, I am not really sure what is...
So I am curious to know on a scale from 1 - 10 (1 being no threat and a 10 being we should be shitting ourselves) how members of this community view the threat of a nuclear armed Iran.
2, maybe 3 if I were feeling pessimistic. Iran is not at war, and the only countries I could conceive of Iran trying to attack are in possession of plenty of reliable, well-designed nuclear weapons. Iran is not run by complete idiots, they know there is no way they could win a nuclear war with Israel or the US.
Iran wants nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip, a way to assert itself during negotiations by hanging the threat of a nuclear attack over everyone's heads. Iran knows that the US and Israel have not ruled out the possibility of a war; Iran having a nuclear bomb is a deterrent to such a war. That's the point of their nuclear program.
It's more like, "so what if women don't come to my restaurant? Plenty of men do, and the only women who complain about the situation are ones that never tried my style of food."
I do not have anything to back this up, but my suspicion is that women are not only underrepresented but HUGELY underrepresented in this field.
So? The question was, "Why should we care?"
So, tell us: Why should we care? Do you even have a reason to care, or is it just because everyone told you that you should care?
It's a white collar job.
Typical concern of 21st century feminists. Women are also underrepresented in blue collar jobs, but feminists stopped caring about that decades ago.
Am I on to something here or is this nonsense?
No, it is nonsense. Women are not applying to CS, EE, CpE, or IT programs; the problem is not in those programs, which have gotten to the point of bending over backwards to attract women. Nobody is being denied access, and women are not facing a harsh environment, at least not to the point where they are fleeing. The cause lies outside of these fields, but feminist theory excludes that as a possible explanation.
if gender equality is so very important then why aren't ... women encouraged to join professions such as 'coal miner' or 'oil rig workers'
Long ago, in an earlier age of feminism, that was considered a worth goal. Feminists worked hard to give women opportunities to work in blue collar jobs -- sanitation, factory work, railroads, mining, etc. Then one day, the libertarians convinced everyone that the only jobs that matter are white collar jobs, and the next generation of feminists fell into the trap of believing that. Suddenly, feminists stopped worry about blue collar work, and started focusing on white collar professions, since as everyone knows, white collar work is the only kind of work people should aspire to. Simultaneously, feminists grew to despise lower class women, because those women did not fall into feminists' idealized vision of the successful, professional (i.e. white collar professional) woman who has "equal access" to joining the 1% (equal to men, which is to say, only an illusion of access).
This century's feminists love the upper middle class, white-collar, middle-management suburban woman. That is all they are worried about. When forced to answer questions about women in blue collar professions, today's feminists base all their answers on the assumption that those women are desperately fighting to get a white collar position (not true).
Spoken like the ignorant white middle class male you most likely are
Yeah, speaking of prejudice...
Last time you checked?
Last time I checked, my undergrad EE program received 0 female applicants my year. What do you think we should have done about that? Women were not applying; that was not our fault, so stop blaming us. By the way, women do as well as men when they do bother to apply to engineering programs:
http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2009b/090804OhlandEngineering.html
those are for the most part low-status, low-paying servant style jobs
Oh, so I guess we do not really care about gender equality in lower status jobs. What was that you said about the middle class? You know, that stupid, insulting, derogatory reference you made to middle class white men? Sounds like you think the middle class is the only thing worth focusing on, and moreover, only the upper middle class.
Yet as anyone who has dealt with feminists knows, that's the story with 21st century feminism. Back in the 70s, feminists were trying to ensure that women had equal opportunities in both high-status and low-status jobs -- like sanitation work. Today, feminists have fallen into the same trap as everyone else, belittling and ignoring blue collar work and focusing only on glamorous, "You can be part of the 1% if you try hard enough!" careers.
I can't say I understand exactly why this is so,
No, but we can rule out certain things:
http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2009b/090804OhlandEngineering.html
Is the problem cultural? Maybe, but what the heck are engineering schools or companies supposed to do about the general culture outside of their organizations? If feminists want to address this problem, they should complain about how few mothers and fathers are buying tinker-toys, erector sets, magnets, etc. for their daughters. At least part of the reason I (disclaimer: "cis" male) went into EE as an undergrad was my early exposure to magnets, electric motors, and computers. Maybe little girls should be given toolboxes, wires, batteries, and LEDs to play with instead of Barbie dolls.
My undergrad EE department was told that the environment was driving women away, and that was supposed to explain why we had no qualified female applicants. Obviously they knew what sort of atmosphere our department had before they had even arrived!
What amuses me is the number of feminists who criticizing the disproportionate representation of women in science and math who never tried to advance beyond a high school education in those subjects. The women I have met in engineering were tough, knew how to put down sexually offensive comments before things got out of hand (I do not think anyone can reasonably expect offensive comments to never occur -- but there is a point at which those comments become a problem, and the women I am referring could stop that from happening with a few well-chosen words), and hated the special status women receive during admissions to engineering schools (they felt it belittled their abilities).
You wouldn't accept the bona fides of Sweden, but would trust the government of Ecuador to behave honestly and protect your interests? Really?
No, of course not. However, Ecuador will not extradite Assange to the US or any other country, and Assange is apparently on good terms with the president of Ecuador (RTFA). Ecuador could serve as a temporary base of operations with Assange reorganizes and plans his next move, or as an escape route through which Assange could go into hiding.
Well, I suppose he could continue to do his work from there, assuming they have a reliable Internet connection etc. Not sure if he really wants to spend the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy though -- it is a step up from house arrest in a mansion, but not exactly "freedom."
They would have ceased caring by this point if it was all nothing but phoney charges
The Swedes did drop the charges, for lack of evidence. Someone cared enough to reopen the investigation and try to force Assange to go back to Sweden.
I do not think it is a stretch to suggest that the US government had something to do with that.