johnbm

What articles like this completely ignore is that toy stores are not divided into a blue boy's section and a pink girl's section. There's the "girl's section", and then there's "everything else".

They are taking the fact that some things are marketed explicitly to women as evidence that everything else is marketed to men. It's absurd, but that's feminist navelgazing for you. Same reason they blame men for women's beauty standards, even though it's women and women's magazines who enforce them. Things marketed to women by women as being for women.

And then something like Goldieblox comes around that's like shitty pink meccano with dumb girlie stories attached to each box set, and behold! It's somehow going to set girls free of the pink tyranny... by being stereotypically aimed at girls.

Or you could just buy them ordinary gender-neutral LEGO. The one that boys and girls alike can enjoy.

Until you need to do something with WebGL and you realize you have no idea how to write fast code because you're more than a dozen abstraction layers removed from the silicon.

"I am an absolute moral authority. Apologizing and shutting up is the only acceptable response when I am pissed off. Any protestation will be taken as further evidence of your complicity."

Or maybe you're just a self-centred special snowflake.

http://virtuallyantifeminism.blogspot.ca/2013/09/pax-being-r...

There are two kinds of developers... those who want a single framework that will solve all their problems and which they never have to look into... and those who like to understand one or more abstraction levels below where they're actually working.

Digging into a framework's source code is natural to the latter group, but utterly alien to the former.

Documentation written for the latter group describes mechanisms, design principles, APIs, etc. The former group instead requires examples and step by step tutorials.

Both will call documentation terrible if it doesn't conform to their expectations.

One of the women was singing Assange's praise on Twitter the days before, and it seems she only got upset once she found out he'd slept with another woman during his stay. Even then, the question was initially just about getting him tested for STDs, as it was an overzealous prosecutor who turned it into a rape case.

So it seems like it wasn't an NSA plant, but rather, a case of a politicized investigation over a narcissist sleeping with two adoring fans, tinged by Swedish institutional feminism, which the US then ran with. We already know the US has wound Sweden around its fingers.

It's really simple. The more gender equality there is in a country, the more women and men revert to stereotypical occupation choices. That is, there are more female engineers in India or Eastern Europe than in Scandinavia.

The countries where the percentage of women pursuing STEM is the highest, are the countries where STEM careers are disproportionately lucrative.

These findings have been confirmed by multiple studies with enormous sample sizes (e.g. Richard Lippa's n=200,000 survey of 53 countries).

Feminists will spend the next couple of years staunchly denying these findings, while the number of women in STEM has flatlined, and the percentage of students that are female only rises because men are systematically discriminated against.

"The experiment also shows that attractive women get special treatment in the male-dominated IT industry. The majority of individuals who went out of their way to help Emily Williams were men. The team actually tried a similar test in parallel with a fake male social media profile and got no useful connections."

But remember, tech is biased against women and women have to work twice as hard to get the same credit. cough

Just World fallacy: the belief that things happen for a reason, that bad things happen to those who deserve it, and that the world is ultimately fair.

That is, they prefer to believe the government is a superhuman entity that has everyone's best interests at heart, rather than facing the reality that it's made up of fallible, selfish humans who are only interested in covering their own asses.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Richard Lippa has done studies that show the more economic freedom and gender equality a country has, the more men and women choose traditional occupations along gender lines.

It's pretty obvious: in countries where your high paying options are limited (e.g. eastern Europe or India), you are more likely to go after a career in STEM, preferring economic success over personal actualization.

Decades of pro equality policy in e.g. Norway or Sweden have not significantly increased the number of women studying STEM. Government officials say outreach programs result in a temporary increase in women that drops again after a year or two.

But if you bring facts or studies with n=200000 respondents to the discussion, someone like this will dismiss it because she worked with some shitty men before and generalizes her experience to every woman and man in the industry.

If you see a sexism post on medium, you can be sure it's going to be anecdotal and utterly US-centric.

The documentary series is Hjernevask and is amazing, not just the episode on gender: http://vimeo.com/user5971760/videos

Answer, because women have in-group bias, and men don't:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274

Nope, it's a specific chemical that smells like buttery popcorn, it's what they put on microwave popcorn. It also destroys the lungs of the factory workers who produce it (or people who eat too much of it):

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57516710-10391704/col...

> architecture astronauts

That's an awesome term for something I never quite had a word for.

That's not true at all. Firstly, any PNG would have a limited resolution, requiring massive file sizes to be indistinguishable from an SVG. Secondly, browsers don't scale bitmaps with perfectly alias-free filtering, which means you get artifacts when scaling down and blurryness when scaling up.

And big surprise, NYTimes makes it seem like the problem is with Assange not being happy how he's portrayed, rather than it being based on discredited sources, putting people in key roles that never happened, and ignoring that it was a careless and clueless Guardian journalist (David Leigh) who leaked the key to the unredacted Cablegate files in his book, not Wikileaks. Look around and see if you can find that last little tidbit mentioned any time some journalist writes Wikileaks put people in danger.

"I read more of the diplomatic cables published on the Department of State Net Centric Diplomacy. With my insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics I became fascinated with them. I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and events that I found interesting.

The more I read, the more I was fascinated with the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.

Up to this point,during the deployment, I had issues I struggled with and difficulty at work. Of the documents release, the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn't harm the United States. I conducted research on the cables published on the Net Centric Diplomacy, as well as how Department of State cables worked in general.

In particular, I wanted to know how each cable was published on SIRPnet via the Net Centric Diplomacy. As part of my open source research, I found a document published by the Department of State on its official website.

The document provided guidance on caption markings for individual cables and handling instructions for their distribution. I quickly learned the caption markings clearly detailed the sensitivity of the Department of State cables. For example, NODIS or No Distribution was used for messages at the highest sensitivity and were only distributed to the authorized recipients.

The SIPDIS or SIPRnet distribution caption was applied only to recording of other information messages that were deemed appropriate for a release for a wide number of individuals. According to the Department of State guidance for a cable to have the SIPDIS [missed word] caption, it could not include other captions that were intended to limit distribution.

The SIPDIS caption was only for information that could only be shared with anyone with access to SIPRnet. I was aware that thousands of military personel, DoD, Department of State, and other civilian agencies had easy access to the tables. The fact that the SIPDIS caption was only for wide distribution made sense to me, given that the vast majority of the Net Centric Diplomacy Cables were not classified.

The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.

I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption.

I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States, however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.

In many ways these cables are a catalogue of cliques and gossip. I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy. On 22 March 2010, I began downloading a copy of the SIPDIS cables using the program Wget, described above."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-manning-...

How many of the people whining about this problem have ever submitted a Linux kernel patch or considered it and said they wouldn't because of him? Name names, thanks.

More astute readers would notice that you didn't actually provide anything to substantiate your arguments other than an 'ironic' ad hominem.

Take for example this: http://littlemissgeek.com/about

The image it's painting is rather obvious: women aren't just disadvantaged in technology, they have been falling behind over the last 2 decades.

And yet, we find that university gender ratios used to be about 50/50 in 1985, and are now 60/40 skewed in women's favor—that is, 3 women enroll and graduate for every 2 men: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ccap/files/2012/02/blog-chart...

Little Miss Geek is by the way Belinda Parmar, who has come out and said specifically she will no longer speak or attend women-only events in tech. But somehow she still fails to see the obvious.

"In 1997, Metropolitan Life examined the way boys and girls were treated and concluded that “contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school, and interactions in the classroom.”[28] You did not read about this study in the media. And it had virtually no impact on the schools.

The impact of our belief in women-as-minority? It takes The New York Times almost two decades after women are exceeding men in college to acknowledge it in a significant story.[29] When they do, they devote more space to how the gap creates problems for the female students (“There aren’t many guys to date”[30] ) and how it turns men into dominant oppressors (“[the guys] have their pick of so many women that they have a tendency to become players”).[31] In contrast, articles about men being in the majority at the Citadel, or in the armed services, never mention men as victims because they have few women to date."

Here's another juicy nugget:

"The Lace Curtain’s power exists even in male-dominated institutions. For example, Dr. Charles McDowell, formerly of the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, discovered that 27% of Air Force women who claimed they had been raped later admitted making false accusations of rape.[12] The admission usually came when they were asked to take a lie detector test. With these admitted false accusations he was able to develop 35 criteria distinguishing false accusations and those known to be genuine. Three independent judges then examined the remainder of the cases. Only if all three reviewers independently concluded the original rape allegations were false did they rank them as “false.” The total of false allegations became 60%."

You can read the entire book here: http://web.archive.org/web/20031216215957/http://mndnet.com/...

Note that this is the same Warren Farrell who's been protested as a rape apologist and whose talks feminists have boycotted by pulling a fire alarm and blocking the doors, such as a few months ago at the University of Toronto.

Find me a feminist talk being protested in a similar fashion, and then we can talk about male privilege.

> Do you need to go to the powder room and have a good cry about it?

In other words: "I'm going to emasculate you by comparing you to a woman and giving you stereotypically weak female traits like crying.

But YOU'RE the one who is a sexist."

Cheer up, I was being cynical because of this specifically:

"We need a new planet so we can try new things, create new ideas, and generally liberate ourselves of traditional conventions."

Of all the places to try out 'new conventions', the harshest frontier in human history does not sound like a good idea. And I agree, BioSphere was terrible, but the important thing is that it failed (mainly) for human reasons, not scientific ones. I think it is entirely possible we lack the capacity as a species to thrive outside our world.

I don't think the scientific problems are impossible to overcome, but I do think anyone who flies there with any notion of romantic exploration and a new beginning is going on a suicide mission.

Last time I found an anti-SOPA site that said "Enter your email address and location and we'll send you information tailored to your area." That is, it was placed to suggest you'd get information right now, about how to help with the campaign.

Of course, it was a complete lie. You were just added to their mailing list, and all you received was a message confirming that.

So you've moved to Mars. Through a stunning feat of engineering, humanity has designed a ship that can make the journey, land tons of people and equipment without crashing, and has deployed a habitat of some kind intact.

Well congratulations. You now live in a tube or box in a freezing, unbreathable, radiated, barren desert. The only way you can go outside is by donning a bulky environmental suit and breathing apparatus. You may have brought a dune buggy of some kind along for exploration, but you can't go very far. If something happens to it, your spare parts are numbered and you probably won't survive the night out there, spending your last moments staring at yet more sand and rocks.

You don't have real mining or manufacturing capabilities and a resupply takes years. At best, you might have a high-end industrial 3D printer for parts, but your (specialty!) raw materials will run out very quickly, and you can't 3D print truly complicated things.

The remainder of your life now depends on you maintaining a delicate, miniature artificial ecosystem inside, so you can produce food and oxygen indefinitely. This is a feat which, when we tried it back here on Earth, failed miserably (Biosphere 2). That was with the luxury of Earth-based construction, at atmospheric pressure, without having to ship materials out and in of two enormous gravity wells. Environmental integrity was a question of science, not one of life and death. Besides, there is no reason to believe that Earth's ecosystem itself is stable long-term, never mind an artificially picked subset of it.

Once the honeymoon period is over and you've settled in, you will slowly come to understand what it means to be truly alone. You will never again see the people you left behind. You cannot move away if you get into irreconcilable conflict. Your survival depends on maintaining social cohesion above else, despite none of the usual comforts being available.

If, above all odds, people manage to not go insane on their own, there's always Dunbar's number: a suggested upper limit on the size of stable social groups. In case of ideological rifts, it is impossible for people to move away and start over: unlike on Earth, a new colony can only be started with the full and unconditional cooperation of an existing one.

If you want to try new things, Mars is the last place to do so. Whoever goes there will be clinging to the way things were.

We already have a vague approximation of colonizing Mars anyway: Antarctica. Go read about life on McMurdo base for example, or this: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/big-stink-brews-in-anta...

The article doesn't provide much citations for "Bicycle helmets do an outstanding job of keeping our skulls intact in a major crash." which is the premise it starts out with and builds its case off.

Obvious questions arise... like why are motorcycle or pro-sports helmets so radically different in design (full head + visor), even for scooters that barely go faster than bicycles, and how many "major crashes" result in head trauma as opposed to other kinds?

And if bicycle helmets are so great, why don't we require car drivers to wear helmets too? Surely then they would also do an 'outstanding job in keeping our skulls intact in a major crash'?

Don't trust anyone more than you need to. Get everything in writing. Do an honest cost/benefit analysis for all parties involved.

What do you think young 20 somethings who work 80 hour weeks at a startup for the promise of stock ownership are doing?

Try changing your font, line/letter spacing, or turning on indentation guidelines. This is mine: http://imgur.com/0BSq6lE

Of course, the crux of the matter is that these feminists still think Disney princesses are the most important role models for girls, thus confirming their own bias, and yet provide no alternatives of their own. Are girls supposed to look up to the shrieking harpies of Femen instead?

Most likely they didn't know about img { display: block } and wanted to get rid of baseline spaces in their table-based layout.

The problem is that this demo page feels like the modern equivalent of a Geocities page. It shows off the technology, but fails to show how it can be used tastefully by using it everywhere without restraint.

Additionally, I find many of the animations confusing and non-meaningful. For example, having an email envelope in a site footer being filled and flying off correctly denotes the concept of "send me an email". But doing the same thing for an email field in a form feels completely out of place. The user is not sending an email, they're just giving their information for future reference. Many of the animations are similar: they demonstrate a vaguely related concept, not the specific use case being demonstrated.

Like most things the Ada Initiative does, this makes no sense once you scratch past the surface.

Even if women risk more criticism as newbies, the risk still exists for everyone, and solving it for part of the group only is discrimination.

If Github really cared about intimidation, they would offer a free private repo to new users as a promo, or perhaps have a $1/month micro plan. Instead they accept a small minority of users for free who wouldn't have paid anyway and score good will PR points.

And if the Ada Initiative cared about making women a part of the community, then they would recognize that those women will want to collaborate in private with men too, who should be given the same opportunity to experiment in private.

Modern feminists are the biggest sexists around, they keep acting like women can't compete with men on equal ground, even in a place as anonymous as the internet.

Have you ever noticed how the people complaining the loudest about online abuse are always the ones with the biggest pictures of themselves on their blogs? Featuring their lovely blue hair, tattoos, piercings, shot in their Pinterest-approved bedrooms? It's princesses all over again, and most women can see through the bullshit too.

The funny thing is, in a way, Stallman and Apple agree: users should be able to modify and enjoy their devices any way they like. For the hackers, that means root access. For normal users, that means being able to install apps without worrying about security and privacy. The Stallman model drives the internet's infrastructure, but the Apple model now drives consumer computing. We can argue about the particular provisions (I do prefer Android), but apps work.

I think the GPL was a legal solution to a social problem: companies were hoarding software and trying to patent it. But software patents are still illegal in most of the world, and the best way to ensure software cannot be patented is to publish it under a permissive license, and demonstrate prior art. Regardless of intent, licensing something under GPL is a kiss of death in certain cases, so it acts a bit like a patent anyway: it scares away commercial competitors.

Tivoization is also interesting, because we sort of have a modern day Tivo: Netflix. It's so convenient and affordable, people don't care how the video is being delivered. Instead of Tivo hacking, there's the Netflix API. (http://developer.netflix.com)

The fact is, software- and content-as-a-service have largely made the GPLv3 irrelevant, because the goals it's meant to enable, i.e. freedom and accessibility of software, have been realized in different ways. Society at large simply does not care about a Grand GPL future. It does care about privacy, and being able to export their data from the services they sign up for.