He may have assumed the normal distribution.

It's OK - the poor guy has obviously never been exposed to elementary statistics or he would have recognized what a sigma refers to. I do think it's fair to assume a certain base level of education on Slashdot - it is a nerd site after all. But what a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action!

But why do they like different career paths?

I'm going to posit that women are smarter about accepting abusive work conditions than men are. 90-hour weeks where you sleep at your desk and get free Mountain Dew and a game of pinball in a few times during a death march is an abusive situation.

What I really don't get is why some women want so badly to put other women in these situations when they're already winning. I guess what we need is more women entrepreneurs, to run companies sanely. Or men to grow a pair and tell their masters to kiss off so that tech work environments can become places where women would feel welcome.

Yeah, smoke on that one - when you work unpaid overtime you're being hostile towards women.

We're worried about 90% of life on Earth becoming unsustainable as a result of global warming.

No we're not - we have fossil records from, e.g. the Jurassic where high temperatures and CO2 at about 1300ppm resulted in mega- flora and fauna all around the earth, even in areas that have desertified as the Earth's moisture has become locked up in Antarctic ice sheets over the past several hundred years of cooling (as evidenced by ancient Chinese maps).

What "we" are worried about is the rich cultural and political elite losing their seaside mansions and other shore-line real estate investments. Because we can find seashells 15' underground 20 miles inland from them and we know that the Earth's climate oscillates on several timescales, it's inevitable that the Earth will return to those prior conditions at some point in time.

But if we can slow down the encroachment of the sea on the banksters' wealth at all, then it's worth any cost to be borne by the 99%.

The amount of energy required to overcome not just the physical bonds of stone but the gravity of the mass of the earth

Yes, but is it stronger than emo angst? Queenish drama is immune to gravity wells.

If speed is absolutely critical, you're going to go with C/C++/ASM/whatever native-compiled-language works well for your problem.

If speed is not absolutely critical, there's plenty of "scripting" languages that get the job done more easily with less code.

Yeah, this is how most 2+-sigma programmers on the right side of the standard distribution of programmers approach problems.

All the rest (the vast majority) need languages with good error messages, good error landing, decent garbage collection, a lack of value/reference handling, etc., and frankly being more procedural than functional is an asset to a below-average programmer.

Code density is not the criterion most mid-level enterprise IT managers need to deal with. Even with a complex project and a team, you can take one guy and have him write the JNI bits in C++ for performance (BTDTGTTS) while the rest of the team handles other parts and they don't have to know as much. It's actually really bad economics to have all top-notch programmers on your team if your project does not require that.

And before all you kids who got trophies for losing a soccer game get into a snit - by mathematical definition, half of all programmers are below-average.

And Java works pretty well for them, and there are stable and scalable deployment platforms for their code. Expect the "cool kids" to be wondering about Java in 2024 - even if there were a better replacement available today (there isn't), the extant code bases would not get replaced in one decade.

There's no such right, though there are some EU governments creating an enforced privilege, even for stuff paraded out in public.

For everybody else, check the agreement you enter into voluntarily when creating an account.

Time to build more prisons for youngsters.

What, have Truancy Officers really been slacking that much?

And to top it off, somebody in Oregon selected Oracle to be their vendor in the first place. I'll eagaerly await the replies here from folks whose experience with Oracle was that they were on-time, on-budget, went above-and-beyond in the name of customer service, and were a pleasure to work with. Too bad no company in the entire state of Oregon was qualified to build a database-backed website!

If the entire student body doesn't shut down the school, or at least picket the office and generate some arrests, they should be horribly ashamed.

In a situation like this there are so many people complicit in intellectual censorship that the only way to deal with it and maintain the school's reputation is to have a special investigator find everybody who signed off on it, everybody who could have objected, and everybody who was complicit and did not specifically and provably object to it, and fire them for cause. Then fire everybody who tries to cover it up and impede the investigation.

I sure wouldn't send my kid there given the current leadership. Tweaking any one policy will leave the same anti-intellectual stooges in control of the school. There's either a strong pro-intellectual signal sent or the status quo remains.

So, what's the Board of Trustees' position on this? Typically they don't want to rock any boats and do nothing about such incidents - they love to get wined and dined, collect a stipend, and rubber stamp administrative decisions while occasionally approving a hire of a search firm to find a new President. The old days of active Trustees are nearly extinguished.

We need way, way, more women like her on TV

They'd be silly to hitch their next decade to TV. They have plenty of fans if they want to Kickstart a YouTube channel.

These things could definitely be fixed, we just don't care to fix them.

And we don't even have the tools do to so. How many languages let you write:

secure char[] myPassword

much less:

secure objectType myObject

and have the language memset its memory to zero (or shred, etc.) for you when the variables go out of scope?

It's hard to do security right even if you're really trying. Anybody know if C++2014 made any gains here?

Anytime someone prohibits you from viewing, listening or reading something it is thought crime, and policing thought is barbaric and unjustifiable violence against individuals.

They need to police your thoughts so you can have freedom.

That is the reason.

Not every GMO contains nicatoids (engineers would know that). There are still some kids in China who could use yellow rice, and they definitely could export it to their neighbors.

Monsanto deserves a firey death for setting back non-psychopathic GMO's by 30 years or more.

I don't want to be another complainer, but this site is begging me to stop visiting. I am not very happy.

There's a town nearby that is behaving similar to Slashdot '14. They have a tax shortfall, so they raise taxes, and people move out. This creates a tax shortfall so, GOTO 1.

The property values have literally fallen in half in the past decade, while other area towns' properties have maintained or slightly increased, and there are many abandoned properties now (with associated problems).

Slashdot will seemingly keep increasing the "revenue enhancers" until everybody has moved out. At that point, I guess they declare victory and go home.

If you want to get all strict-constructionist on this matter though, planes, cars, buses, and rail didn't even exist when the Constitution was written, so one could argue that there's no Constitutional protection when travelling by anything beyond horseback, carriage, or walking.

No you cannot argue that. The Constitution says nothing about technology and everything about how humans behave.

Then there's the other side, where airlines were allowed to be in charge of their own security, letting "the market" set the balance, but then nineteen men decided to kill about 3500 men, women, and children one day, and our society realized that it wasn't gonna work to let the airlines be in charge of security.

That strategy ceased to be effective at 9:03AM on 9/11/2001 over a field in Shanksville, PA. And you know who figured that out? Ordinary Americans, doing the security calculus themselves, where the government had completely failed to protect them, despite having many opportunities to do so.

To be double-sure the airlines all secured their cockpit doors. That risk no longer exists, which is why the TSA has never caught a terrorist. They do violate the human rights of Americans all day, every day. In an effort to stop the terrorists, they have become the terrorists, all because they consciously choose to violate the highest law of the land.