In the terms of "Epochs" it's total wankery (or in American English, mental masturbation ;)

It may even make sense to consider "the atomic age" as a new Epoch at some point in the distant future, but placing that date on it is pure politics, not science.

Wow, seriously?

You can define words to whatever you want them to be. PEOPLE MADE THEM ALL UP. DUH.

If you want to define a "pizza" as a giant cosmic object that can not be comprehended by humans, go ahead, but the rest of us will continue to think of it as a tasty flatbread covered with tomato sauce and cheese.

Though for you "thinking" seems to be more accurately defined as "mental masturbation"...

That's moronic. "Thinking", like all *words created by humans*, has a reasonably clear definition in many contexts that doesn't include electrons or evolutionary processes.

Bad analogy. Logical fallacy -5. Next time, try to think, don't try to swim.

"Out-thinks"? Basically it evolved not to produce a protein for part of the day because that resulted in better survival rates from more nutrients. Cool, but why call it thinking, even with quotes when we are big boys and girls and can understand evolutionary processes. Does Slashdot really have to resort to Buzzfeed fringy-worthy headlines these days?

I'd say the Russian sanctions are overwhelmingly correct. Putin has an 80% approval rating, which means the Russian people agree with what he did. In that case, they are going to need to accept the consequences of a recession in 2015. If Russia doesn't want to play nice with the rest of the world politically why should the rest of the world play nice with them economically?

In the case of NK, though, these sanctions are just for show. NK doesn't have a global economy to damage, and certainly doesn't have major trade relations with the US and EU. China will prop them up as they always have...

I'm not convinced that NK was directly responsible in this, either (if they FBI as they claim have strong unreleased evidence, release it!)

But if you actually RTFA (or RTF government document) this is not going to hurt "the people". The people in North Korea have no Internet access or money to invest in foreign banks.

In theory they are just targeting financial transactions of North Korean agencies and senior officials. In practice, come on, how many of them have significant financial transactions in the US, anyway? It's just more posturing in a 60 year long posturing battle between the US and NK that is so silly it makes Zoolander look like a serious documentary on male modeling.

And very targeted and embarrassing release of insider emails and documents doesn't really fit the North Korea theory very well. I mean, their *official spokesperson* released a statement (sic): "The U.S., a big country, started disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing a tag." Just don't think they are going to be concerned that much with internal Hollywood politics when they can't even manage to translate one sentence into proper English.

Also, apparently the whole GoP reference and Interview theater threats only came up 3 weeks into the hack; one popular opinion is it was misdirection to muddy the investigation (if so, it sure worked!) And you'd think they'd lead with that if that was their original intent...

But anyway, at this point neither argument is very convincing. There just isn't any (public) hard evidence either way. Some claim the FBI has "proof they aren't showing" - if they want people to believe them, they might want to release that. The US government hasn't really built a very trusting relationship with its citizen these days...

Since it's defined in many national laws as "intentionally causing damages to a computer system". And it's going to be hard to argue it wasn't intentional after they bragged about it so much on Twitter already...

You need to read what I said a bit better. Of course they can be assigned to the original company who funded the work (i.e. the employer of the inventor(s).

If a company completely *buys* another company, in effect it is now that company. But that would SIGNIFICANTLY cut down on patent trolls (the whole point of this) as it would make it a much more expensive, complex, and risky undertaking. For example. Google did buy Motorola, keep most of the patent rights, and sell of the rest - but it cost them MANY billions of dollars to do that (and luckily Google was just doing it defensively, though of course they could assert them).

Why is it impossible to avoid? As part of not being able to sell/permanently assign the patents to that 3rd party company (i.e. the troll), it follows that only the original owner can actually sue for infringement. Again, the idea was trying to prevent patent trolls, not patents.

And OBVIOUSLY it was all just a suggestion. No off the cuff 2 paragraph statement is going to solve patent trolling. But making it harder for the trolls to acquire them is definitely something to consider.

Who said they can't license the patent? Of course they can license it, they just can't sell/transfer it outright, and none of the licensees can directly sue other companies for violating it. If anything that does protect the original inventor (or the original company it was assigned to).

Not at all. There is a huge difference between *licensing* a patent and *selling* the patent. Licensing means someone pays you to use it. Selling it means someone buys it and can do whatever they want with it (and in fact, you have given up the right to use it).

If you invent something, you can have an exclusive on it, or you can license it to companies that want to use it. That's how the system was INTENDED to work, and how it has worked for a ling time. Patent trolls (usually companies made mostly of lawyers) buying up large quantities of questionable patents and speculatively suing anyone with a remotely related product are a relatively new thing (largely enabled by the crazy vagueness of software patents).

But how does that change my point? (and I know you don't necessarily disagree...)

Assign the patent to the corporation sponsoring the patent, fine, I agree with that. Just don't allow it to be transferred to another of those corporate peoples. Or hell, maybe if the corporation is bought outright, you could consider transferring *all* patents, etc. But the fact is many patent trolls just pick and choose absurd patents that their lawyers end up finding an angle that's good enough for the ignorant juries who decide the outcomes...

You are totally correct in that. And even 20+ years later, my mom was working in admissions at a major university and was passed up for promotion because she "was probably getting married soon, and would just have kids and leave" (which she did, ie. ME, but I still don't agree with that any more than "preexisting conditions").

But 60 years later, that argument is just not true any more (especially at Stanford, my alma mater), and should be put to bed. The GP comment was what I would call "totally douchey" but the article is also absurd in somehow claiming gender bias started at a single school in a single year. Bullshit sensationalistic headlines... because anyone who actually READ the article would probably find it interesting, and not particularly biased or inflammatory (besides the fact that, yes, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were total a-holes back then).

I was in Stanford class of 1994 - which means, yes, I started in 1990. And, yes, we barely knew what real "email" was, since pretty much no 18 year old in high school had it. I had been on BBSs for 4-5 years before that, but at that point for even the leading edge outside of academia it was private BBS or CompuServe, etc.

By 1994 email was ubiquitous, Usenet was already long in the tooth, the Mosaic browser had been released, and we all had wired Ethernet in our dorm rooms (which still was definitely NOT the norm for college campuses - but it was nice). I wrote the first TCP/IP driver for DOOM so we could play multiplayer in the dorms once they blocked IPX after the initial DOOM IPX driver killed a lot of campus networks ;)

Anyway, the point is that range of 1990-1994 was in fact one of the critical periods for those developing the *commercial* Internet, and Stanford was at ground zero of a lot of it. And another point of the article is (if you read the whole thing) while at Stanford, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were not just the total dicks described in the article - they were WORSE. They basically started the Stanford Review to counter/insult any effort at racial or gender diversity/progress on campus. Even they apologized (according to the article) for the crap they wrote at the time (and Thiel came out of the closet eventually) and at the time it was BAD...

All that being said, the title of this slashdot post is FUCKING STUPID. It's in NO way what the article said, and as you know it's ridiculous to claim tech or ANY OTHER gender gap in business, engineering, or whatever somehow started in *1990* (more like 1790? 1690? 1690BC?) or at a single location...