Ahh.. the one upsmanship of sexism. What fun!

It reminds me of an old joke. During WWII a high ranking Soviet official walks out of a meeting with Stalin, obviously upset, muttering under his breath "Mustached asshole!". The secretary overhears him, and goes in and tells Stalin he just heard the official mutter "Mustached asshole!". Stalin calls in the official and asks him "Comrade, Who were you referring to when you said "Mustached asshole"? The official without hesitation says "I was referring to Hitler of course!". Stalin thanks him and calls the secretary in, asking her "And who did YOU think he was referring to, comrade?"

I think you're sort of missing the point. Sexism is sexism. You're still dividing the world up into sexes and saying one persons sexism is better or worse or not as important than someone else's sexism. Uhh.. also a form of sexism.

Isn't not discriminating on the basis of sex simply not discriminating on the basis of sex? You're kind of saying "Well fuck you and the discrimination you face because mine (or womens) is FAR worse". That's counter-productive. If you're against discrimination, you're against it, no matter who's being discriminated against.

  We need a lot less angry testosterone driven assholes.

This is just another form is sexism. I'm really tired of this bullshit about the "testerone driven male". As if all aggression is male and derived from masculine hormones. Can we please stop this bullshit? Men and women are different, it's true. But is one form of being an asshole any better or worse than another? Is asshole diversity somehow "good"?

The pendulum of sexism is drifting towards males, and there seems to be a distinct anti-male form of sexism in the world now. It's exemplified by this statement about "testosterone driven", as if men are simply slaves to hormones. It's just as sexist as women being accused of the same thing. (I think we're all familiar with the women controlled by their fluctuating hormones meme). Reversing it and putting the same thing on all men is just as sexist. So please stop this stereotype.

>80% of NBA players are black, 70% of NFL players are black. Is anyone asking them for more "diversity"? Yeah I thought not.

Maybe it's because there's around 500 NBA players, and around 1700 NFL players. For comparison, Google has 50,000 employees.

So if you're concerned about people having equal access to high paying jobs, who are you going to go after, the NBA or NFL, with a combined 2000 jobs, or Google, with 50,000?

It's not about "fairness" in each industry or "diversity" (that's really just marketing in our current culture), it's about different groups of people having access to well paying jobs.

Now, I'll be the first to tell you I don't think Google is racist, and there's MANY different reasons for the racial disparity. But trying to paint this as a numbers game where each industry has to have balance is really missing the point here. I'm actually totally against things like affirmative action. I don't think you can solve racial inequality through a socially acceptable form of racism.

It's true, but it's also just part of the way the world works. It's not just Silicon Valley. The big difference there is that Smart People have far more of a chance of first succeeding because software is "hard", and requires smart people in the first place to do anything useful.

1. By definition, most of the population is not-so-smart. (Please note, this does NOT mean smart people are better than everyone else, just smarter)

2. It takes smart people, and often times a particular kind of smart person to distinguish the smart people from the not-so-smart, but overly confident people.

3. People are heavily biased towards confident people. Confidence everyone can recognize. (as evidenced by the rise of Sara Palin, who has no business being confident, but yet was/is beloved by a certain segment of the populace).

4. There's an inverse relationship between skill and confidence. The more skillful people become, the less confident they are. (Primarly because they realize how much they really don't know).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So given the above, it's a natural tendency as a company grows that it'll start to get filled with people who aren't quite as smart as the founders. It's really inevitable at a certain point of growth because you'll just need more people, and a larger percentage of them will be not-so-smart. They'll start promoting the confident, but less skilled people because of point 2 and 3. This will create a feedback loop (less smart promotes even less smart people), and eventually the company is filled with morons who coast on the success of others. (i.e. Microsoft).

A LOT of content these days is saved on the web. I type a lot of things on the web now, and lose quite a bit because often times there's no save feature at all, just post. At any time I could want to reference another browser window, have the browser crash, or accidentally close the window and lose everything I'm typing. That happens a lot, and I doubt I'm the only one.

In fact, with the web I lose a LOT more than I ever did 20 years ago, since the save features are rare, and auto-save is non-existent. I find myself using desktop apps less and less. Why would I open up Word for instance? The last time I used a word processor was editing my resume. Even that's a little anachronistic, but there's currently not a good alternative.

And no, I'm not even "the younger generation". But the point being, the web hasn't caught up to the desktop at all in terms of not losing content.

I found his post to question conventional wisdom, but it's certainly not "un-educated". You seem to be responding to someone else's post, or someone else's opinion. Being "an old guy", perhaps you're simply making the same response that's won you praise over your entire life. i.e. "women have had to fight for rights and were actively discriminated against". That seems to be your entire response. While what you say is true, the conversation has shifted among generations now, so perhaps you need to make note of that.

I really think you need to go back and re-read what the OP said (especially if your response is it's simply "un-educated"). He's simply questioning whether the the gains women have gotten came through second wave feminism or through other means. I think there's a lot of truth to that. A lot of women went to work because of economic need, not because of ideology. Economically having half the work force idle isn't advantageous. Essentially a lot of women got jobs because the family needed the money, not because they read "the second sex", or because Gloria Steinhem existed. You can disagree if you like, and that's fine, but having a different opinion on where change comes isn't un-educated.

Nowhere did the OP make any claims that banks wouldn't give out loans, or that women weren't discriminated against. That's an argument I think you've been making for years, and people of your generation have fought you on. The OP is younger than you, and comes from a very different background and likely takes very different opinions than people of your generation. So taking him to task and putting him in the place of a member of your generation kind of misses the point, and the point that the OP was trying to make.

I think you're onto something about up/down votes. Reddit has a system where you can sort by "controversial" but that in itself is a problem since it's just a pain in the butt to have to sort through two different systems of moderating.

The one system I REALLY dislike is the only positive system of upvotes. The most obvious problem is there's little means to correct information that turns out to be innaccurate.

Say someone posts something that initially looks extremely promissing and gets highly rated. Someone else posts a rebuttal that completely destroys the argument, and only create miss-information. But yet that initial high rating is very hard to get rid of, since there's no negative feedback.

The other problem is that with no negative feedback, it's hard to filter out the utter dreck and crap. If everything starts at 0, and can never go lower than 0, how do you get rid of the spam, nonsense, offtopic shit, poor posts, etc? That needs to get lowered down to a level below the fresh posts, otherwise it's just hard to wade through all the dreck to find something to boost.

I've never thought it was supposed to promote one kind of behavior or another. Upvote/Downvote is a means to improve signal/noise ratio, and make it possible for tens of thousands of people to communicate. It's a form of moderating, and frankly that's how it's always been. That's how slashdot was designed, and why we call it moderating, not "social conditioning". It works relatively well for what it's supposed to and certainly better than nothing at all (though I prefer reddits moderation system where there's not a limit of 5 to a post, and everyone can moderate all the time). I've never heard anyone express the idea it's a form of conditioning.

To me the idea that receiving attention (no matter if it's good or bad) is encouraging behavior, while being ignored discourages behavior isn't all that surprising. We're social creatures that evolved in groups of 150. Being "cast out" of the group is the ultimate in shame. People have used ignoring others as a form of punishment for a LONG time. Hell, that's what a kill list was for way back in the 90s on Usenet. That's exactly what the Amish do via shunning when they want to control peoples behaviour. It's the same with other social species like dogs as well. If your dog bites you for instance, the best thing to do is to ignore it for several days. Don't look at it, act like the dog doesn't exist. When it's time to feed the dog, have someone else from outside your house feed the dog. Dogs DO NOT want to be outside the pack. If you punish the dog, you're really just engaging it and playing a dominance game. If you simply ignore it and make the dog think it's no longer in the pack... it'll get the message. Being outside the pack= death. The same is true in human interaction as well.

Fortran isn't a shovel, and other languages aren't bulldozers. Fortran is like the first shovel ever invented, and other languages are improvements on that shovel.

Cobol was an early language as well, and nobody but a few dinosaurs program in it anymore. Why? Because they have to maintain legacy code.

Mostly the same reason with Fortran.

If the new admin is competent, there's no reason to not give him full access to everything. If he needs to be trained, then ease him into it. Not giving a competent admin full access is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, as it doesn't instill confidence, and breeds miss-trust. The second biggest mistake is never allowing the guy who needs a little guidance or training to ease into the job.

In other words, you have to let go, and let someone else do the day-to-day operations. Managing an organization like that means trusting your employees to do the right thing. You need to get comfortable thinking on a high level, and not worrying about how the servers are configured.

This isn't "free speech", it's advertising. Google needs to be more selective about who it gives free advertising to. That's certainly not silencing anyone.

I don't believe that anybody actually believes all that claptrap about Xenu..

It's no more or less believable than any other religion. Do you think people really believe that a dead guy came back to life? How about an entire ocean was suddenly parted so the good guys could get away and then collapsed again on the bad guys? Or that the earth is 6000 years old? Or that the guy who created the entire universe 12 billion years ago and billions of light years large is really really concerned about if human penises wind up in human vaginas before the correct ritual is performed?

So yes, I really do think some people believe in the Xenu thing. Especially since they don't really tell you about the Xenu thing until you're really into it.

Umm.. so the article was focused on the abstract idea of increasing efficiency of thermoelectric generators. The practical idea (and even the article title) was about how it might be able to power a car more efficiently. But yet you focus right in on how it's never going to work. (Why yes, I DO understand the carnot limit of heat engines).

The article never talked about massive gains in heat efficiency for power plants, just scavenging waste heat. Right now we have massive cooling towers at power plants to get rid of waste heat, which sometimes provides problems for increased temperatures of waterways. If you could make an efficient thermoelectric device like this you might be able to take some of that waste heat and turn it into usable electricity, reducing your cooling needs and producing power at the same time. A 600MW coal plant going from a 33% efficient to 34% would produce an additional 18MW. That's not bad. At .02 a kilowatt hour, that's nearly $9000 a day.

So no, there's nothing really to "debunk" here, since no claims are really made about large gains in efficiency.

Wow. I don't want you to design anything where my life could be in danger or be in charge of any project. We're accepting the scenario of the OP (The change wouldn't have happened unless the part number was kept the same), and you're telling me that given the decision to save lives, or follow policy, you'll choose policy. Life is rarely so simple, but you've already accepted this conclusion and have not only chosen to go with corporate police, but are DEFENDING this position in public.

While I understand human nature and accept that most people will follow policy and simply put the blame on someone else (This is well researched and called diffusion of responsibility) I'm saddened by the fact that you're advocating this position, and that it was modded up so highly.