Excellent. I came across the Kane and Mertz paper a while ago, but never actually read it. So now I just need to convince my brain to stop assuming that the greater male variability hypothesis is true, when this paper makes a very good case against it.

Responses like this are why I'm glad I kept reading this thread. The top half of this discussion is just disgusting. It's a shame it took me this long to find some intelligent, thoughtful, and decent human beings at slashdot.

What do you get if you ally with a women as a coder? You get better products. Think of the opportunity cost of sexism. Think of all the talent you're not getting by letting her (and by association, other women) be harassed. If I was interested in something, but kept getting shut down at all opportunities, eventually I'd move on. In this case, moving on can mean going into proprietary software development, or it can mean going into a different field entirely.

To put it another way, letting women in does not mean kicking men out. You enrich the entire community, and get skilled programmers who, for one reason or another, don't want to deal with the bullshit.

If that's not compelling enough, consider Otis Boykin. He invented an improved electrical resistor. This led to a decrease in price of home electronics, including TVs, computers, and radios. In other words, without his work, computers would be more expensive, and we probably wouldn't be in the same situation we are today. He's also black. If he had been kept out of the electrical engineering community simply because he was black, we would probably have a different world today.

So the next time some jackass starts harassing some lady because she's a lady, tell him to back off. Because you're not just helping her, you're helping every woman who stays out of the field because of the sexism.

This is the best sarcastic rebuttal I have read in a damn long time.

That being said, money could be a factor. Namely, men make more of it. Since they make more of it, they can spend some of it on making their life easier, and free up time to work on projects.

Fair enough. I tend to handle the following jobs: mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, shoveling the drive way, and the laundry. My fiance, conversely, tends to handle cleaning the washrooms, doing the gardening, and tends to do more of the other jobs (vacuuming, dishes, and what not) than I do.

In fairness, each of those splits has a reason. I mow the lawn because I'm the only one with mowing experience (my fiance never had to learn as her father took care of that, whereas my father pawned the job off on his 3 sons ASAP). I shovel the drive way because she has asthma and would get physically sick trying to exert herself in the cold (I live in Ottawa, and it gets cold). I take out the garbage because no one else in the house will remember. And I do the laundry because she works retail and I have free time on weekends to handle that sort of thing.

She does the gardening because it's her garden, and I made it clear that I will have nothing to do with it. She cleans the washrooms because she finds that I do too poor a job (different standards, I guess), and she tends to do more of the other jobs simply because she notices the mess long before I do. The rest? We split equally, more or less.

Compared to other fields, which have a much more equal balance of men and women. Gonna throw this out there, back when I worked at McDonald's, men and women got equal treatment. You did your job regardless. I had just as many female managers as I did male managers. The owner and his wife both had equal authority (at least as far as I could tell from the bottom of the heap). I had just as many shitty male colleagues as I did shitty female colleagues. See where I'm going with this?

The closest example men have would be in traditionally female professions, e.g. nursing. And the worst treatment they tend to get there is having their job belittled by, guess what, other men. I highly doubt that a male nurse going to a nursing conference would be at risked of being groped by his female colleagues, no matter how rare he is.

1.6 mSv is 1600 uSv. Just clarifying.

No kidding. I'd suggest holding the phones for at least one month before they're allowed to be processed. That being said, I'm sure someone could find a way to make this work without running into the theft issue.

Sadly, this was my first thought. Unless there is some sort of holding period, like with pawn shops, this could easily be abused. My second thought was issues with personal data. Will the phones be wiped when received? Or only when they are prepared to be sold. This could work, but they'd need to handle these issues, along with the others that I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Well, I do suppose that if you live in an area with a significant number of hills... Ottawa is a relatively flat place, only about 120 m between the highest and lowest point. And as much as we bitch and whine, the snow plowing does tend to get done fairly quickly.

Really? I mean, I definitely use winter tires, but I've never felt the need to use chains. And I live in Ottawa.

Yeah, the system doesn't seem very robust. That being said, I'm sure a good civil engineer could find some way to make it work.

To be fair, I suspect that both you and I live in North America. This system is intended for Europe, which, to my understanding, has the kind of space required for the transfer time at high speeds.

The real advantage to the traveler is, in theory, saving on wait time. As it is now, the process is "tram-transfer station-train-transfer station-tram". With this system in place, the process would be "tram-train-tram". Thus, in theory, saving the time of having to wait at the transfer station. Unfortunately, I suspect that this would introduce a number of inefficiencies that would wind up either being more expensive, or not saving any time. For example, having the trams connect to the train would save time waiting for the next transfer, but would bring the tram much further away from its original starting point. Unless you planned it incredibly well, that could end up costing more simply moving empty trams to the next destination. The other problem is this system seems to rely quite heavily on strict timing. I could easily see that a single tram being late would mess up the next few hours, whereas a bus system is much more robust.

If I understand this correctly, the 'slow' trains work like a sort of express bus system (or, to be more precise, a streetcar system). They do a slow milk run in the neighbourhood, picking people up. Then, after leaving the slow area, it speeds up to dock with the train, where you transfer over. It's kind of complicated, but I could see it working. So here would be your travel day. Wake up, catch the slow train at the corner, then after a short while, transfer over to the train. Then, when the slow train for your destination docks, transfer to that one. Get off at the stop for work, and walk the rest of the way. The idea here is to cut out the middleman. Instead of having to wait at another bus (train) station for the next high speed train to arrive, you simply transfer directly to the train.

There are, admittedly, a few problems. First off, this would only save time for people who have to regularly make the sort of 'bus-train-bus' connection. Secondly, this doesn't seem very error-proof. If people can't make the transfer fast enough, then you end up being stuck on the slow train until you can make another pass at the next one. Thirdly, you'd need quite a large section to make sure you have enough time to make the transfers.

That being said, this is definitely an interesting idea. I'd like to see someone work all the kinks out, though.