Can you say specifically what about primary education bothers you? There is a dire need for more male teachers, but that's not quite the same thing as feminisation.

Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

Slashdot is all about the comments. If people keep commenting, these stories will keep being posted.

Personally I don't mind them. The comments are depressing some times, but let's face it: Slashdot is the Monty Python argument clinic of the internet, that's what people come here for and that's why these stories are popular.

It's just an overreaction to the fact that the movie doesn't have the usual "women must be saved by the man, they can't act independently or take the opportunity to save themselves" trope. Max creates the opportunity, he doesn't have to take it for them too. Why isn't that enough?

I reject any definition of what a man should be. Just be the person you want to be, decide for yourself what matters and what you value. There is no ideal woman anymore, there should be no ideal man either.

That's not feminisation, by the way. That's liberation.

You see a conspiracy where there is none. They had sex slaves in the plot and wanted to do a better than average portrayal, making them proper characters instead of the usual generic dross. They got in an expert to consult.

What exactly are you trying to say? That this person taints everything she touches? Can you provide specific criticism of the film to support that point? Or are you just saying it is a zero sum game and that men must lose out for women to be portrayed positively in movies?

Or god forbid you can buy your parts from places other than ebay. You're pretty much guaranteed legit parts if you buy from reputable sources.

While this may sound like their reliability is in question, I would say worse from other vendors as the only alternatives to FTDI have had just utter garbage drivers to begin with.

Connect a $15 ISP programmer to 6 pins.
Buy AVRs with the Arduino bootloader pre-installed.
Buy any USB AVRs which all come with bootloaders pre-installed.
Pop the AVR out of your Arduino and into your application board.

I tutored Team Project I at university. We literally had every student designing PCBs and programming AVRs in their first year and not a single person had issues with it, even the really dumb rejects of the class managed to get something running, they just couldn't code to save themselves.

What an absolutely backwards thinking statement. There are a multitude of applications available to beginners which require crystals, and at the frequencies we're talking about these applications even work on a breadboard. Crystals are in no way shape or form even remotely out of range for a beginner to use.

This is slashdot. I don't think anything we see has happened today.

You missed the point. It's not about interest. I do find this interest.

It's about stories. Slashdot is a news aggregator. This isn't a news article of any type. It's a how-to guide. A DIY guide. It's for nerds, but not even remotely news in any way shape or form, and there are a multitude of sites dedicated to precisely that.

That's nice. But I don't see any evidence of such a perspective in the parent's original post. Here's what was said again:

Let's first try reading this in the literal way where "you" consistently means "some company doing advertising" and "I" means the parent who wrote this post. In other words: (1) I read your advert, (2) afterward, I might want your product, (3) I didn't ask for your ad, (4) but you "took money out of my pocket that I didn't plan for" because I end up wanting and thus buying your product, and thus (5) that's theft.

I believe you're trying to re-read parent's post as though the last two sentences were magically written from the point of view of the author of TFA. But (a) there's no evidence of that (e.g., quotation marks, and (b) it doesn't relate in GP's argument to what came immediately before it.

Ironic -- saying this on a website that serves up ads. (Granted, it allows you to block them if your karma is good, but clearly your morality still allows you spend time on sites that do the thing you detest, particularly to new users.)

The problem is that they can run the stats. Companies know that successful ad campaigns can increase revenue. How effective web ads are, I don't know -- but there are good reasons that companies spend millions of dollars per minute to run ads during the Superbowl or why clothing companies pay to run ads in fashion and pop culture magazines, etc.

You may hate them and never look at them. I certainly don't -- when I'm trying to read an article in a magazine or newspaper, for example, it's like I "don't even see" ads. I know they are there, but I never look at them. And even if you offered me money to try to remember what any of them were about, I generally couldn't tell you.

But I also know I'm not "most people." And neither are you. For some reason, most people actually seem to pay at least some attention to ads... and that's why they exist.

Also, you have to consider things from a financial perspective. If you gave consumers a choice: (1) cable TV with commercials, or (2) cable TV with no ads, but you have to pay for all your programming, I'd bet very few people would be willing to pay the exorbitant cost to take choice (2). It's the same thing for magazines or newspapers, and perhaps for some online things too.

Personally, I'm willing to put up with random ads in a paper magazine or newspaper with otherwise good actual content, because I know that I end up paying less for content with little inconvenience. I can "filter" my own reading so they are not intrusive to me at all (though I've seen certain fashion magazines that seem to be 95% ads, and I simply would never buy such a magazine, even if I wanted to read some articles, because that's just annoying). I'm less forgiving of ads that actually force me to waste time, whether they're TV commercials, or radio commercials, or web ads that delay my browsing or access to content. So I avoid things like that -- I don't watch live TV, I only tend to listen to public radio, and I don't revisit sites that have served up too many annoying ads to me.

That's a valid choice, and I encourage it. The problem is that you are vastly outnumbered by people who won't take such a stance because they aren't quite as annoyed by the ads. So they put up with them, and as long as the advertisers see enough "views," they'll keep trying.

In any case, though I wish ads would just go away completely (like you), I realize that there are many people who find some (usually non-intrusive) advertising to be useful. (I know people who have told me that they buy some magazines to look at the ads. Seriously.) And if those people are willing to keep buying random crap to convince advertisers to keep paying to make better content, I'm personally willing to reap the benefits of cheaper content with little downside (since I'm never going to spend money on anything based on an ad, so the people who do are subsidizing me).

It's when advertising gets annoying and intrusive that I can't stand it. And I do the same thing you do -- I just don't go to that site anymore.

Huh? I know that the meaning of the word "theft" gets argued about a lot around here -- particularly when the copyright enforcement police come around.

But whatever we think "theft" means, I don't think it has ANY relation to what you just said. You read something, then you decide to buy something. "In some circles, that's theft." Umm, no, it's not. You made a choice to spend money. That's not "theft" by any stretch of the imagination.

See, all of those words mean different things. "Coercion" is generally immoral and often illegal. "Enticing" or "encouraging" are not. "Manipulating" is usually immoral, but whether it's illegal depends on context.

I hate advertising probably as much as you do. And I agree with you that it sometimes exploits people psychologically in unfair ways. I wish there were less of it. But as long as you don't have a significant mental deficit and the advertising is basically true (not false or misleading), I cannot possibly see how you say that someone choosing to spend money is "theft."

Your two numbers don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. The distribution of intelligence (or whatever criteria college admissions are based on) is influenced significantly by various cultural and socioeconomic factors, regardless of race. And even if intelligence overall is basically assumed to be the same across racial groups (basically true, despite the various IQ studies that have tried to find very small differences), the tail end of the distribution on the high side may have different characteristics for different races (for various reasons, e.g., for socioeconomic reasons students who go to fancy private high schools tend to not include a lot of black students, so there are probably fewer black students who have had the educational opportunities to achieve at a very high level) -- which is all we're concerned about here.

Anyhow, a little while back this issue was covered in the media, particularly stuff like this NY Times piece. That includes this graph, which seems to show that Ivy League school admissions (who take race into account during admissions) have tended to arrive at Asians accounting for 15-20% of admissions in a very narrow band. While Caltech -- being one of the few elite schools that explicitly says it does NOT take race into account -- has seen Asian percentage rise significantly as the Asian population has in the U.S.

There are various problems with this oversimplified analysis, like the fact that Caltech has a different focus in overall student body from the Ivies in general, so it may attract different types of students with different skills. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing similarity to trends that were noted (for example) in the early 1900s with a "Jewish quota" that was enforced in many top schools to cap the number of admitted Jewish students, even if they had better applications than other students.

Is this effect real? Various statisticians have been debating it for the past few years. But it's at least something to think about, given the disparity between Asian percentage at top schools which take race into account and those which don't.