Looks like there's nothing but partisan hacks who can't comprehend anything more complicated than a 5 word sound byte in this discussion.

Let me summarize what I just read, even as implied in TFA. Obama and anyone who opposed the Keystone XL pipeline are at fault for the explosion and not the rail company.

Because it's impossible to improve rail safety. Because it's impossible to address the concerns raised about the Keystone XL pipeline. Because from what I can gather big oil has decided to throw a temper trantrum because they didn't get the instant gratification of having *their* way *now* and many of our right-wing authoritarian members here are in full "authoritarian aggression" mode carrying out that temper tantrum.

Why, in this day and age of information technology and satellite tracking systems, do we have trains colliding with each other AT ALL?

Oh, I know why, because a good deal of you posting today, and you know exactly who you are, are too busy holding the POTUS and environmentalists and hippies and anybody else you don't like accountable while giving the rail company an implicit pass.

Jeebus. Oil *will* run out some day. The shit fits some of you are having are so utterly stupid. We need to reduce our reliance on pumping crude out of the ground NOW. The best ways we have of doing that is nuclear fission and biodiesel (NOT corn, there are better ways to make the stuff--apparently an algea process or hemp if I recall are the most promising, so take your pick). Then we can still have the crude for better uses than just literally burning it up while we figure out how to replace those things with alternatives then too.

The paranoid, outraged, partisan world some of you live in is frightening.

I refuse to believe that in some abstract sense a species that can put one of their own on their own moon and has sent robots all over its home solar system can't tackle the problem of growing energy demands and dwindling supply of the easiest energy source available. Thank goodness we live in a world where crude oil from the ground isn't the only energy source and when it's gone it doesn't need to be all over, go back an live in caves! Thank goodness there are other ways! However, take that same species, convince them they're all "temporarily embarassed millionaires" and then pit them against each other on issues as asinine as how to get something safely from point A to point B and then convince them that if their side doesn't win, they'll never be millionaires again!, then we are headed straight for another dark age.

And this shit is only gonna get worse in 2014, isn't it? At least maybe in a few years I'll be able to buy some cannabis downtown so I can just tune all this shit out and be happy and drugged (no, not all of us who are interested in using it know where to get it).

Have to admit, that would be the best possible private sector "bail out" one could hope for. Better than throwing it at Wall Street. Just imagine all the science that would get done with a rescue mission.

But yes, this does seem to be utterly foolhardy. On the other hand, I can barely imagine how thrilling it would be to live on another world for even a year or two, even if it were a death sentence.

We'll get there some day, just probably not in this century. Maybe something like asteroid mining would create enough of a need to see it happen, assuming that asteroid mining ever becomes necessary. Small moves.

I'd really like to know the answer to #3.

Off the top of my head, I don't understand why they don't have a private key known only to the bus/station equipment that does the reading/writing of the amount on the card and some kind of incrementing or rotating ID to prevent replay attacks/card cloning? Each bus could have an ID and a counter, then each morning distribute to a system on each bus the bus/counter combinations that have already been used maybe say in the past 3 or so months depending on how much data that would be and how much storage would be available on the bus. Make sure to design in some key rotation of the private key as well. Sure, it's not perfect and probably has attack vectors I'd need a second set of eyes to catch, but it's better than this and doesn't require any wireless anything except maybe at the station (or a USB thumb drive would work just fine to get the lists to the busses in the morning). Why isn't there a market for a more secure system?

Is there really something about a solution along those lines that would cost an order of magnitude more than the existing equipment or at least more than these flawed systems cost bus operators both in lost revenue and paying the lawyers?

BUT, I guess implementing a system that would require some serious effort on the part of a criminal to circumvent doesn't play as easily into the American narrative of poor folks and their lack of virtue and lives of petty crime. I also don't have any family in government or backroom connections that would get me the contract, either. Maybe that's sadly the answer to #3.

That leads us to an answer to #2 and sort of to #1 as well: it's more satisfying to Americans to create a flawed system and catch people in the act of exploiting that system than it is to just implement a system that's too difficult to circumvent.

I did listen once. So, I took up the task of helping them learn how to program. This was even required of me at work by my boss (a womyn-born-womyn who promoted me, possibly on sexist grounds, but what the fuck can we ever do about womyn-born-womyn who believe that computers are just for boys?!).

So, we learned about string concatenation, how to use left, right, and mid, and how to teach a computer to present the correct on call doctor when somebody calls at 3 am with a life-threatening emergency.

Except, it all went wrong. Now, I'll freely admit that I'm not good as a teacher, but I've successfully tutored men and trans women before. What I ran smack dab into was the womyn-born-womyn entitlement complex.

Now, there are those who are assigned the female gender at birth purely by chance, who then go on to be individuals and pursure their joy. Wonderful! I have no problem with those individuals.

See, the basic confusion that my womyn-born-womyn co-workers had made was that being a computer programmer was merely a status. Of course, they were also Mothers, so they believed that because they had a night of wild sex and then grew a baby in their own bodies for 10 months (something I would do as well if only I had the biology), that there were therefore somekind of nexus of creation energy. (Not their words, just what I've been thinking lately about womyn-born-womyn privilege.)

It turned out that getting the computer to say "You've selected Dr. so-and-so as O/C. Do you want to page her?" was fucking hard. It turned out that it was even more impossible when Dr. Widget was o/c and we needed a female pronoun and when Dr. Block was o/c and we needed a male pronoun. It was EVEN MORE difficult to even determine that if that was too hard then maybe we should just forget about pronouns!

No, the modern womyn-born-womyn ABSOLUTELY CANNOT COMPREHEND THIS:

No, feminists love to bash me over the head with the person who wrote that because I wasn't lucky enough to be assigned the correct gender at birth, yet they HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK SHE WAS TRYING TO SAY.

Womyn-born-womyn would rather be having wild sex and popping out babies, and how can I blame them?

I fucking listened to womyn-born-womyn. Maybe you should fucking listen to them, too.

Ok, here. It should be obvious that I'm jealous of womyn-born-womyn, and I've also had a good number of bad encounters with womyn-born-womyn. I'm so fucking sick of being sexually harassed by womyn-born-womyn.

Do you know what it feels like when a gay guy starts flirting with you? It's pretty fucking uncomfortable, isn't it? It doesn't feel one bit natural, and it makes you want to either vomit, run away, or sock him in the face (or some combination or maybe other things). Well, that's what it feels like when a woman is hitting on me (trans or cis). Except when I fail to recripocate when it's a womyn-born-womyn (cis woman) hitting on me, then somehow I'm just an asshole. That's female privilege at work. I'm expected to recripocate because of my assigned gender at birth, fuck all my biology might mean.

You know what? Yes, there's homophobia, racism, sexism, and all kinds of other things in geek culture. It spurts up on my screen even when I'm just trying to enjoy some mind-numbing Diablo 3. Except, for some reason, most geeks and most men I've met have no problem with the fact that I'm a woman. They just accept it. Hell, some of them like the fact that they can flirt with me without risking accusations of sexual harassment or date rape. It's just the feminists who feel the incessant need to remind me that I'm not really a woman and could never be anything like their privileged, spoiled asses.

Sure, some men don't like the idea I'm a woman and MRAs are convinced that I've been somehow brainwashed by feminism and turned into a communist robot (despite voting Libertarian consistently---I guess I'm a rather poor brainwashed feminists communist robot but oh well). It's just feminists who, ACROSS THE BOARD, have some major problem with the idea that I'm a woman. They would much rather just punish me for being a rapist.

So, I hate both womyn-born-womyn and I hate feminists. The reasons for each are very different. My hatred of womyn-born-womyn is utterly irrational. It's feminism that has lashed out against me time and time again. If feminism isn't lashing out at me for my assigned gender, it's lashing out against me because the idea that I might be just as much of a woman as they are upstairs is so offensive that they need to use that as evidence that I'm somehow even more of a rapist.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that white knights like you need to stop labeling anyone who would dare oppose feminism as misogynist. MRAs and others who oppose feminism do so for good reasons, and they're certainly not misogynist. Hell, I got banned from A Voice for Men because of my misogyny.

It just irritates the hell out of me that daring to question feminism gets one labeled as a misogynist. No, save that term for me. Feminism needs to burn in a fire already, but not because the people who see the legitimate need for it to go away and see the flaws in that philosophy just hate women.

Well find for me feminists who aren't misandrists.

If only some feminists are misandrists, then why do their policies wind up getting implemented?

I'll tell you what I've found to be the most rotten part of feminism (and also the MHRM, but that's another thing). Here's the thing. It's a womyn-born-womyn only club. What does the term womyn-born-womyn mean anyway? It took me a while to figure it out myself when I was younger and stupid. I was this stupid little shit who thought that just because I liked long hair and dresses and wanted to live as a woman and couldn't relate for the life of me to being a man that I might be a woman. Except then I ran smack dab into this term "womyn-born-womyn." It's not good enough to be a self-aware human being with a biologically female mind for them.

No, it's a womyn-born-womyn only club. That means that you had to have been assigned the female gender at birth, no later. Otherwise, you're a rapist, and you must be punished as a rapist. You find for me the feminist wh believes otherwise.

So I'm supposed to have this "male privilege" that I've benefitted from. What's the fucking 20 on that? Where is my male privilege. I'm still fucking waiting for it.

White knights like you are disgusting. Take off your blinders. Stop putting womyn-born-womyn on a pedistal. Start judging them by their own individual actions instead of staring at their breasts.

I've been the target of discrimination for the gender I was assigned, despite a doctor and a psychologist independently telling me that that assignment might not have been correct, except I can do about fuck all about it because of shitheads like you and the feminists and the MHRM. All of you need to go soak your heads.

The feminists and white knights like you are too busy telling me that the reason I might want to change my legal and professional gender from male to female is because I want to lurk out in bathrooms and somehow rape little girls. Why in the fucking burning hells would I want to do that?

No, hell. Even yesterday I was in the men's room at work, and yet again I made a man do a double-take. When I'm in the men's room, I MAKE MEN UNCOMFORTABLE! Wrap that around your stupid little white knight pea brain. He thought, standing IN FRONT OF a urinal, that he had accidentally walked into the women's room. That's female privilege right there, and it gets extended to me repeatedly BECAUSE I AM NOT A FUCKING MAN IN A DRESS. I have the female privilege of being able to invade any male space I choose to. Except what the hell other option do I have? At least men are understanding about it and it makes me feel a little bad about it all, but if I were to use the women's room, you'd better bet that I'd be slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit and attempted rape charges, and the feminists and white knights like you would be yelling hallelujah!

Then the MHRM movement chimes in and tells me that I'm mentally ill for other reasons.

Really, what the hell is wrong with you?

Take off your blinders, and see feminism for what it is. It's a club that seeks to privilege those who were lucky enough to be assigned the female gender at birth, like a gender caste. They want to use that status as a weapon and somehow argue that the rest of us are just rapists and pedophiles. Then, when somebody like me pops up and says, hey, hold on a second, I haven't ever wanted to be a guy, and I've got a doctor and a psychologist who says that being a guy probably isn't right for me, and I'l really like to be a woman now, then they take that as even more evidence that I'm a dirty filthy date rapist sexual harasser who wants to "invade women." (whatever the hell that means)

Where is a feminst who's said anything else? Find her for me. I'm not going to hold my breath.

What about dumb sexist jokes that womyn-born-womyn spew all over the modern workplace?

Shouldn't we expect womyn-born-womyn to eat their own shit from time to time?

That's the problem with the passive voice where the verb "adapt" appears. We don't know who's responsible for adapting it. It could be the author of the brochure (i.e. requiring somebody authoring a brochure to create several different adaptations), or it could be the brochure itself as you and TFA's author read. It's an assumption to say that the brochure is adapting itself simply because the law used the passive voice. The passive voice leaves who the actor is utterly vague.

I don't know how you arrived at the number 100,000.

This strikes me as one of those legalese things where the language is intentionally (or unintentionally, who knows) vague, and the best way to implement it is to go through the motions, do the bare minimum, and say create 2 or 3 brochures, or hell, since womyn-born-womyn are special and need their own information, we'll have 6 from a matrix of [child, adult, old fogey] vs. [patients of family docs and GPs, *women's* health]. There. We've successfully adapted a brochure about some condition, and we didn't even need to go into double digits.

Well, I suppose I'll probably get called racist now because I didn't add an additional dimension for [hispanic/latino, black, and everybody else]. So, now we're up to 18. Hopefully if we don't have any other special interest groups, we can leave it there and get on with the delivery of health care.

(*sigh* Can't we just have single payer already--you know so that your doctor can take your individual risk profile and adapt the information for you personally based on your family and medical history instead of some byzantine system that's either a bunch of brochures that won't really tell anybody anything or some kind of Star Trek LCARS system with voice recognition and strong AI?)

Ok, Code.org. Ok, feminists. You want to solve this thing?

We're going to need to conscript womyn-born-womyn into STEM classes. Demand that they at least get an associates degree in something STEM related before they be allowed to graduate with their Women's Studies or English major.

Sterilize them until they're able to do that. Take away the option of being a Single Mother.

If they don't enroll in a STEM class by the time they're 19, require their parents to throw them out of the streets until they starve.

Womyn-born-womyn are TOO PRIVILEGED, and THAT is why they don't enroll in fields that are "too technical."

If we given womyn-born-womyn the same options as assigned males, as I outlined above, we'll see an improvement in enrollment in that demographic.

Otherwise, what the fuck ever. Let womyn-born-womyn continue to choose to be Single Mothers or to marry to a man who will provide them with an income instead of EARNING IT THEIR FUCKING SELVES.

I am sick of womyn-born-womyn investing more energy in bitching about how computers are "too technical" rather than just getting out a compiler and making something. I am sick of the feminist movement that enables this kind of utter failure. Womyn-born-womyn, like anybody else, are perfectly capable of doing this crap on their own; except, apparently, when the privileges feminism has given them prevent them from doing so.

Except, why do I care what womyn-born-womyn want to do?

It's clear that Code.org wants to limit enrollment in STEM classrooms in order to drive down wages in engineering and computer fields. They're merely riding on the coat-tails of the idea that there's something sexist about this little blurb:

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Gee! Who the hell wrote that?!

Oh! It was a womyn-born-womyn!

We need to stop believing that there's some mystical force keeping womyn-born-womyn out of the field. We need to tell Code.org to go fuck itself, because feminism is completely off base here.

I'm a trans woman, and I do computer-y shit for a living. Womyn-born-womyn can either bitch about how hard it is to sign up for CS-101 or they can just sign up.

And hell, womyn-born-womyn won't even need to deal with the sexist shit I need to deal with when I go to college like mandatory date rape classes and all the little other ways that assigned males are discriminated against in college.

One thing one could hope for out of these studies is some kind of diagnostic to identify transgendered individuals. Right now it's a matter of "well, I feel this way and my psych says it's ok!"

I have a feeling there may be such a thing... some day. Perhaps it would be possible to make a diagnostic before adolescence, which would have ideal outcomes both for socialization as the correct mental sex (for trans men and trans women) and for skin-deep appearance (for trans women at least, trans men tend to disappear once they start testosterone HRT).

Otherwise, I think I agree with the general sentiment. As long as we're only using these studies to make stereotyping generalizations based on genital sex, they're pretty much worthless in my view.

I don't give a damn.

I got called sexist because I was promoted over a womyn-born-womyn I was more qualified than. The feminists called me sexist, even though the person who promoted me was also a womyn-born-womyn.

Guess what? I'm still making shit per hour while she went off and got married, had a seven day honeymoon in Hawaii, and is now a stay-at-home Mother. (Yes, with a capital M.)

We'll get more womyn-born-womyn in STEM careers once we decide that womyn-born-womyn need to have a career that pays more than minimum wage BEFORE we allow them to get knocked up. PERIOD. That's ALL THERE IS TO IT .

I think I agree. When I clicked the link, I expected a review of a book that would cover things such as how screen reading technology is changing in the world of AJAX 3.5-rc2 where a webpage's DOM model can be generated entirely after the .html document has loaded. Personally, the more I delve into "HTML 5" technologies, I wonder if there's something I might do to make sure that I won't break assistive technologies. There was some of that in the review.

However, I wasn't sure what treating autism with VR based therapies had to do with accessibility or where ADHD even comes into the picture.

That being said, I've been learning over the years that if one assumes that one's users all have ADHD, the intelligence of a 7 year old, the domain knowledge of somebody hired yesterday, and possibly a cocaine addiction and then uses that assumption to build user interfaces, it works a lot better. That's just me being cynical I suppose.