One quiet day during my internship at the US. Department of Commerce, I found a regional database of S/M-size companies with detailed data. As someone with an interest in female leadership, I ran a query to find the number of female company leaders.

Fully 80% of the entrepreneurs in the database were women.

However, 80% of those female entrepreneurs ran a one-man shop, while less than 50% of the men did. Most of the woman-owned companies provided services like tutoring, catering, cleaning, personal shopping, or crafting (traditional gender roles).

I'm not sure what the data means, but I found it interesting.

Insinuating that foolproof-designed medical equipment eliminates the need for medical training (and therefore surgery can be assisted "by anyone", as you claim) is akin to claiming that a debugger eliminates the need to learn proper software development procedures and programming protocols.
Training, no matter how extensive, doesn't eliminate human error. Stress, lack of sleep, long hours, distractions, and high pressure environments can all contribute to human error - and as we all know, those are common working conditions in hospitals.

Antivirus companies release between one and 250 (yes, really) pattern updates per day. The majority release far more than one.

When a pattern update is released, the worm or virus detected has already been in the wild for several days. Our AV company takes at least 24 hours to issue an official pattern for the viruses I've found in the wild. So there is literally no time to spare in getting out detection for viruses. By the time it comes out, we're already in the danger zone.

Can you please explain how an average sysadmin would test, approve, and implement dozens of pattern updates across multiple platforms on a daily (including weekends/holidays) basis without significantly delaying detection across production (thus potentially compromising corporate security with a worm, which will almost certainly cause downtime and data theft)? Also, can you explain how this sysadmin would time- and cost-justify it to management, especially considering that a worm getting into your system while you're in the process of testing would do at least as much damage as the McAfee snafu?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just puzzled how the IT staffs would be considered incompetent for not testing each pattern file under the conditions I stated above.

The entire system of antiviral detection by using patterns is completely inadequate. Even the AV companies admit it, but I'm hoping this incident will spur them to put some investment into approaching virus detection via another method.

I'm in a very rare group. I saw both sets of movies as an adult - within two years of each other. Although I love sci-fi, I grew up with parents who had zero interest, and somehow got through high school and college without ever having seen Star Wars. I think it never even occurred to my friends that I hadn't seen it.

I went to see the first set of Star Wars when it was re-issued to movie theaters. When Leila kissed Luke, someone in front of me said "Ewwww! They're siblings!" I said "WHAT?! They are?? Thanks for ruining it!"

At that moment, my friends came to the realization that I had never seen the movies before. At subsequent movies, they announced to the surrounding moviegovers that I had NEVER SEEN IT and to make SURE to not reveal any upcoming secrets (including the "big one").

It was great, actually - my friends, who were born around the time of Star Wars, were super excited to see someone's first reaction to the movies.

Anyway, as a perfectly controlled experiment, I agree that the first set of movies was far superior to the second set. The prequel seemed hacked together in order to resolve things from the first set, and over-reliant on special effects and lame jokes to the exclusion of the storyline.

You're closer to truth than you think. My family boycotts anything Amish because their culture does not value animal life, and therefore has a long-standing tradition of neglect and cruelty toward dogs.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/amish8.htm

I'm an EMT. When I was first certified, we had to go through a practical test of asking the patient medical history, what happened, allergies, medications, etc. Through the course of the test, we probably asked "what happened" two or three times. I knew the ER would ask again. And again. I thought it was wasteful and said so.

The EMT who was training us explained that stories often change through those multiple askings. My experience confirmed her explanation. As another commenter mentioned, the truth GRADUALLY comes out. Though many people will answer "What's your medical history?" accurately each time, some will change the story based on who is there, how much time they've had to think about it, once they've calmed down, and whether something else you've said reminded them.

"Do you have any medications or history I should know about?" once turned from "No" into "I have a chronic medical condition and take numerous medications for the condition" based on some gentle reminders. "Could you be pregnant?" turns from "No" into "Yes" once family members are no longer within hearing range.

A lot of medical inefficiencies make more sense when the soft squishy human side is taken into account.

I know no one will probably read this after 1,000+ comments, but I wanted to have my say. We've come a long way in a short time.

In the late 90s/early 00s, there was an article on Slashdot about how women were outnumbering men in the purchase of electronics and computing equipment. I remember jumping into the thread, thinking "Surely my enlightened brethren will celebrate this additional diversity in their field!"

Instead, I got comments about how women were clearly buying these things for their husbands, being misled by savvy (and male) salespeople, and some snarky comments about the nature of the "electronics" being purchased. (Either stoves, or washing machines, or something else that vibrates.) I got the feeling these techies were intimidated by someone else infringing on their territory. Yes, many of the comments were supposed to be funny, but they were clearly jokes laid thinly on top of sincere feelings. Now how do you think that made me feel about participating in this community?

Things have gotten much better since then, but don't you think the low percentage of women in the FOSS community may be related to some held-over, more open sexism from times past? Upon being burned once or twice, many women will just give up trying to be part of the boys' club. Additionally, though openly sexist comments are taboo now, the collective and subtle actions of an organization may all work together to feel a specific group feel unwelcome.

The commenters who are demanding specific examples of sexism (and when being provided with them, calling them single incidents not representative of the entire community) are misguided. The FOSS community doesn't need a witch hunt - it needs to look at the overall feel of the community and determine if something about that is exclusionary. It's not easy, and it's very warm-and-fuzzy, and many people in the FOSS community don't understand the problem if it doesn't consist of 0s and 1s.