How is that fallacy applicable, exactly? I was talking about keeping ongoing costs down.

As of this current moment the top 15 selling games on steam all have linux support. I guess those developers are all just throwing money away right?

Unfortunately, yes. The money they invested in paying the developers and QA team for making and verifying the Linux port inevitably lowers the studio's ROI. Sure, it can represent some number of additional sales, but because of how small the market is, the royalties from those few additional sales (assuming that you even see any royalties... many of the games that I've worked on at the game studios I've worked at were outsourced to us from other larger studios, and we were just paid a fixed fee for development), are generally not going to outweigh the many thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars that might be spent by the game studio working on the port and just making sure that it behaves as intended.

The only way it makes sense to grab that extra 1.5% sales that Linux *MIGHT* represent is if you can get it at absolutely *NO* extra cost. And that 1.5% is a theoretical maximum, assuming an extraordinaly high penetration level across all Linux users. In practice, the penetration will be just a tiny fraction of even that amount. Sure, the studios will take the Linux market when they can get it for free, but it's generally not something that a studio is going to want to invest effort in. Ultimately, that effort will still only translate to reduced profit because the increase in sales can't justify the amount spent working on the port.

Maybe there are game companies out there that like throwing away money, but in my experience, game industry profits run way too close to the margin to afford to spend any paid developer-time on something so small. If it gets done at all, it's typically by people who have a passion or love for that market, not by game studios, who are generally really just in the business of trying to make money.

That still amounts to people treating different genders unequally, which may be a fault of the child's parents for not simply telling their child that they can be or do anything that they want to, but I would argue that it is just as much a fault of the parents education when they were children themselves.

If we begin by starting to teach people, ideally starting from a fairly young age, to not treat people differently simply because of their gender (or their race, or sexual orientation, etc, for that matter) then the problem ends up really resolving itself over time. It will take a couple of generations for the effects to reach a critical mass, but by trying to target women specifically to enter STEM fields, we are really just reinforcing the problem, because we are treating the different genders differently when there ought to be no reason to, and the problem just perpetuates.... maybe not indefinitely, but certainly for far longer than it ought to.

We need to treat the cause, not just try to reverse the symptoms.

If you have a passion for a field, the fact that you might be a demographic minority, whatever that demographic might be, is generally not by itself going to make you uncomfortable enough that you don't want to do it any more. If, however, you are treated as anything less than an equal in that field because of your demographic, then that's going to be a serious problem... but that's is a problem with the people... and not a problem that is necessarily inherent to the field.

So instead of encouraging women to enter STEM fields, per se... just encourage them to enter whatever field that interests them... and if being treated unequally is a problem, we should really just be educating people to treat others with respect, regardless of their gender.... then, when women happen to enter what may happen to be a primarily male-dominated field, they don't get treated any differently, so they have no reason to be uncomfortable.

'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts' is not just a saying or anal sex reference

I thought it was a reference to the tale about the Trojan Horse

Well, I am sorry, but you are factually wrong about this. Your "proofs" show that division by zero may be undefined for some cases, which does not change the fact that it is quite well defined for some other cases. IEEE 754 is quite clear on that too. You may wish to eduacte yourself beyond pre-calc before sounding off.

Not that it probably matters to you, since it is evident that you are wholly unwilling to listen to people who actually do have an education on the matter, but I have far more math education than just precalculus. The proofs that I've offered or referred to can be independently verified, if you are so inclined to follow up on that, but if you are either unwilling to take the word of people with a significant amount of mathematical training or background, and are evidently unwilling or unable to understand them yourself, and why they would apply to division by zero for absolutely all cases, then all you are really doing is blindly contradicting what I'm saying without even making an an attempt to understand the reasoning behind it. I had up until this point assumed that you weren't deliberately trying to troll people who know what they are talking about, but I am beginning to rethink that assumption.

For what it's worth, IEEE 754 doesn't determine what is mathematically true, and the only "value" that makes any sense for division by 0 is something that is not a number in the first place, which mathematically is undefined.

D'oh.... stupid freudian typo... didn't notice until after I had submitted.

What I meant in my first sentence above was this:

... treating division as multiplication by the multiplicative inverse, much as treating subtraction as adding the additive inverse...

There are several well known proofs that division by 0 is undefined, such as treating division as multiplication by the multiplicative inverse, much as addition as adding the additive inverse, which I mentioned above. If you are partial to calculus (actually, this is precalc-level stuff), another relatively straightforward proof is to consider the limit of division by some number x as x approaches 0 from the positive side vs division by x as x approaches 0 from the negative side. The two limits both have a magnitude of infinity, but are of opposite sign. This means that there is a discontinuity in division by 0, and because there are no mitigating factors in a division operation that suggests that only one of the limits would actually be correct at that value, mathematically it is undefined. For the case of 0/0, consider that the limit of 0/x as x approaches 0 is quite well defined, being 0, and the limit of x/x as x approaches 0 is also well defined, being 1. However, again there are no mitigating factors that suggest only one of these limits would be correct, so this means that you still have a discontinuity at 0, and in absence of any particular reason to choose one limit over the other at 0, that means that expression is undefined as well.

So no.... I am not factually wrong about this.

No... the post that RackinFrackin replied to was factually wrong. A number divided by 0 is *NOT* defined as either plus or minus infinity. The definition of division is such that any division by a number is equivalent to multiplying by that number's multiplicative inverse, but 0 does not have such an inverse, so dividing by 0 is like trying to multiply by a number that doesn't even exist.

In other words, it's undefined. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Division doesn't really exist in the sense of a mathematical operatoin. Division is best thought of as a convenient shorthand for multiplication by the multiplicative inverse of a number. The multiplicative inverse of a number is well defined to be such that a number multiplied by its multiplicative inverse equals the multiplicative identity value, which is 1. There is no number that can be multiplied by zero to get a value of 1, however, so "dividing by zero" is like trying to multiply by a number that doesn't exist in the first place.

For definitions of "well-defined" that selectively ignore the definitions that mathematicians use, perhaps.

For myself, in particular, I wonder how long it will take v8 to support it.

Bill C51 is particularly troubling... it has already been passed into law and as such may prove very difficult to get rid of by any later prime minister that disagrees with it without a majority government.

The most particularly troubling aspect of C51 is that it empowers CSIS to break almost *ANY* law... short of inflicting enduring physical bodily harm on someone, or acts of sexual violation... in the course of disrupting anything that they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be a terrorist threat, including violating even civil and constitutional rights. That means they can imprison people because of their race, or simply because of what that person believes, for example, even if that person has done absolutely nothing wrong. if CSIS has any reason at all to suspect that such factors link them to committing any act that corresponds with a terrorist threat, a phrase that by itself is so loosely defined (in fact, it isn't even defined in this law... in fact, it appears almost intentional to have left it undefined so that CSIS could apply the term as they saw fit), that even picketing or almost any other form of entirely peaceful assembly that might happens to disrupt some activity that the government is wanting to push forward could qualify.

It's interesting to consider, however, that because CSIS also outlaws the the distribution of terrorist propoganda, if, for example, Westboro Baptist Church were Canadian, then by Bill-C51, the government would have to ban the Christian bible, since WBC uses that text to justify many of their insane acts, and the bill explicitly outlaws the dissemination of literature that encourages acts of terrorism.

... tying something you physically possess to identification, but it should never be used standalone. A password, pass-phrase, or even a pin should still be required, because anything else can always potentially be taken from you, or worse yet... compromised. The additional factor of having some physical device that can further confirm your identity gives an added layer of security over the password by itself that can still be beneficial, but it should never be trusted to the exclusion of a password.