Almost all sports are judged to some degree, even if it is only a referee making decisions. In any case, those sports are all in there because they have large international competitions and structures, with well defined rules that many athletes feel are worth competing under. If they were just a pure judgement call people wouldn't bother participating since there would be no clear and objective way to measure and improve their performance, but that's not how they work.

The judges use very specific criteria, just like an examiner does to mark papers in an academic setting. For example, in rhythmic gymnastics there is a list of moves, ranked by difficulty and judged on how well the athlete meets the prescribed forms. It's not about looking good, it's about doing the motions correctly and with a high level of skill.

Um... The picture you linked to doesn't show a peep sight. Could you perhaps circle it and post the image somewhere? I'm interested to know what you think a peep sight it.

There are still big problems with this.

1. The police were warned not to go after people for this kind of thing, with specific advice from the Attorney General. Yet, they carry on doing it.

2. They don't seem to understand Twitter. The laws they are using are anti-harassment laws, designed to stop people trolling the families of victims and the like. This guy didn't send his joke to those people, and they would probably have never heard it if the police hadn't brought it to their attention.

3. While the tweet was public, so are billions of others made every day. It's akin to saying something distasteful but not illegal to your friends while walking down the street, and being arrested because someone somewhere could have been offended by it.

This is the new Godwin. And in this case, you are wrong. This is the police being dumb fucks, as usual. They have been given specific advice about this sort of thing, but are ignoring it.

It's actually the people who oppose the social justice warriors who are calling for this kind of things: the Daily Mail readers. The ones who wanted the porn filters. The ones were are permanently offended about everything, especially other people people's offence.

Actually European human rights do give people some right not to be offended in certain, very limited circumstances. For example, someone who has just been bereaved has a right to a certain amount of peace, e.g. not having people standing outside their homes screaming abuse all day. See, in Europe there are both positive and negative freedoms, i.e. your right to scream abuse vs. everyone else's right not to listen to it in their own homes.

Arresting someone for posting something on Twitter is way, way, way beyond what little protection people have though. The victim's families are not forced to read these tweets, and in fact it's somewhat doubtful if they would ever have heard about them if the police hadn't turned it into a media circus by being their usual moronic selves.

It's sad that you just accept that. Try taking a look at northern European countries like Sweden. Child care is excellent, so good that most parents actually prefer to to hand their kids over to well paid, highly trained professionals. It really is top notch.

Combine that with strong rights for employees wanting time off around the birth and then needing flexible working hours in the early years and it really is possible to have a career and kids without sacrificing anything.

The point is that it shouldn't be a choice between kids or career. Why can't men and women have both?

Society needs kids, obviously. Society has an interest in seeing kids brought up well, which means a reasonable and stable income, time enough for parenting, high quality childcare and education. If we can't facilitate that, it's a problem that needs to be fixed.

Unless you think women should just plan to marry a guy with a good job who can look after her and her child, or maybe become a welfare queen, women need to have a career.

If STEM jobs are so bad why do men do them? Do women just make better choices?

VT-d is used for something else, basically allowing PCI-E devices to access RAM without needing to worry about a >32 bit address space. While it might be possible to prevent this attack with it, that isn't how it is currently used. If a fix can be implemented it might break a lot of drivers.

The attack is so nasty because when you can overwrite random bits of memory you can modify executable code on the fly. Address randomization doesn't help, you can simply search the entire address space for some suitable entry point.

Funny, those masculine traits tend not to be associated with nerds.

One person doing something does not meant that the 50% of the population who share her gender is dishonest. #GamerGate is over, the bullshit was exposed. Let it go.

Affirmative action is supposed to still be a meritocracy, it's just that you make some effort to get members of the minority group to apply instead of just throwing the posting out there. For example, you might make an effort to network with women so that they see your job listing, as often guys mostly have other guys in their circles. It might go as far as offering grants to help minority candidates afford to apply and study, or to move to where the job is.

Ultimately though the choice of candidate is down to merit alone. If they don't make the grade, they still don't get in. At least, that's how it is supposed to work, but maybe some people are doing it wrong.

That women need more encouragement? That silicon valley rewards aggressiveness and risk taking, rather than good technology?

TFA says that silicon valley is a meritocracy, but then demonstrates that "merit" actually means masculine attributes rather than technical ability. That's the problem, and we lose out on potentially great tech and programmers because we don't value their work more than their personality.

While the troll mod is unjustified, it also misses the point and makes sets up a straw feminist to make its argument.

The point is that we waste a lot of talent because silicon valley and many companies are set up to value masculine attributes - daring, aggressive behaviour that involves a lot of risk. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but it also means that we might never get to see that brilliant technology that was invented by a female coder.

More over, that point focuses on the people at the top of start-ups, the ones responsible for raising money and taking risks with it. It doesn't justify the imbalance among engineers, the people writing the actual code. Again, it's down to things like guys looking for people like themselves, and not valuing feminine traits which are actually good for business, and not networking with enough women to get the applicants in the first place etc.