Doesn't this study show that women and men don't work as well together as they do separately, and that trying to increase diversity results in less effective teams, and was a bad idea all along?

So, the smart thing to do is separate the women off away from the men, encourage them to form teams entirely composed of women, and give them some meaningful tasks to do that won't overly burden them physically and will exploit their particular strengths.

This is very innovative stuff.

Sure it seems cheap, but have you seen the prices on the refill cartridges? Outrageous!

OSX is horrible. Really, really horrible.

Like an OCD wife that puts your tools away while you're trying to use them because everything has to look clean and nice at all times.

Prometheus went full retard in every single way possible. Irredeemable excrement.

The weighted companion cube is the best cube, because the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you, and in fact, cannot speak. In the event the weighted companion cube does speak, the enrichment center urges you to disregard its advice.

Is there a way to reclaim Slashdot from this constant barrage of psychological assault on IT professionals by outsiders?

I'm a bit of a nerd and I'm an IT professional. This place used to be a place to find news of interest to nerds and IT professionals. Now it's a place where there's going to be a daily article about how shitty a person I am and how shitty my industry is.

Is this what the rest of you guys come here for? To get shit on daily? It's kinda feeling like Slashdot has just become a bad habit I do when I'm bored because I've done it so many times before.

Is your target audience people who are nerds, or is it people who are envious of nerds? It's kinds feeling like this place has become the latter.

I'm not saying Linus doesn't have talent, or that he's not "nearly always correct", but I am saying that he goes beyond stripping away sugar-coating, and resorts to name calling (I believe the phrase I once read was "unevolved chimpanzee"), and public (not private) belittling of people who makes mistakes. That's not simply "correcting you", that's not straddling the line in any way. That's fully crossing the line to being an asshole, and it's completely unnecessary. And here he is, talking about it again. Being an asshole has embroiled him in side debates about the correctness of it, and all of this effort and stupid side chatter is now nothing but a waste of his time.

There's a very-not-gray area of being blunt: "This code is too abstract and isn't efficient, it wastes cycles with all this dereferencing, and is not acceptable in the kernel." It's not nice, but it's not mean. It's actually easy to stay in that area. It takes no more or less effort than calling someone an insulting name, and it provides a not-hostile work environment that might bring extra talent to the table.

Sorry to poke at the god-like bubble people try to wrap Linus in, but I never see talent as an excuse for a prima donna getting away with unwarranted hostility.

There is not a reason that talent and asshole must always be coupled in the same person. And very few people who aren't assholes like to work in an abusive environment. Therefore, this kind of environment excludes people who have talent but who are not assholes. Of course, a "nice" environment excludes assholes for very similar reasons.

So what we need is what we've got: two distinct environments. One is where assholes with talent build one set of components, and nice people build other components. Occasionally they spit at each other from across the divide, but overall, it works. Yes, people will complain if they find they ended up working for the wrong team, and they may be appalled at the working environment of the other side, but those seem to be individual preferences.

Is one side better or more talented than the other? Probably, but they would unquestionably be better than they are today if they could draw from the full talent pool, instead of restricting themselves to just like-minded assholes or nice guys.

"Really? Why? Is it really that unreasonable to expect, in a population that is roughly 50/50 male to female, that at least 2 out of every 10 candidates for a given position would be females who are also qualified to do the work?"

Quite possibly.

I studied a combined degree of computer science and business (first year only) at university back in the tail end of the eighties. In my first year there were approximately 250 students in the class, only 7 of whom were women. By the second year, there were only 170 students left, and only one of them was female.

I'm sure those figures have changed over the years, but it will still take a long time of 50 / 50 admission to the field before it's even close to parity on qualified, experienced and competent workers.

Yeah, I wasn't worried about her safety, only that all the hospital's systems are vulnerable because they have these malware infection hosting devices rolling around on carts.

My wife recently went in for an ultrasound, and the machine clearly booted up Windows XP. I'm sure they can't install updates it without it being a certified upgrade, so they do nothing.

Meanwhile, whatever hackers are finding their ways into the hospital's network probably aren't quite so fussy about the certification of their malware.

I think he may be trying to eradicate his own homelessness with those prices. Although with the prices for printing vanity books, he might not be making enough to pay the rent for two months.

This is no different. Back in the 1970s, our high school physics teacher had the computer terminal in his area, and so he taught the computer class. He wouldn't allow me to take it because, as he said, "you already know more than I do about this."

The important thing is it wasn't an admission of failure on his part. He knew the class was beneath me, and simply didn't want me to waste my time.

Put on your best Hugo Weaving voice and imagine Elrond saying "Hobbits ... are a disease; and we are the cure."

"1. the very first application of AI will be military. it will be written from day one to harm people, directly or indirectly. consumer application will come much, much later."

We already have that now, although it's a limited AI, not fully autonomous like many think of when speaking of AI. That's already quite dangerous enough.

2. regardless, malicious people will subvert AI for nefarious purposes, unless it's tightly controlled.

Totally agree.