I'm not sure I agree with your whole post, but I have to give you props for this quote here. I'm a women in computer engineering and honestly, the place I feel the most uncomfortable is around so-called feminists. In university I avoided the women's center like the plague because every time I went in there with my eng books or wearing an engineering sweater or anything I always got the LOOK and a lecture about how I was just as bad as all the rest of those engineers and why are our songs so disgusting and blah blah blah.

There's sort of a delicious irony about someone claiming they are this huge feminist and then going into women's studies, the MOST un-evenly gender balanced and stereotypically female subject available and then having the gall to give me shit for singing stupid songs and drinking too much beer. You want to fix the gender balance in computer engineering? Well, the computer is right over there, stop doing stupid sociology studies and learn to code.

Ditto. Not an HD, but one of the older ones. Totally decent MP3 player, doesn't even do a bad job on movies. Good in my books. I want for little.

movies are actually 24.

Minor: what's goatse?
/.er : (posts link)


Bam - you're a criminal.

Wow, what open source projects have YOU been working on? They sound magical.

Yes, spelling and grammar in comments are important for understanding, and proper spelling in variable names in particular makes it easier for developers after you to follow and track through code. However, I disagree with the generalization that long comments always mean you don't know what you are doing. Most of my code comments are 1-liners, but I always leave long comments for function headers so everyone is clear on what the inputs are. I also leave larger comments for equations that aren't immediately obvious, ESPECIALLY if the equations are coming from spec documents. A spec number, section number and explanation help developers FIND these things later and actually understand them. Spec documents in particular can be thick and it's not always easy to see at a glance how things are supposed to work. Plus, if there IS a mistake (let's face it, no one is perfect), it's way easier to track where something went wrong if you know what the start point is.

Actually both federal seats that were up for election went to Democrats including a seat in upstate New York that hadn't gone D since the Civil War. It was 2 Governorships that went to the R's.

Uh, no, that page describes how to rip a DVD to Matroksa in order to preserve the actual video content, audio channels, and subtitle streams. There's *nothing* in there about ripping the actual menu structure, and AFAIK, the Matroska menu spec a) is in it's infancy, b) has no tooling to make DVD -> MKV w/ menus actually doable, and c) isn't supported by any players out there.

'course, I'd *love* to be proven wrong. :)

You see porn is bad. Because it has naked people in it pretending to have sex. Which is bad because sex isn't fun, its a terrible thing that must be endured for the betterment of society. Or something. I dunno, don't ask me hard questions. Its in the bible, right after god said to go forth and multiply...

Sex = bad! Stop questioning things!

Maybe. But I think it's mostly just a disconnect between what the people who work in the field believe the term to mean and what the general public takes the term to mean. Some of that might just be naivete on the part of researchers. And maybe some bravado as well.

When I hear about intelligent anything to do with computers, I just think of a system that learns. That, to me, is the key differentiator. On the other hand, my mom's friend was telling me one night at dinner that her son was taking a class where they're "building machines like brains". Well, he was clearly learning about ANNs in some undergrad CI course, but man, it sure sounds better when you say you're building brains, eh? It sounds like self-aware systems are a semesters worth of work away. Maybe he was trying to make his work sound more impressive. Or maybe his mom just took the wrong thing away from the conversation. Either way, he's talking about building an XOR and she's thinking Commander Data.

To be honest, though, researchers aren't always clear on what the terms mean either. Don't get me wrong - you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher who genuinely believes they are going to build a self-aware system or anything of the sort, but I remember going to a conference with an hour and a half long panel discussion on whether or not the fields of AI and CI should be combined or separated in the conference, and what each encompassed. No one had a good answer.

I think the guy at the store tricked you...'round here 8 bits can count way past 18 - get up to 255 unsigned. Looks like you have about a 4 1/2 bit machine. I'd take it back, and never shop at best buy again.

Unit tests are good for ensuring that no one totals your code while making changes to other products/areas of the code base. But, yeah, I'd still rather have the QA guys sign off.

Agreed. Link to the official site - http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/safety/distracted-driving/index.shtml. Hand-held communication devices are banned. You can use hands-free. You can use items attached to the dash. You can buy a 10-dollar mount for your iPod and that's acceptable. If the GPS is attached, that's also OK. And unless someone has managed to get coffee or a chocolate bar re-classified as a "communication" device, those aren't even touched by the new law.

But, you know, no need to get facts in the way of a good story. I mean, it's not like you could have found this stuff at the top link in google or anything.

You make a very good point. Some of this may just be different wiring, some of it is also likely social norms. Women in general still tend to take a larger roll in housework etc. - maybe it's just a time issue (although this is becoming less of the norm - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/060719/dq060719b-eng.htm). In other words, maybe the fact that there are fewer women in FOSS development than men isn't necessarily evidence of greater sexism in the FOSS community and it's more a reflection of a different, external gender difference.

Could also be a remnant of old-school development teams too - when your entire team has been together since the start, it probably doesn't have too many females on it. There have been a couple of times I've wanted to submit some kernel patches (fairly minor stuff - I do driver development as part of my job so sometimes I see something here or there that could use a fix). I never have though, 'cause I know it won't get accepted. Not because I'm female necessarily - more because my name isn't morton or torvalds =).