Oh sure, but now Pakistan has them they would never ever ever ever EVER disarm.

UK - Don't you remember being alone fighting most of a continent (under German rule), a little more than a 100 since you were alone fighting most of the same continent (under French rule)?

Thankfully the two biggest parties do not support disarmament. Public opinion is always mixed and many people are distressingly naive about it.

I frankly don't believe that disarmament is ever going to happen because too many people want power. So, the nuclear powers are:

France - never going to disarm because they've been invaded twice in living memory (just) and suffered awful consequences. Never going to happen again.

USA - lolno.

Russia - yeah Putin is totally going to disarm when everyone does because he's such a nice guy. I think he'd wet himself with glee if everyone else disarmed.

India - not until Pakistan disarms, because Pakistan is way too unstable (and probably not even then).

Pakistan - not until India disarms, and, well, who will be a serious power without them.

North Korea - well, they're a total basket case of a country so whatever they do wouldn't surprise me. But evil dictators aren't know for relinquishing power.

Iseael - disarm while they're surrounded by hostile nations who tried to wipe them off the map within living memory? Not likely.

China - eeeynope. I think they're going to keep on growing their power, and not being uninvadable is not a good way to do that.

UK - I don't think we actually will (I really hope).

Like I said, this prof is a great deal more respected and a good deal more well-read in the field than the authors of the PNAS paper.

So? The author there simply lists plausible alternatives. The PNAS paper actually does an investigation to test one of the alternatives. Actual experiments are more revealing of reality that pontificating. Figuring out alternatives is important, but only experiements will tell you if they actually mean anything.

You are also making the supposition that he doesn't know about that paper, but in fact in a recent paper he goes so far as to cite it.

Well, he didn't in the link you gave.

You are pitting recent findings from a small, limited, non-blind and uncontrolled study against this professor

It was blind and controlled: the participants were unaware of the actual gender of the applicant.

AND his peers' decades of peer-reviewed, blind and controlled studies.

Such as?

Well, that's agiant wall o' text for a wednesday morning. Working through it:

Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also donâ(TM)t give them the big rewards. Iâ(TM)m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures arenâ(TM)t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.

I don't agree with that and there's nothing to back it up. Cultures aren't exactly conscious. The culture doesn't observe competing cultures, think, and come up with a competing strategy.

Today, sure enough, women get higher college grades but lower salaries than men. There is much discussion about what all this means and what should be done about it. But as you see, both facts could be just a statistical quirk stemming from male extremity.

While he is indeed correct that it could be a statistical fluke of a flatter distribution and a threshold, there's also evidence of systematic bias, for example that PNAS paper which keeps coming up where purely invented CVs got different ratings of competence and salary offers based on the gender of the fake applicant.

The thing is, that's something where it is possible to make a controlled trial, someone did in a limited area and it gave a result which is more concrete than simply listing possibilities.

Right now our field is having a lively debate about how much behavior can be explained by evolutionary theory. But if evolution explains anything at all, it explains things related to reproduction, because reproduction is at the heart of natural selection

Well, that's just out-and-out crap. Reproducing sure is at the heart of natural selection, but there are several equally important prerequisites (e.g. staying alive) because without those reproduction is simply impossible. Plenty of animals seem to have gentically fixed hunting instincts. That's evolution affected behaviour (as if any isn't!) devoted to survival not reproduction.

Itâ(TM)s like the common question, whatâ(TM)s more important to you, having a few close friendships or having lots of people who know you? Most people say the former is more important. But the large network of shallow relationships might be important too. We shouldnâ(TM)t automatically see men as second-class huma

This guy seems to have a dirsturbing lack of knowledge of history. If you go back a couple of centuries, very intense platonic relationships between men were not rare. Thankfully then people wrote letters and those have been preserved and frankly with some you might even confuse them for love letters. More recently, society pushed men away from that because of the fear of "gay". A change over the course of 150 years is not explicable by evolution.

Eh, I'm kind of getting fed up with reading the whole thing, since it's full of holes and some things which are just plain off the wall. If you have a specific argument, then post it.

A girl name implies a disturbed male and/or troll in this environment.

Is this an example of Poe's law?

I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't love to talk about relationships with other women.

Shame. Sound like you know only pretty boring women.

And while men may not talk about relationships per se, we do talk about women. A lot.

And men too!

Those conversations have their place, but if you spend most of your time on either of them it's dull, dull, dull.

In fact, there's a convincing argument to be made that everything we do is in the pursuit of securing or keeping a mate,

If there is such an argument, I've not seen it.

Ah yes, the old "sexism doesn't exist because free market" argument. Judging people's ability based on their gender rather than their ability isn't rational, so why on earth do you expect people to behave rationally about it?

And you can even pick a neutral nickname/e-mail address, and start working on open source projects without anybody even being able to judge you on your gender.

The fact that you even have to bring that up indicates there is a problem and all things are not, in fact equal.

Liar, liar, pants on fire. You made claims about my feelings:

Interestingly enough, no one objected to Monty Python making dick jokes, but if a techie does it, then your oh so precious feels are hurt...

Now you lie about not making claims. Do you even know what the truth is? So I ask again: are you a pathological liar? It's an ironic question as the answer will by definition not be worth much.

Ah so apparently there's some slashdot "rule" where I'm only supposed to reply to you if you reply to me first. Righty ho.

The reason you've been seeing a lot of me is because it appears that we both like the same threads. Only one of us consistently lies about things other people say, and it isn't me who does that.

I like how you never retracted your comment, nor tried to back up your claim.

Stalman has done a lot, but sometimes his ideas get in the way of actual software. Hurd? after decades still not shipped. gcc? Got out of hand until it got taken over by egcs.

That makes no sense. His idea was to have a 100% free unix. They started working on the hurd. Then Linux came along and it was under an acceptable license, so RMS declared that the problem was solved, GNU had the kernel it wanted and so developing one was no longer a priority.

Likewise ECGS (Experimental GNU Compiler System) was a fork of GCC it proved substantially better, so the FSF abandoned the mainline and adopted the superior fork.

In other words, I think both examples you've given of RMS getting in the way are actually examples of exactly the opposite.

From TFS: According to RMS, Facebook is a "monstrous surveillance engine,"

Frankly, I think he's being excessively kind on Facebook there and that's the last thing I would have expected from him!

then your oh so precious feels are hurt...

Out of interest, do you realise that you're a pathological liar or is this subconscious trait?

I challenge you to find any time I've made any objection to the DICSS project (you won't because I haven't and it's long list of entertaining dick jokes).

One wonders how he greets people?

Well, he seems to have adopted it heartily: his handle is "letsgetrandy".