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Comment Re:A possible explanation (Score 0) 301

>> a review that is egregiously, over-the-top sexist in nature.

I don't see that as being self-evident at all, In fact I can't even see what part of the above could be considered sexist or even controversial if you analyse what was actually said.

There seems to be 3 potential points of issue:

* The comment that as the researchers didnt include a male would mean their paper risks being gender-biassed seems perfectly reasonable, especially as the papaer itself is about gender balance.

* The statment that on average, most men can probably run a mile faster than most women. Check any sports timings. This seems to be beyond doubt to any but the most unreasonable person.

* That men's papers are on average higher quality than women's. Since I have no personal experience of reveiewing papers submitted for publishing I have no valid comment either way, however lets do some logical ananlysis:
If we assume that the stated position of their own paper is in fact correct; that men tend to publish more papers, and in more prestigious academic journals, than women. It therefore necessarily follows that men actually must have more experience on what it takes to get their papers past reviewers (i.e. to impress them) than women.

There are way too many "peecee" people (and apparently you may be one of them) that see any acknowlegdement or even mention of gender differneces (especially the ones where women don't do as well as men) as automatic cause to yell "sexist". This is patently ridiculous given the existence of physiological and mental gender differences is undeniable. Shouting "sexist" at every mention of these really does not do anyone any favours, least of all, the women that are fighting to attain actual equality.

Comment Can anyone explain to me (Score 1) 121

Since there doesn't seem to be any effective oversight of the NSA (or CIA) or any actual consequences when they break the law, why would anyone seriously expect the NSA would actually stop mass collection or even give a shit about this bill passing?

The expensive mass-surveilance mechanisms and technologies are already developed and in place. Unless all the secret data centres and backbone taps are identified and physically destroyed in front of independent monitors, There's not a hope in hell that the NSA and their buddies won't just keep using it no matter what some stupid bill says.

Comment Re:And why is bitcoin different? (Score 1) 253

>> The problem is that they'll run out of bitcoins to sell,

No, they just need to keep busting drug dealers that take bitcoins. if those hauls over time net less bitcoins it just means the popularity of bitcoin itself is going away, therefore the number of bitcoins they need to sell to affect the market is less.

>> mining produces smaller and smaller amounts over time.
True but thats controlled by difficulty which is adjusted montlhy, and does not necessarily always increase. In fact its decreased several times lately, since there is no new generation of hardware that can mine bitcoins significantly faster or with using less power to justify the cost of keeping mining given a continuing increase in difficulty and a continuing cost of electricity. In fact we're already well past the break even point for most miners.
The government have no such problem, since unlike every other miner, their goal is not to make a net profit, but to crash the bitcoin economy at any cost.

Comment Re:And why is bitcoin different? (Score 1) 253

>> At least it can't be devalued like government's magic paper.

Sure it can. The government already got their hands on 30,000 ( worth about $18 million then) of Silk Road's bitcoins and more from other busts, and the NSA already has masive computers that could mine bitcoins like there's no tomorrow.

Complete conspiracy theorizing herre, but it really wouldn't be hard or even unlikely for the US government to use any bitcoins they recover from criminal activity, along with power-mining to keep anonymously bulk-selling bitcoins at a big loss just to crash the whole bitcoin market. Their motivation would presumably be to both kill anything that faciliates the existence of black-markets and also kill anything that competes even slightly with the almighty $.

Comment Re:He also wants to roll back civil rights too. (Score 2) 438

The problem with liberty is that human nature ensures we can't ever actually have it. There's always some dick that thinks he's got a god-given right to tell everyone else what to do.

Even if you could create a a free environment, some fucktard will just take advantage of it to recruit an army (a.k.a police force) then declare himself the boss of everyone by force. Kinda like the government already does and the leaders of most religions try to do.

Comment Re:Injuries? (Score 1) 263

Yep. The differences are that you are probably a lot fitter and younger than most experienced pilots. For example, 40 is considered young to be a 777 pilot.
They have a sedentary job and they spend a lot of time away from home, living out of hotels/restaurants, which is also very not conducive to healthy eating or healthy lifestyle.
Besides your backpack is a lot more ergonomically designed so far easier to tote than most pilots flightbags that I've seen. They are basically a wheelly suitcase.

Comment Re:What's up with all the negativity (Score 1) 634

I don't subscribe to the thinking that attracting more women to engineering just because they're women is somehow a self-evidently good thing, consequently I personally don't care or see it as a necessarily bad thing if the field has a (largely untrue) stereotype of being mostly a job for men.

To be honest I think that if someone can't get past some perceved stereotype and simply do enough minimal research to find out that the field they're interested in actually has opportunities regardless of the sterotype, then they already proved themselves a bad fit by demonstrating they don't have fact-based aproach to problem solving so won't be a good fit to be an engineer in the first place. Think of it as natural selection. The first round of the interview is just turning up.

Comment Lets talk about actual equality. (Score 1) 634

>> She notes that....at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female,

I trust that she is equally concerned about that gender bias and getting more men into that board then? No? Funny how she suddenly gives equality a hall pass when it happens to be women that dominate something.

Comment Why? (Score 1) 634

I'm sorry but the argument that there *needs* to be more women in computing just because vagina makes no sense to me.

Why does she just blindly assume that we all see the relative low percentage of women in the field as a problem? There is already nothing inherently gender specific in the subjects that make up CS (math, AI, good algorithm design etc). Lets keep it that way.

Remember the road to equality (and freedom of choice) is to keep the opportunities equal to both genders, not make equal numbers of both genders take those opportunities. If you introduce artificial advantages that only benefit one gender, even if it is to address some perceived numerical imbalance, you're necessarily reducing ACTUAL equality.

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