How about a picture of a mountain, or food? Or if it's a face recognition class, then just some random ordinary-looking people in a public setting, rather than a model?

It's the face of a woman in a highly sexualized setting, arranged specifically to titillate. There's nothing wrong with this, and I agree that it's pretty mild compared to porn, but that's not the point. The point is that it presents a context in which hormone-fizzed young men (I've been there, I know!) will want to say something inappropriate, and some of them probably will. It doesn't make the young men bad people, but it can be pretty crappy for a young woman in that environment, and can even be unsafe for her, depending on the particular young men who happen to be in the class.

It should be dead obvious to any college instructor that this is inappropriate. She is absolutely right to call them out for it.

The Lena Rossi image is famous, but tossing it into a CS class with a bunch of eighteen-year-old men is just asking for a hostile work environment for any women in the class. The really sad thing is that the instructor is so in love with the old photo that he (I'm guessing) couldn't anticipate the problem and didn't come up with a better photo to use. That particular image is so low-resolution and has such poor colors that using it as a standard for doing CS instruction in 2015 would be stupid even if it weren't a problem in any other sense.

Please note that I didn't say anything at all about men not getting a fair shake.

I said that people would be rightly skeptical of an article that was written entirely by men claiming men were not getting a fair shake, regardless of the rest of the article's merits. The fact that it's coming from an all-male source would raise some eyebrows, and quite understandably. Now apply gender equality to that and ask why it's wrong that that should be true with all the genders reversed, as is the case here.

I also suggested that if a reviewer said, of such a hypothetical gender-swapped scenario, "maybe the reason why men aren't apparently aren't getting a fair shake isn't due to bias against them but just because men generally don't measure up in this area" -- suggesting an alternative hypothesis, as academic reviewers frequently do -- that would (and I think should) be considered a sound critique, something that at least should be addressed in the paper. Now flip the genders again and you get the second part of this story, and suddenly that's an atrocity?

You're right, the comma after the second parenthetical should have been a semicolon for improved readability.

I'm sure if a paper with the opposite conclusion authored only by men was submitted for review, women (both reviewers and others) would be decrying that fact, implicitly because of the assumed tacit bias of the all-male authors (a plausible concern to be fair, but in both directions), and, if it was in fact the case that women had more articles published than men, suggesting that perhaps an alternative conclusion to systematic bias could be that women just are better in that respect would be a perfectly acceptable critique of the paper.

And I'm saying it's very easy to be a bad manager. It's even easier to be a "bad manager" in the sense that those who work for you think you're a bad manager.

I've worked for one company that I thought did a rather smart thing: They separated out the "manager" and "boss" roles.

So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group. The "boss" was a rather technical guy who was not good at managing, and did not want to manage, and who mostly worked as part of the team. The "manager" was treated more as a resource to keep the group working effectively, and really wasn't "in charge". For any substantial decisions, the manager would discuss it with the boss, and the boss would make a decision.

Admittedly, it was a small company doing a rather niche set of work, but it worked really well. There seemed to be something to the idea.

But according to that logic, you'd need techs all the way up.

Yeah. I've been a manager before, and if I'm being honest, I think I did a pretty good job at it. Relatively. Mostly.

But the guy who said, "It's too easy NOT to be." doesn't know what he's talking about. It's really easy to make a dumb managerial decision. It's really hard to be a good manager. For example, he says;

So great, now instead of being the absentee manager who doesn't know what's going on, you're the micromanaging asshole who calls constant meetings. As a result, you remember all the reasons why your project is delayed, but what are you going to do about it? Do you let the project be late? Do you cut back on the project goals? Can you throw more resources into the project to meet deadlines? Sometimes more resources don't work.

Sometimes you can push your people harder and get more work out of them. You don't want to do that all the time, because it has diminishing returns, and your people might hate you for it. They probably will hate you for it, but in doing so, you might be saving their jobs.

Now upper management calls you in. They're upset that the project is going wrong. You know it's because little bubble-headed Billy screwed up again. Billy is bad at his job. How much do you protect Billy, knowing that he really ought to be fired. Maybe you could throw him under the bus and get everyone else out of a jam, but that seems like a shitty thing to do. You prefer to be the type of manager that says, "This is my responsibility. The buck stops here."

But does Billy need to be fired? If you want to fire him, you're going to need reasons, and this could be one. He's a nice guy, and people like him. You're afraid of ruining the guy's life. You'd like to see him do well. Maybe you could sit down and have a talk with him, give him some help, and get him on the right track. That sounds great to you. You'd be a little bit of a hero, if you took this guy who's a bit of a fuck-up and helped him become a big success. You have a little fantasy about the whole thing: Someday, Billy is a big-shot millionaire, but he owes it all to you. That's a nice thought. Of course, you've tried the same thing with Peter last year, before eventually firing him. You really should have just cut your losses earlier, because everything you did to try to help Peter just fell flat. Ultimately, he wasn't motivated. Maybe Billy will be like that too, and you'll look back and say, "I wish I'd fired Billy earlier."

.... and Sorry about that. I went down a rabbit hole there, but I wanted to try to illustrate that these decisions aren't particularly easy. There are a bunch of competing interests, and there's not a clear "correct" answer. You can read books about management, with all their trite aphorisms. They might give some good examples of where other managers succeeded or failed, but the reality is that those examples worked because of context and chance. Often, the real lesson is that you have to be aware of all of the details and subtleties of your situation, sometimes ignoring conventional wisdom, try to find a solution that works in that exact, particular context, and hope for the best.

No, I think that's insufficient. The real issue here is that we need real, fast, high quality, unfettered telecommunications infrastructure. It's an economic issue, an issue of technological development, and First Amendment issue. There can be no compromise there.

Unfortunately, infrastructure development can only be left to the "free market" in limited ways. We can't have businesses developing completely independent roadways. Cities can't have a bunch of different electrical companies all laying down cables. We can't have a free market for water, with many different companies laying independent pipe networks throughout our cities. It's not practical and it doesn't make a bit of sense.

Companies like Verizon and TWC keep trying to re-frame the whole thing as though the Internet is an entertainment service, and we shouldn't regulate it any more than we regulate companies that make socks. They keep trying to re-frame it, and we keep letting them. They pay corrupt morons like Rand Paul to champion their causes, and we vote people like him into office. We should stop doing that.

The Internet is telecommunications infrastructure. We need it. We can't allow businesses to control and subvert out ability to communicate for their own short-term business goals. Net neutrality is not like telling a sock manufacturer how to set their prices. Net neutrality is like telling a company, "You're not allowed to own all the ink and paper in the world, and then decide which news stories get printed, and which personal letters get sent." It's like saying, "We can't let a company buy all of our roads, and then decide who gets to drive where, when, and in which car."

I think GP meant the denialists should just invest in green energy instead of spending so much money money protecting their fossil fuel interests.

As an American who agrees that the American view of the political possibilities is myopic, there is still a difference. To put it figuratively: one side thinks all kittens should be fed to vicious ravenous dogs to be maimed and devoured as the dogs see fit; the other side thinks there should be some limits on how much the dogs can maim most kittens and how many can be devoured in what circumstances, and further special protections for certain classes of kitten.

What do you mean, lets not feed kittens to the dogs in the first place? What are you, some kind of communist?

Yeah, it really is quite hard to explain answers to incoherent questions. Science can't even answer a simple math question like what do you get when you multiply 37 times the square root of giraffes?