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Comment Re:What about the male stereotypes? (Score 1) 642

Which, if any, particular Disney princesses do you rate as "mindless bimbos"?

All of them? Because they're essentially sold characters who do not protest being sold? I thought selling people was wrong. But not these people. As such, they help to send a message that it is fine for some humanoids (or parts of their aspects) to be commoditized. Bad message on many levels... even worse for kids, who do not need to learn to use other people as commoditized tools for their own pleasure.

OK, that's harsh. But maybe one could uplevel this discussion a bit to point out that in a society where just about anything is commoditized, it might be a good idea to question that assumption, first.

Comment Re:Harassment Patrol (Score 1) 642

Fortunately, those in Gamergate care about stopping shitty behavior on both sides.

Tee hee. Right. Snort... Because we do that with more invective, more scorched-earth activity like doxxing and death threats against people who had the temerity to voice an opinion that someone didn't like. Maybe people never taught you folks this: YOU SHOULDN'T MAKE DEATH THREATS, ONLINE OR ELSEWHERE! The fact that it is done doesn't make it right. At least that's how I'd explain it to a five year-old, which seems to be the moral level of many in your "community".

Comment Re:Note to IT recruiters. (Score 1) 276

This week on AskHR!

When will the 5 year old be replaced by a 1H-B because it's cheaper?

This is a simple question for any HR professional! It's very obvious when you think about it. You're assuming that all engineers are equivalent - they're not! Each of them have different cost functions and must be handled as an individual on that basis! As such, the H1-B will replace the five year-old when the H1-B cheaper than a five year-old. And the easiest way for that to happen is if the H1-B in question is a five year-old! As, I said, simple... At least for an HR Professional like me!

Remember to send your questions to AskHR! Everyone who asks a question gets entered into a drawing for a free pink slip! Not that you weren't already in that lottery, but... May the odds be ever in your favor.

Comment Re:All tech companies move on each other (Score 2) 91

However I doubt that I would like my colleagues and Linkedin business contacts to know about my: racing hamster, gunpowder musket and jedi religion hobbies.

But that means you aren't being authentic! And how can you be passionate about your work if you're not authentically passionate? Once Facebook enters the workplace, it's only a matter of time until your social and work life will be entwined even more! And you'll be able to tell all of your "real world" friends about how awesomes your workspace is! And HOW MUCH YOU LOVE YOUR JOB! And to make sure, the company will put out guidelines as to how many posts you output per week (on your "own" time, if there's any left) you need to post to show your dedication to social interaction within the company! Show your authentic selfie! ON! FACEBOOK AT WORK!!!

OK. Sarcasm mode off. How did we get to a point where companies are actually talking about stuff like passion as a requirement for work? I have passion for women and my music and the skilled craft I pursue. But for a job? Well, let's just say it's fine to put in a day and a half's work for a day's pay, huh? Why ask us to fake passion for you, too? But I guess that's what whores always get asked for. And in the end, all of us who trade labor for money are that. Maybe we could look for a better economic system that didn't allow some to make unreasonable demands on others? But I guess that's just me...

Comment Re:How many kids took those classes? (Score 1) 134

Most of those kids were at University High, a school that I actually know little about. And what I say here may be wildly apochryphal. God knows, there are probably folks who actuallly went there lurking here (and so, they should chime in). But I digress...

As my feeble recollection recalls (this was almost 40 years ago, you know) Uni High (as it was known by the natives) was a research vehicle for the Education Department at the University, where latest theories were sometimes field-tested. All I know is that a lot of the university's staff and teacher's kids went there and there were some percentage of townies, as well. Not a magnet school, per se, but certainly home to some extremely bright kids. They got to actually take classes via PLATO (something I would have killed for in high school) and sometimes they had PhD's teaching them (although mostly it was the teaching corps sporting MA's and going for the PhD that got put doing the scut work of actually teaching). Other than that, good high school in the state, certainly a bit better than the other schools in Chambana. That is all...

Comment Re:Genius /Insanity (Score 2) 49

Just because people are crazy in one area of their life, it doesn't mean they can't turn out great work. That's why quite a few geniuses are people whom you probably couldn't stand to be with for very long. As for mathematicians? Newton? Erdos?

The math (or lack thereof) will speak for itself. If nothing else, it will be another glimpse inside a mind that came up with some of the most groundbreaking mathematical work of the last century.

Comment Back in the Day... (Score 4, Informative) 134

I took online courses on PLATO and wrote simple games for it. The hardware was laughable by today's standards - plasma screens that glowed orange text (and lines!) from a dark blue background with touch input provided on about a 1/2" grid coupled with hideously clunky keyboards having their own special function keys - but it was reasonably reliable and allowed some of the first really large scale research on CHI.

Not that anyone other than researchers actually gave a crap about that last part.

But the system was fun to write programs for. It had a pretty OK language for the day, called TUTOR, that contained necessary primitives to make it Turing complete along with others to let you write onto the screen in a variety of ways. Again, pretty primitive by today's standards, but enough to teach programming with - they were debugging the interpreter (I think Fortran) and I played with it once. Pretty advanced for the time with breakpoints being highlighted.

And of course this is back in the late 1970's. Before the PC was a gleam in IBM's eye. The whole thing ran as on a huge CDC 6600 running a custom OS (as many were, in those days). Odd instruction set by an even odder designer you may have heard of - guy named Seymour Cray. Quirkier than hell with 60-bit words, 18-bit address space, and 6-bit bytes (yes, we spoke octal). But that was back in the day when minicomputers were eating the lunch of the mainframe boys. CDC, whom the University of Illinois partnered with to productize the system, couldn't muster the resources or talent to market this system while swirling down the toilet.

And, like so many things in computing, we see progress, good ideas thwarted by, well, nothing but the fact that people are short-sighted and, if something doesn't make a buck for someone, we drop it on the floor. So it goes...

Comment Good idea - bad ontology (Score 1) 70

The top level of their ontology names categories in Science & Technology, Sports, Social Sciences, Arts, Business, and "Technicals" and claims that "all skills" come under this tree. Well, I can name a node "everything", put everything under that and say that "all skills" come under that tree, too. It doesn't really make the classification useful.

So, what I see here are idiots who think that crowd sourcing ontologies work. Note - it doesn't. At least not very well.

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