It's a vicious cycle though, because on the other end you have users that don't really care about security or taking the time to educate themselves to use technology responsibly. Management could push having a robust and secure product, but by the time its built, someone else will have grabbed most of the market or the market will have changed enough that your product has no where near as much potential.

I think that this is an area where open source software can do better though. If you or I find problems or want to improve the software, we're able to do so. The same can't be said of closed source software and you're at the mercy of the company that makes it.

You're misunderstanding what I've written. There are not fairly equal numbers of men and women at the top ranks of mathematics as if you look at doctorate degrees awarded, the numbers skew heavily towards men for that particular field. The data about B.S. degrees would seem to indicate that there's no substantial barrier for women who want to go into math in general as if there were, the numbers should be much, much lower. You could perhaps make that argument for engineering fields where the degrees going to women is around 20%, but trying to claim that significant cultural or institutional issues are keeping women out of math doesn't mesh well with the data.

The science suggests that if you have a team composed of the best mathematicians, it will feature more men than women. For what it's worth, the U.S. team has had women on it in previous years so it's not as though they're being excluded entirely. The discrepancy is due to biological differences between male and females that for whatever reason make men perform slightly better at math. If we were talking about power-lifting no one would be trying to claim institutional bias is keeping women out of the upper echelons of those competitions.

Almost certainly, though it would be rather stupid of them not to make the purchase through some kind of shell organization. The simple fact that a government agency is acquiring information about a specific exploit is itself valuable information. At the same time, you'd almost think that the government would try to do a lot of this work in-house.

Ideally, a self-driving car should only need a user to take over in the case of catastrophic failure, but it should also have safeguards in place so that if it fails some sanity checks it has another system that can at least bring the vehicle to a safe stop.

Having a system that relies on a sudden hand-off to a human is asking for trouble. As you mention, the point of having a self-driving car is so that you don't have to drive so there's no way that you'll get people to give their full attention to the car. Expecting a person to be able to take immediate control is not going to work and it should probably be impossible for a user to take control unless they first stop the vehicle and change it to a manual setting.

Outside of complete system failure or a complete loss of sensor data, there aren't a lot of cases where a computer wouldn't be able to do a better job than a person at handling an accident. Even if the vehicle is side-swiped by another driver, the computer will be able to a better job of recovering from the accident without causing further problems.

I think the auto-updates are only for the home version, which you probably shouldn't be using in a business setting anyways, but depending on the work you do moving to Linux might not be a bad idea even if Windows were less of a pain.

A Freudian slip is when you mean one thing but say your mother.
- Anonymous

Shachar

He also literally blew up.

In other words, whoosh.

Shachar

I was recently having a discussion about someone related to IQ tests (there was an interesting poll (who knew) on Slashdot a while ago) and was discussing Raven's Matrices as an example of a test that I thought was unbiased as it was free of any cultural context and had been reduced to abstraction, but a friend shared a study (PDF link)with me that pointed out that the test did have a built-in gender bias due to reliance on spacial analysis, which men do perform better at.

Given that spacial rotations, manipulation, etc. are an important part of many mathematical fields, it doesn't surprise me that men tend to perform better on average. Also, this does not say that all men are better at math or that women cannot be brilliant mathematicians, merely that if you look at the number of elite mathematicians, that more of them will be male because they are biologically predisposed to be stronger at some of the aspects that make an individual better at math.

Also, you should account for a person's own internalization of their abilities and how it affects their behavior. If women tend not to be as good at math from an early age, many of them will take a disinterested approach to it. This is hardly unique to women as children and people of all ages and genders exhibit this behavior. Because there are areas where women tend to perform better than men (along with any other brain wiring differences that produce different effects in people) they may be more drawn to other areas of study and focus there time there.

The problem is that there is evidence to suggest that men and women are different, but there are some who will not accept that argument. I don't know whether that is because the fall prey to some of the same illogical reason that you point to above and assume that it means women can't do something or if it's just a simple matter of people treating their belief as an article of faith that must be true and therefor anything to the contrary must be false.

While there's certainly no lack of sexism in the world, it's a lot harder to accept that there's some kind of pervasive institutional problem when you have no reason to suspect that you should see roughly equal number of men and women among the ranks of the top mathematicians. Also, given that women earn ~45% of B.S. degree's in mathematics in the U.S. it makes the claims of institutional sexism (at least in this area) even harder to believe. Interestingly enough, women early ~70% of the B.S. degrees in English and foreign languages. Perhaps that is related to the scientific evidence that shows that females perform better than males in terms of verbal abilities.

I don't think you'll find many people who are against providing equal opportunity (or as much as we reasonably can) to everyone, but you can't get there with bad arguments. You end up fighting a problem that doesn't exist or attempting to use a solution that isn't going to work. I think that people are just tired of dealing with other people who don't care to look at the science or will reject it because it doesn't mesh with their existing views. It's a bit like trying to argue with someone who believes in young-earth creationism.

Then what do the numbers need to be? You can't claim to have a diversity problem where there aren't enough members of group X without stating what the numbers should be. Furthermore, what justification do you have for your numbers and why are they more correct than assuming approximately equal distribution or the ratio that currently exists?

You also commit the same fallacy (along with ad hominem) that you accuse me of by claiming that I'm a member of group X when I'm not. There's another reason the Slashdot crowd is getting sick of these articles. You're basically doing the same thing as people who dismiss women based on their sex in that your focusing on a perceived attribute and ignoring all else.

I don't think there's anyone who would claim that everything is perfect and I think the resentfulness is coming from having the same story pushed again and again. It would be one thing to argue that women and minorities in Silicon Valley are being paid less, but it's another to argue that not having a workforce that's exactly equal to the general population shows a lack of diversity. It would be rather silly to accuse the NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL of struggling with diversity, and yet all of those have as much of an aberration as the tech field.

Also, you have to consider that from a man's perspective, merely being labeled a sexist at all, whether or not it is true is possibly career ending. Look at the recent shit-show controversy surrounding Tim Hunt or Matt Taylor for good examples of how out of hand it has gotten. The people who took offense and sounded their outrage are the reason there's such a backlash and why people don't even want to broach the subject. Most people aren't going to blow it up into a big deal, much like most people won't abuse you in a relationship, or most people aren't going to mug or assault you on the street, but it really only takes one to completely turn your life upside down.

When you have that kind of atmosphere, it's not conducive to debate at all. Even if you and I are both reasonable, it doesn't stop some third party from driving by and make accusations because what someone said doesn't jibe with their beliefs. There are some who would call me a racist and others who would like you as some kind of feminazi for yours just for daring to take sides.

I think a lot of the push back occurs because the solutions presented by the people who tend to take on these causes are unlikely to work. First they rest on the notion that a deviation from some magical number suggests that there is a problem rather than looking at whether qualified minorities are being treated worse. Here's a relevant quote from Thomas Sowell:

However, the new wave of social justice sees this as a violation of a core tenet of their faith and therefore anyone who believes such a thing must be a racist. But let's assume that their belief is actually correct for the sake of argument. The article would still suck as it tends to suggest a top-down solution, in that a diversity problem in tech can be solved by simply hiring more minorities. Even if hiring standards are lowered to give preference to minorities, there simply aren't enough available candidates. Worse yet, it's likely to create even more racism/sexism/etc. as you can't expect your workforce to respect someone who was only hired to fill some kind of quota and honestly I can't say I would feel all that comfortable working somewhere if I knew I was hired for that reason.

If you want to actually have more diversity in the tech sector it means that we have to start at the bottom and work our way up and that means fixing inner-city schools and dealing with a whole host of other problems along the way, which given there basis in economic inequality means that this is going to be a difficult task, but you're not going to see as many African Americans, Latinos, or underrepresented Asian Americans join the tech sector when they grow up in poverty and don't have any interaction with computers or that kind of technology when they're younger. And even if you fix those problems, you won't see the results for decades.

The people in technology are largely tired of having this rammed down our throats. We've probably had more diversity-themed stories posted to Slashdot recently than just about any other topic, and it's almost always more of the same, typically written or posted by people who aren't even in technology. And when disagreement with that line can by met with some rather serious accusations, it just exacerbates the problem and makes tempers flare on both sides of the issue. If people want to do something to increase diversity, then they should go out and do it, but the people who write these articles rarely discuss something that they have done and seem to push the problem into the hands of someone else, who might not even consider it a real problem.

A lack of diversity itself doesn't automatically mean that there is a problem. It merely indicates something that should be examined, but again there are some people who no matter how much proof you could lay at their feet won't accept any answer that doesn't conform to their predetermined beliefs. It's really no different than a religion in many aspects and there are some members who are a bit more fanatical than others about it. The social justice movement has become rife with such individuals and they're not good people. The recent controversy over a Kimono exhibit at a museum in Boston is a good example of how warped and perverted the movement has become.

Doing good in the world doesn't require one to do it in the name of social justice. If you want to help or make something better, go and do so. But clinging to a label and pretending the movement hasn't been hijacked by some authoritarian hardliners and trying to defend them just because they're on the same team isn't going to do you any good.

You'd just end up getting taxed twice then, first when you convert to Euros and then when you use those Euros to buy something else which is subject to VAT. If the business accepts Bitcoins or some other digital currency as a valid form of payment for goods which are typically taxed, then I suspect that VAT would be collected at that time.

Comparing early advocates for social change and progressive policies with the current group typically associated with "Social Justice" is a bit like saying that African Americans should still be voting Republican.

Do you really think that all the slacktivists that participated in KONY 2012 and other campaigns, which accomplished little beyond allowing the participants to pat themselves on the back about how great and progressive they were, are comparable to individuals who devoted their lives to helping others and pushing for equality?

There are still plenty of individuals who are fighting for change, and facing far more adversity than I think most of us could handle. I can't imagine many here not being supportive of such people. But then you have the modern American Social Justice movement that is more concerned with self-promotion and using problems as a vehicle for their own ends rather than solving any problems. That's who the people here are complaining about. Letting those people attach themselves to the social justice movement and then defending them when they make an awful mess of things does not help achieve social justice.

Condemning the charlatans is not the same as condemning the entire movement or its past history.

On the other hand, if Apple has a patent on this, it would prevent others from doing it. But what we really ought to do is just find a patent troll and only give them patents for things like this that are corporate-grade jackassary and turn them loose. We can even situate them in Texas for maximum effectiveness.

Actually, it would mostly just be Asian (Indian) employees that would need to be cut. If you look at the published diversity figures that some companies have put out, many (Here are figures released by Google and Microsoft) of the biggest don't even have as many white people as you would expect if the hiring perfectly followed the country's (we'll ignore local differences for convenience) racial demographics.

However, I don't think that the people who push that point of view would agree that in order to improve diversity it's necessary to hire more white people and lay off a lot of minorities, who are from a smaller minority group than Latinos/Blacks, especially when you break apart the Asian category as Indians would be even more vastly over-represented.

Or we could just realize that would be silly and that diversity is more than just a skin color. If you want a good team, you want people with different perspectives on life, and while race and culture can play into that, they're hardly limiting factors. Someone who grew up in a remote rural setting, has a special needs child, or grew up living under a totalitarian regime can probably offer a lot more insight into how a product can be used or adapted to suit the needs of different target markets than some individual whose main difference is that of pigmentation.

It's probably a reference to Edward Tufte who wrote The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. If you follow the second link and look at some of the charts used, they're not very useful because they completely fail to convey the data in a useful and meaningful way.

Also, I wouldn't call the statistics overly compelling either. They ran enough tests that they were likely to come up with at least one positive result. What they should do is use the few positive results that they've recorded here and verify them by conducting the same experimental procedure in different locations where fracking is also occurring to see if the same results are being seen.