Are there? I've never heard of any, frankly - that doesn't mean there aren't any, but advocates for more males in education aren't making the rounds of the night shows talking about it. And it's probably more important - there's a substantial body of research showing how important it is for boys to have male role-models.

As a personal anecdote, there were definitely a few male teachers in my elementary school who were driven out by mothers terrified of having a man around their child... I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

I think everybody's all for more women in the work place, and even tweaking some things to make it a more inviting place (but I'd fall short of "catering to" since I don't like discrimination). Stuff like improved parental (both parents) leave, more flexible hours, better work-life balance, etc that helps everybody, but women tend to value more highly and so it disproportionately keeps them away.

Let's say you're an employer with a mostly-male (at least in a particular section) workforce and you want to improve your gender balance in that particular section. Maybe your interviewers have been unfair, maybe the labor pool has been lacking, maybe your offering is disproportionately unfavored by women, whatever - you want to address it because you're progressive and want to do the right thing.

Now you may have some "male chauvinist pigs" in your workforce. You're fine with firing them - you just don't know who they are yet, since there haven't been any women around. There's a risk that you (or your employee managers!) may be held personally liable if some incident go south, and nobody's thrilled with that, but you institute procedures and brush up on harassment law and train people so you're not too worried about that.

But then you read about bullshit like the Adria Richards case and other horror stories that you hear about all over the place from your business buddies and you realize that you're making yourself pretty vulnerable in a way that you can't really defend against. Even excluding the legal issues (you're being sued by an employee...), there's massive PR issues because the kind of personality that tends toward frivolous or over-blown claims is probably well correlated with the kind of personality that enjoys a large social media reach (my observation - may have selection bias, but not really relevant to my point). And neither the law nor the public opinion will give you the benefit of the doubt.

So I don't think there's any denying that a company exposes itself to greater risk by hiring a woman instead of a man. Frankly, men don't really sue for sexual harassment (they should, though, it's not uncommon for men to be harassed). Your progressive employer who's trying to do the right thing will still have to weigh the costs and benefits and determine that the benefits outweigh the costs, or that the cost is acceptable.

The problem is that this should be a slam dunk win for the company - there should be no risk at all for hiring a woman! More generally, you don't want to make the "backwards" viewpoint supportable at all, or else it'll greatly hamper progress on those issues.

I was on a phone on a train when I typed that - knew it'd come back to bite me :/

So NYC water is untreated in the sense that it doesn't pass through a treatment plant. They're working on a plant for the Croton system, which has been out of use for several years due to color (turbidity) reasons, not health. When it's done, the Croton system is expected to supply ~10% of the water.

They do add the chemicals you mention, although the latter two are for the benefit of the pipes (cuts down on corrosion), not the people, so it's not really a water quality issue. I did know about the flouride, but that's a public health (teeth strength) thing so I don't really consider that a water quality issue either. They do add an small amount of chlorine, which I didn't realize - there's no taste or odor whatsoever. Frankly, it tastes like well water to me.

It most definitely is unfiltered (100% now, ~90% when the Croton plant comes online), which is extremely rare, so there's no treatment plants as such. But it is "treated" in the sense that it's not exactly as it was when it left the reservoir for the pipe.

It most certainly does, but the Croton system has been out of use for several years (source). When they get around to using it again, it only accounts for ~10% of the water - and in any case they're treating it mostly for color (turbidity) and not safety (the state's DOH doesn't distinguish, but the federal does). The city's water is untreated in the sense that it doesn't really pass through a treatment plant - they do put chemicals in it (a very small amount of chlorine, not enough to taste, and some fluoride) and it it is definitely unfiltered

New York City water is untreated and it has some of the best water in the country.

You must be reading a different article than I am. I see "The patch is then progressively applied to Google services/servers across the globe." which implies to me that the 21st was the start of the clock. I could easily imagine that it would take several days to update everything.

Then the clock starts ticking for whoever the "infrastructure providers under embargo" are. I emphasized "then" in my original post - presumably they wouldn't share the flaw even with trusted partners until they'd fixed it themselves. Two sequential "several days" could hardly be shorter than 10 days.

You don't think it could take 10 days to find a flaw, fix it, make sure you've fixed it, and roll the fixes out to prod? And then "notif[y] some infrastructure providers under embargo" and let them fix it and roll it out to prod?

You may disagree with Google looking out for themselves first here, but the fact is they'd be negligent (and foolish) to spread this more widely until they'd ensured it was fixed for themselves and (by extension) their customers/users.

Yes. "Without authorization" is more than "well I wasn't expecting him to ask that question!".

No, he sent a query to the webserver, and the webserver did what it was designed to do and answered it. AT&T was the one making the mistake by assuming that all trivially-correctly-formatted requests were from AT&T customers as opposed to actually checking whether the requester was - in fact - a customer (something they could've easily done!)

Sure. So? It means he knows how to use 'seq' and 'wget'. Would it be different if he changed the number in his browser 140k times?

Like a lot of prosecutions people complain about, it wasn't really about the "kid" (why does it matter if he's a "kid"?). It's about precedent, and "some queries shouldn't be sent to a webserver, but you don't know what those are until we nail your ass" is a pretty damn bad precedent.

He probably had a suspicion that AT&T didn't mean to provide this access, but they did. This is more like calling up a place and asking what Frank's address is - you may think it's odd that they told you, but in the absence of even trivial checks to see whether you really are Frank, it would be reasonable to conclude that this was intended to be public. After all, they just happily told a member of the public. And no, the user agent is not even a trivial check, since every browser pretends to be every other browser anyway.

Well I wasn't going to start the cursing, but fuck that shit.

1) How is the industry a "sweaty jock party"? Most of the people I know haven't seen a jock strap in their life, and certainly wouldn't ever have qualified as "jocks". Mostly I see companies bending over backwards to provide an egalitarian work environment, and finding little resistance on most measures because the men aren't "jocks".
2) There's all kinds of stupid shit you can justify by shouting that "THEY ARE TRYING TO DO *SOMETHING*". Perhaps they should fire half the men, and put the rest in the locker room (you know, because they're "jocks") to keep them from pestering the women in the rest of the office. That would be something, alright. Or put a flower in the window. That would be something, too. Are we to try everything that someone somewhere thought might help? And then having said you haven't identified the solution ("might be the *wrong* thing....") you tell everybody who doesn't agree to "just go to Hell"

I totally agree that gender is completely irrelevant when writing code, but some of us feel that counterproductive and harmful initiatives are something to criticize, not endorse blindly. We don't have to be chickens running around with heads cut off just because there's some problem - in fact, that's about the fastest way to fuck up a situation that I can come up with. Personally, I believe companies should be trying to do the *right* thing.

Stepping back from your idiotic post, I think it's undeniable that there is a supply-side issue here. I don't know if it's cultural, stereotypical, biological, or just logical. It could be any, frankly - perhaps we view women as less technical (which we should fix), or women are less interested in joining the "losers" in the computer club (seriously, where did "jocks" come from?), or maybe what they've seen of CS is that it's a pretty shitty job with regards to the stuff they care about (like "working too much and never seeing my family") and they're making the right choice for them. Hey, more doctors and lawyers now are women then men, and it pays better (and is more rewarding in dimensions that may be more important to women). I don't exactly know what's going on (though I have my suspicions) but I do know that bribing teachers to ignore the boys and focus on the girls is the wrong way to approach this - for so many reasons, ranging from discrimination to backlash to unintended consequences to simple ineffectiveness.

No, you don't get it.

Let's say you have a company where they try to hire everyone "over the bar" regardless of any factors. You'd expect the gender ratio of the company to be whatever the percentage of the candidates who are above that ratio. (If it's not - and it often isn't, for various reasons - fix that first)

If this ratio is not 50/50, say because there are less women overall, and you determine that it is more important to fix the ratio than maintain the hiring standards, then you will unavoidably be diluting the pool of females with people of a lower standard. (If you don't decide to lower the bar, then you won't be changing the ratio)

So you are a rational individual (of any gender) in this company and you are presented with some person. It is an unavoidable fact that the average woman is of a lower competence than the average man. It is the only logical conclusion! The hiring process made it so!

This is a catastrophic approach because the sexist, backwards attitude shouldn't be made the correct logical inference! But by instituting the quota, the company has done exactly that!

There is a lot a company can do if it wants to have more females, without lowering the bar. Women typically require different outreach than men, such as more encouragement (men are more apt to pursue a path even in the face of active discouragement), seeing other females "leading the way" (part of encouragement), describing a job in terms of social impact (vs the "vanquish the challenge" aspect that appeals disproportionately to men). There's nothing wrong with this - a company that wants the best recruits should be picking the best messaging for many different groups, like new grad (great learning!) vs experienced industry (run stuff!), young (cool projects!) vs older (great benefits!), and, yes, even men vs women. Even something as simple as dropping the puzzle interview questions can help, since aside from being useless, a lot of the "fun" ones depend on cultural touchpoints (superheros and zombies in that article) that don't generally resonate with women. It's really an overall "change how we think about this" approach that's not generally too controversial - even stupid stuff like "hide the names on resumes" and "figure out what you're expecting before you meet the person" can help an interviewer avoid unconscious biases - against any group.

None of this is instituting a quota.

Why would Google sell that info? They make so much more by selling access to it.

Simpsons already did it (sorta)

It's not plural at all. It's a collective noun, so it's singular. And 'math.' (note the period) started as an abbreviation, which lost the period by the 1870s. The wacky form 'maths' didn't come about until the 1910s, 40 years later.

It's a stupid spelling. It's awkward to say (the 's' often ends up nearly silent anyway) and grammatically confusing (it's not plural!), where 'math' is just a straight abbreviation. Couple that with the smug yet completely unwarranted sense of superiority ("the trouble with americans") people get for using it, and you've got a winner.

"That's not true at all."

Yes it is.

I'd provide more evidence, but you didn't - and in any case even the tiniest bit of good-faith searching would find it.