If so you are kidding yourself. Never mind them not being armed with any anti-ship weapons (which are rather complicated to design, manufacture, and make work), they aren't facing up against their real military counterparts. These little narco-boats are not being hunted by US Navy subs and ASW ships. They are just dealing with the DEA and coast guard.

Also they have a much easier job of staying undetected than an attack sub. When you are just trying to get from point a to point b, subs can be fairly sneaky. However when they launch an attack, everyone knows where they are when said attack happens.

If they tried to interdict merchant shipping lanes and sink ships, they'd quickly find out they are playing in a league they can't deal with. To give you an idea:

A narco sub is 40 to 80 feet in length, made of fiberglass, wood, and maybe steel, has a diesel engine, can go about 6 knots, has a range of maybe 2000nm and generally isn't fully submersible. One of the few found that was (found before its maiden voyage I might add) could go about 300 feet under water. No design optimization for silent operation, no sonar, no torpedoes, weapons are only whatever the 3-6 crew have.

Against that would be the Virgina class attack subs. 377 feet long, made of reenforced steel and classified composites. Has a nuclear engine with unlimited range, and diesel backup, and go "more than 25 knots" the government won't say what its actual max speed is. Likewise it has demonstrated a public test dive to 800 feet, real max depth classified. It carries 12 tomahawk missiles, and has 4 torpedo tubes that can fire Mark 48 torpedoes (it carries 26 total of them) or harpoon anti-ship missiles. It has the best passive and active sonar systems the US has ever made, all the capabilities are classified. It has been designed to be as silent as possible and is supposed to be as quiet underway as a Seawolf tied to a pier (already a very quiet sub).

You really think there's any comparison?

You have to remember for all the chatter of a "war on drugs" it is really just an ineffectual police action. When one of these narco subs gets spotted, the crew scuttles it so as to not get caught with anything. The coast guard then rescues the crew. They are just (semi) stealthy drug transports.

If they were being used to interdict and sink shipping traffic, there would be a REAL war and these things wouldn't be looked for so their crews could be taken in to custody, they'd be blown the fuck up. Wouldn't just be the US on their ass either, though they would be the biggest threat, merchant ships are flagged from nations all over the world, they'd all be out for blood if they were getting blown up.

Do you attain shaman status afterwards?

Brother, shamans try to attain PopeRatzo status.

I don't take work seriously, and it is overwhelmingly about bringing home a check.

I think you're mistaking "work" for "career". Most everyone I know takes some pride in their work. They do a "good job" even when nobody is watching.

You're just jealous because you can't get laid with your female colleagues.

If I did my wife would be using my scrotum for a coinpurse.

You don't know that -- all you've done is take a snapshot of a single instance in time, saw what you perceive to be a minima, and decided that is the nature of things now and forever.

Conceptually, affirmative action is like a social algorithms that endures local minima, but with the design that an eventual equilibrium (or global maxima) will be generated. We have a lot of algorithms like this in computer science[0]; many optimization strategies are known to generate poor intermediary results, with the end-product being either the correct solution, or the best solution derived from the algorithm execution (ideally within some known, expected bounds)[1]. Genetic algorithms work this way: a single generation, viewed on its own, may be at a local minima, and thus an extremely poor solution. However, viewed at the end of the run after multiple generations, a better solution can be obtained (either a high local maxima, or a global maxima -- if one even exists).

Or, put in different terms, look at one stock market index. There are many local minima over the course of the index, but the overall picture is one of growth.

Capitalistic theory argues against you, using your very points. N% may be lackluster for a specific, given contract[2]. If the contracts are sufficiently lucrative, and there are financial benefits to be obatined from that market, then more organizations will desire to enter that market. In this case, the "market" is the artificial construct of "IT businesses owned by women"[3]. If there is money to be made, then more entrants will fill the market. If you knew there was a field where you had a significant bidding advantage because you (for sake of example) had green eyes, would you not consider entering that field and reaping the benefits?

As more female-owned IT businesses bid for such contracts, competitive pressures will start to take effect, to the point where the local minima of "N% lackluster" is nullified. Thus, the concept is:

1. 0. Endure potential local minima, while aiming for a global maxima,
2. 1. As more entrants try to take advantage of the market, allow competitive pressure to improve them towards a quality maxima, and
3. 2. Achieve your original end of social engineering the market to increase the social structure(s) needing improvement (in this case female owned businesses).

You can't observe a local minima and then decry the entire algorithm. When it comes to social engineering, the algorithms often require multiple generations to achieve their ends; there is a good probability that it won't happen within a single lifetime. To use a local minima to judge an algorithm is illogical and narrow-minded. In this specific case, I see it as laudable to attempt to further engage women in business ownership -- there is a glass ceiling, and simply allowing things to progress as they have for the past 70 years won't change anything.

So let the algorithm run. The competition right now may be lackluster, but as more potential female business owners learn of the opportunity, they'll enter the market to get a slice of the pie. As soon as there are multiple female owners in the market, competitive pressure will be to out-bid each other, improving the process to the point where they are indistinguishable from their male-owned competitors. They still have to meet all of the requirements of the tender, and are still expected to produce results -- and over the long term, as competitive pressure and increased female ownership takes place, an equilibrium will be achieved whereby such actions won't be required anymore, as female business owners will be fairly commonplace[4].

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[0] - I've been rather disappointed in the Comp.Sci. literacy of the average slashdotter over the last year or so. It feels like the MCSE types and scripters have taken over, and the kernel hackers and algorithms people have left. Case in point: the article the other week on the new Blackberry OS. Instead of a rousing discussion on the real-time nature of the QNX Neutrino kernel, the discussion was entirely on RIM's business model. Sad.

[1] - My M.Sc. thesis was precisely on developing such an algorithm to minimize the cost of data synchronization/cache coherency, where cost was measured by the inverse properties of a) the cost of data transfer within the network itself, and b) the cost of using out-of-date information (i.e.: you can reduce network costs by synchronizing less frequently, but then the chances of getting stale data increases; inversely, you can reduce the cost of using stale data by synchronizing more frequently, with a rise in cost of network data transfer. An ideal solution finds a minimal equilibrium, and my research centered around a possible algorithm to reach such a minimal state over time). As such, I'm intimately familiar with such algorithms.

[2] - You've made a huge assumption here that female owned businesses would produce inferiour results. Citation needed.

[3] - Note that the article didn't say that the women were the IT workers for the project -- simply that the companies involved were owned by women. This goes to [2] above -- you have no evidence that a winning female-owned company would perform any worse than a male-owned company; such a female-owned company could very easily employ nothing but neck-bearded UNIX geeks of the same calibre you presume (without evidence or citation) a male-owned IT company would have.

[4] - With the side-effect being to ideally remove the glass ceiling. If 50% of privately-held companies are owned and run by women, then any individual woman will have less sexism to worry about, as (ideally) women aren't going to automatically discriminate against women.

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Yaz

I think what some people forget is that the plant was hit with the worst natural disaster, short of a meteor strike, that it could be. A 9.0 quake, which are exceedingly rare (and remember the scale is logarithmic) and a massive tsunami. Then there were a number of fuckups in the response, like not having the right kind of generator on hand. All that, and it still didn't "do a Chernobyl."

None of that is to say it is perfectly safe, but it should provide some perspective on the thing.

The guy is a professional troll (actual name Mark Stephens). Literally, he writes stupid shit designed to inflame people. He's wrong all the time (he predicted big Y2K problems on account of Windows NT), he's a liar (claimed to have a PhD from Stanford, was in fact a TA) and so on.

Don't give his dumb ass the ad revenue from links.

Just as a simple counterpoint, his data about earthquakes is totally fucked. This was the biggest quake on record in Japan, previous winner was an 8.6 in 1707. Also, while quakes happen over there all the time, they don't all happen in the same spot. For example in 2003 there was a pretty big one in Hokkaido, an 8.3, that only caused one death. However if you look at a map you find that Hokkaido is quite a distance from Tohoku where the last quake was off of. So even if a quake happens in 10 years (like he has any idea if that will happen) there's no saying if it happens in the same place.

Guy is a moronic troll that has made a good living of it for years. Stop feeding him.

People (Americans in particular) want to discount genetics, pretend that we can all be anything we want to be, that we have no inbuilt limitations.

Of course we know that is false. Most simply it can be seen (and strangely the one area it is accepted) is athletics. Some people have the genes that allows them to become top athletes, the rest don't and that is that. We also see in athletics the difference between men and women, that the genders are not equal at the top, they have areas they are better in.

Well, this carries over to mental, emotional, and other differences as well. Your genetics don't dictate who you are, but they do define some limits on you and also what you might be interested in.

So you are going to see differences in the interest of the genders, even without any societal forces. One interesting example I see is veterinary medicine. Since it has become a field that was acceptable for women to work in (used to be teaching and nursing was all that was considered "ok" for women to be in) it has become very popular for women. The vet office I use is ALL female. All the vets, all the vet techs, all the receptionists, all women. From what I've learned, the heavy amount of women is not an anomaly, it is a field that women have a lot of interest in.

Now why is that? I'm not sure, I've never seen any research on it. Perhaps it is the nurturing aspect that appeals to many women. Whatever the case it certainly isn't something where there's a big push in society to "get women in to veterinary medicine" yet it is happening. It appeals to women, so they go in to it.

None of this is to say that culture and childhood encouragement don't play a part, of course. If a girl is interested in computers but continually told that "girls don't play with computers" that can well change the course of her life. However we have to be open to the idea that just as different individuals have different predispositions, so do the sexes.

We may always see a situation where there are less women interested in IT than men. Frankly I don't think that should be a concern, so long as we make sure it isn't because women are being unfairly forced away from it. I would think it far worse to try and start pressuring women in to careers they don't like all with some misguided idea of "balance".

I guess I feel pretty strongly about this because computers were something I always wanted to do, since as long as I can remember. This wasn't because of my family, mom, dad, grandparents, none of them are technically savvy. However I loved computers and electronics and was fascinated by it from age 3. Clearly it is just one of those things about me, a genetic predisposition. I'm glad I got to follow that, and I wasn't told to do something different because people decided that I should have interests other than that.

The shortage of women in IT is mainly due to the men in IT.

Haven't used YooHoo in years.

Be careful friend. You are inadvertently smearing one of the finest beverages on God's Earth.

6 ounces of YooHoo, a jigger of Slivovitza, 1 oz of the juice of one boiled Ayahuasca vine and a cocktail onion over cracked (not crushed) ice is a great summer refresher. Miniature japanese umbrellas decorate the top of the glass to create a festive atmosphere for a party you'll never forget.