Look at these images of Ada Lovelace

Is she wearing jeans and a t-shirt? No.

I hope you feel properly ashamed and will stop kicking women out of STEM who might have otherwise had a happy life there but didn't fit your tiny mental model of who should be in STEM.

Women already in Engineering are ... wait for it ... the kind of woman that would be interested in Engineering.

They are only one kind. You are excluding people you THINK would not be interested out of hand; why?

There are programmers who like good clothes. Why can't the same be true of women? Here's an amazing thought; perhaps a person can have multiple interests!

The point is, women who are highly interested in being fashion consumers are unlikely, IMO, to be interested in getting involved in the nitty-gritty details of technology

But my point is this line of thinking is at best barbaric, and totally wrong! It's exactly that kind of thinking that is keeping so many women out of engineering because everyone is constantly saying "oh you are interested in X, therefore you cannot possibly be a good programmer of electrical engineer".

I know good male programmers who have good fashion sense and also like good clothes. So why the hell should that not the be the case for some women too?

For whatever reason women are simply less inclined to even try STEM areas of work. So lets not go around building fucking walls to keep even more out than naturally already discard the thought out of hand even though they would enjoy it.

Again, you CANNOT get the size of a group to increase be being highly selective and exclusionary!

If you want to make STEM careers attractive to a larger set of the population, the answer is simple: increase the pay

WHAT THE FUCK. The pay (and job stability) is *already* extremely compelling and just about any STEM field. That's OBVIOUSLY not any kind of solution.

But now people on Slashdot, for some odd reason, want to bring more uninterested people into this career field?

NO you idiot. We want to bring people into STEM that have a natural love of it (and those are the only people that would stay anyway, you cannot force anyone into STEM which is why programs to herd women into STEM en-masse are stupid). But utter morons like yourself are driving them off before they can find out they do in fact like STEM sorts of work, and that means many females are in fact doing something they like far less than they would like working in STEM related fields.

Finally, if this is such a great idea, why don't we use a variation of it to bring more men into STEM careers?

We do, there are tons of things everywhere that make STEM seem interesting to boys. In fact that is a problem in itself though, in that there probably are a significant number of men that also would be happy in STEM that do not pursue it.

Her fiction is like that of L Ron Hubbards. It feeds into her stated positions on politics or religion.

This can be especially hilarious in the case of L Ron Hubbard.

Moderating his own comments is just basic engineering fail.

If his comments are going to be moderated then it should not be him doing the moderating. It's like testing your own code. You have to be willing to accept feedback that's out of your control or else you'll never know if your stuff is any good.

> I am a civil rights activist. Your right to be free from government sponsored censorship is, IMHO, a fundamental pillar of Liberty. That is not at ALL the same as a non-government entity choosing what comments it wants to display.

You are a piss poor civil rights activist.

If he's trying to badmouth the MythTV developers, I am inclined to believe that whatever grief he got he really brough on himself. They will go out of their way to try and be helpful. Unless you tread on one of their piracy sacred cows, they are a pretty tolerant lot.

These guys still claim to see them: http://www.lookingatnothing.com/?p=366

Indeed, I interviewed a group investigating the pentaquark at SPring-8. This was posted on my blog here: http://www.lookingatnothing.com/?p=366

> or to become a free software developer

Are you fucking kidding?

You are putting your work out there for the world to examine and criticize. You damn well better have a thick skin. If you expose yourself to the possibility of some harsh remarks, then you should not be surprised when you get some.

It's not unlike choosing to become some sort of Hollywood celebrity. The scale is smaller but the principle is the same. The entire world can see you stripped bare and their response might be negative.

It might not even be with mean intent. The problem with expecting never to be offended is that everyone has a different standard in that regard.

Free Speech is a principle. Suppressing free expression is just as despicable when it is done by corporations and individuals. The principle is a social idea, not merely a limited guideline for governments.

Things like the Bill of Rights are just a manifestion of the idea that the principle is important, important enough to codify. That doesn't mean that the principle should be limited only to government.

That's far too much like the idea that rights of individuals are limited and are to be rationed out bit by bit when the document in question is based on the idea that governments are the entities who's power should be rationed out bit by bit.

You are taking the ideas that are embodied by the Constitution and Bill of Rights and turning them on their head.

Being a "tin plated overbearing dictator with delusions of godhood" is not cool and shouldn't be tolerated generally. Doesn't just have to be government.

Software is. This manpage change appears to be implying that the corresponding software is covered by some license other than some variant of the GPL as the given restrictions are incompatible with that license.

Cogent isn't the only ISP out there for Verizon to choose from. They deserve some of the blame. And if they are choosing to bandaid the solution by implimenting QoS on a service-preferential basis, they're attempting to cover up their poor decision here; "Hey, rather than ponying up the cash for a real internet link for our subscribers, let's just throttle the hell out of everything that isn't http traffic... it'll keep customer service calls down and our network will appear to still be just fine, while everything else goes to crap!" "Brilliant! Promote this man at once!" It doesn't help that, just like Obama and Bengazi, the appearance of impropriety by having a competing service while its competitors suffer on your own network looks exactly like what people are reporting it as: A dick move.

Without x86 legacy applications, there just isn't that much reason to bother with Windows.

On the other hand, pretty much anything available for Linux is available as source and can be rebuilt for alternative platforms. If not by the author than by some interested 3rd party.

Windows on ARM is a shadow of it's x86 variant.

The funny part of this is that you don't even realize or acknowledge the fact that Macs are in fact a product of the 80s.