Currently its clear women in tech suffer from the people who claim to represent them. Its notable that the "voices" in tech are some of the least talented or credentialed around. The Zoe Quinn's, the Randi Harpers(freebsdgirl), the Brianna Wu's, the people who catch the eye of gender study graduates to fit their agenda, these women who much of the time lack any real experience in coding are held up as "women in tech". Quinn's example is just galling, she used an open source tool twine to write a choose your own adventure text game, a tool who's selling point is that no coding knowledge is required to use it. But through this, she not only became a "game dev" in the "industry", but also a "women in tech" who now spoke for all women in tech. Same goes with the other two. This complete lack of standards, this completely perverse form of excessive misguided empathy for women is what creates the problems for women in tech or stem, much of them imagined. The issue of empathy is really perverse in that its clear from feminism that women really aren't the more empathetic gender. They are the gender subject to benevolent sexism which is based on excessive empathy by society for the welfare of women. It is something which functioned in more traditional societies for most of human history where gender roles were more in line with this concession against reason, but in the modern world, its become maladaptive. Its allowed toxic femininity, female chauvinism to infect professions and communities like tech with toxic gender politics. These women need to take a look at the life story of Grace Hopper, who's achievements should not exist if the world really was as they painted. A stem phd who ended up doing so well that a modern advanced navy destroyer is named after her, and by republicans no less. All this happened so many decades ago, and now we hold up women who insult Hopper's name as examples of women in tech, its actually quite disgusting. This is all allowed because the people who claim to support women actually think less of them, that is the ugly truth at the heart of the matter.

Yea its just amazing how tone deaf they are. The entire pc industry has sales suffering in large part because of windows 8, and still they push on. I remember a time when people had passionate debates about how windows or osx was better, as misguided as those were, it showed people cared. Now I'm pretty sure even die hard windows users can't be bothered, they know microsoft is just kicking them in the teeth over and over again..and its just getting sad.

I just can't believe how they keep hiring total fuckups at microsoft. The group think and bad management must be rampant in that company now. Just look at the recent xbox one drm debacle, any discussion with people outside of their company, perhaps a few gamers would have told them this, they needed to lay down a record of steam like summer sales and the rest to gain the trust before online drm would be an acceptable thing to ask for. Its not rocket science, its demonstrated in the market place by a competitor for them already... Now this windows 8 UI mess, how many times do people have to explain that they don't want this nonsense, they won't even give us the OPTION of disabling all the new junk to switch back to win7 UI. Its like they know people would turn metro off en masse and they'd be embarrassed, so what, they should have buried it and moved on, but no, they hang on and torture us for no reason at all. So the alternatives just keep looking better at this point. And add to this mess their recent announcement about technet being over, and they are just driving the nail into their own coffin as they push even more people to find and build alternatives to their system. Its not good for a desktop UI to constantly switch to a different screen to do other functions, the point of a desktop is not always have to "context switch", its like having to clear your desk, clean it and wipe out off do minor multitasking, it wipes your memory a little in a bad way, its just how human brain works. Hell science has shown us that memory wipes a bit when you just walk through a doorway even. Their new interface is just broken, it has no place at all being on a desktop machine, and the more they force it, the more obvious how unsuited to task it is. Windows 7 evolved to where it was, windows 8 just skipped evolution and is just arbitrary. As the penny arcade said already http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28 This is just a big middle finger to all of us that use their o/s's. A whole boat load of managers across microsoft need to be fired, they've grown tone deaf to criticism and reality. Problem is balmer is at the helm, and he was the guy that dismissed the iphone because he said microsoft was just fine selling millions of their phone....yea oops.

So in other words you'd like to protect the unelected government of china from potential strife with its people by giving charity to them?

Again, money goes further in china, if said workers can save for homes when they go back to their villages the deal they strike is not that bad, else they'd stay on their farms. Now look at american workers. Walmart doesn't pay a living wage, much of their workers are essentially subsidized with government programs. The same exists for all minimum wage labor in america, yet the apple bashing folks aren't about to fix this, they need to cry over some chinese workers? How about you look at yourself before pointing fingers!! 45 million americans on food stamps as I've said. chinese spent 4 billion on art alone last year. Time to mind your own business I say, their problems are their responsibility, time to take our own problems on before we point fingers.

Well the main issue is folks are missing the actual point. China has one government with absolute power, and has cornered the market on manufacturing, you jump when they say jump or you go out of business when the iphone 5 fails to be delivered on time because some government official decides to get in the way. With absolute power comes absolute responsibility, that is the chinese government alone. Fixation on apple when everything else is made in china kind of says it all, this isnt really about principles. Furthermore when 45 million americans are on food stamps and many are jobless...it reeks a bit of hypocrisy. You won't help your own when you can worry about people over seas? How about the folks who cry over chinese workers fight for living wage for american mcdonalds and walmart workers first, then you'd have something to stand on. As it is this reeks of yuppie guilt, diversion of said guilt to something far away you can do little about to avoid even thinking about the problems you have at home. Never mind the fact that it also reeks of paternalism in the way of the old colonialist attitude, the natives need to be taken care of, they don't know any better. The reality is china is so rich now they spent 4 billion on art alone last year.... so who needs to spread the wealth to these workers? We need to give charity to them when we don't even pay walmart workers a decent wage? What kind of sick priorities are these?

And you fail to mention, china is not poor. 3 Trillion in dollar reserves 4 billion spent on art by their rich just last year alone. You folks want charity for chinese workers? Lets see you enact living wage for mcdonalds workers in the USA before you talk!! 45 million americans on food stamps, and this is what yuppies waste their time on?

Again, that is your distorted cartoonish view of the situation. They are workers who left poverty on farms to work there, they aren't forced to, and they have the chance to better themselves, many saving enough to buildhomes in their villages when they return. What mcjobbers in america have even that dream. Much of this criticism is just based on ignorance, and perhaps a need to distract from your own problems. As I said, 45 million americans are on food stamps, and yuppies cry about the chinese, who have 3 trillion in reserves and spent 4 billion on art just last year. The semi racist view of chinese as all poor is a massive distortion, they have plenty of rich there, and if they won't take care of their own people, that is their own fault. You want to demand charity for chinese workers? How about we stop the hypocrisy first, demand living wage for mcdonalds workers ...then maybe the chinese will listen to you. Lets see how that goes.

It is the governments responsibility. This is left out of most of the recent fad of criticism against apple.

Chinas government has absolute power, thus they have absolute responsibility. They have rigged the system so any business that wants to stay in business has to make their stuff there, apple isn't calling the shots, the chinese are.

Furthermore there is some inherent racism in the criticism. Its as if they are holding the chinese to a lower standard, with the ignorant assumption that the chinese are just 3rd world bumpkins who can't handle responsibility. The facts are this, china sits on 3 trillion dollars in reserve money, their rich have bought 4 billion dollars in art just last year alone, that is the real china. So when lefty yuppies in the west try to assuage their consumerist guilt by crying over the chinese as if they were all poor it gets a bit insulting. There are plenty of rich in china, they do not need our charity, In fact if we look at how we have 45 million americans on food stamps, we maybe the ones that require charity. But I guess that is what it comes down to, people who buy luxury products in western country feel guilty, they play with their toys while their countrymen are jobless, so they distract themselves by fixating on issues like this.

this i've long been surprised at how removed such benchmarks are from real world use. chrome bogs down horribly many tabs open. its "ability" to save memory seems to mean it pages out rather eagerly or whatever and if i leave it minimized for a while it just gets awful slow to restore anything back on screen when brought back up. firefox doesn't have this issue. plus with all my no script and such extensions, managing many tabs open at once is a breeze, and runs quickly. chrome just loses all functionality after a dozen tabs are open. but of course in benchmarks its faster!!! load of bs.

griefers aren't conservative, they go against the system for crisake. calling people on bullsh*t is hardly conservative.

bingo, the falseness of the avatar puts a wall in all interactions. even facial motion capture wouldn't be enough really, they would need to webcam capture your face and map it to the avatar for it to not be completely lame. and even then there are limits to what that achieves...probably mostly a remote creepiness. simple webcam stream gets around all this. adding interactive white boards and a system for controlled chat etc is frankly all you need. sometimes all this fuss over vr is simply an incredibly horribly complicated way of doing something simple. like how in films where computer interfaces are horribly complicated and 3d, most memorable example was the 3d gui in jurassic park where the little girl had to slowly move from building to building in a 3d world when frankly a couple clicks on a well made gui page would have been so much more efficient. google doesn't dominate because it spends its efforts on 3d interactive webpages. most things are better done simply getting to the point. seeing furry avatars around you is simply not anything of value in a teaching environment. sure some educational institutions jumped on the band wagon, but thats how it is with bandwagons eh? popularity has nothing to do with validity.

thats what people like to say though, but if you think about it, it really doesn't add up either. there is no advantage to meeting in a fake room to watch a fake stone faced "teacher" polygon doll try to teach you. it would be so much better done in some kind of interactive real time private teleconferencing web page where the teacher was on a webcam and the students could chat back as needed. fundamentally most interaction is done teacher to student, not student to teacher esp during lectures. any personal feed back can be easily done on interactive white boards and such. second life is just an additional layer of fluff that would add nothing to such interactions.

unless its a place where everyone else is already in uniform it only screams that the it staff are of low social position within the company and are basically on the level of janitorial staff or the cable guy:P its a visual separation from the "normal" workers which is simply unnecessary. unless its a specific service business like a store or restaurant uniforms only are there to differentiate the help from everyone else. lunch ladies and janitors wear uniforms, not the teachers.

basically yes, control is fundamentally too limited for this idea to work. it requires full virtual control which is lacking. the only way i see any possible value is if they match the users actual face movements to the avatars face. aka emotional capture project natal style i guess. still avatars are a creepy false face for the most part and their actual purpose and result is to distance/protect. its just no good if that hot poly babe you are talking to might be some fat slob, it just ruins everything. anything where real interaction is required is better done in teleconference solutions really.