Is there a mod for +1 Pedantic?

He/she is about culture, not biology. Unless you're in a biology class, I suppose...

...but if you're talking about plugs in an electronics class...?

If an inside joke is told and nobody knows what it means, does it make anybody laugh?

How much could it possibly save the company to take away maternity leave? Certainly not anywhere near the disparity in salaries. And women complain about being underpaid because they are underpaid. In our day and age it's not (usually) a conscious decision by management to pay women less. Often it's actually women themselves simply not being as assertive looking for raises and accepting the disparity as unchangeable. The few voices complaining about the disparity are simply trying to get everyone involved to take a look at their own situations and figure out if women are being paid less at their workplace and if those women actually deserve to be paid less.

Maternity leave (and paternity leave) is a benefit like package health insurance, company cars, paid vacation, etc. It's offered by employers trying either to create a happy workplace and attract the best employees or to satisfy the demands of a labor union. I think that most people would agree that more maternity AND paternity leave would be good for everyone. But men have fewer opportunities to be involved with their children because there's still a prevalent idea in America that the women are responsible for giving up their lives to become primary caregivers. Most men are happy with that and so will not fight for paternity leave, and enough women have accepted it that they do fight for maternity leave.

As for "changing diapers or cleaning up code," yes both are messy, but I'd leave these smells for somebody else to clean up any day.

You're right, we're only talking care of other people's parents. But for that matter we should really be talking care of babies. That's what we're here to take about right?

Lol somebody's got a 1950s fantasy of women's role in society.

hedwards, you have no idea what you're talking about.

1. 1. Mothers normally need at least 2 weeks to physically recover from having a ~5" diameter baby pass through a normally ~1.5" tube, to say nothing of the cervix which before childbirth is normally dilated less that 1/8" and the sore abdominal muscles that forced that baby through. In case of Caesarean section, it can take months for the mother to physically recover.
2. 2. Babies need attention to properly develop. A mother's (or father's) love is vital to a child's emotional and psychological development. The lack of such attention can lead to serious and permanent relationship deficiencies.
3. 3. Newborns need to eat every 2 hours, even through the night, until they are anywhere between 3 and 9 months old. The best food for them is breastmilk, providing superior immune support and brain development to formula. In order for the mother to maintain adequate milk production she must either feed the newborn or pump out the milk every 2 hours. Otherwise she will be painfully swollen and will produce less milk thereafter.
4. 4. Even after the mother has physically recovered, she still has a newborn baby that needs constant attention. You can't get daycare for newborns unless you have at least middle class income. Even then there is a severe shortage of care providers because in most areas there are laws severely limiting the number of infants a single daycare worker is allowed to watch at any one time. This is for good reason because infants really need constant attention not divided between a dozen babies in order to develop normally.
5. 5. Remembering that newborns eat every 2 hours, parents of newborns get very little sleep. Assuming you could get daycare for your newborn, both parents will still be sleep deprived for months unless they are rich enough to afford a nanny.
6. 6. Finally, despite all of this difficulty, parents want to be with their new baby. Mom didn't live through 9 months of random nausea, general fatigue, severe mood swings, and discomfort due to carrying an extra 20 lbs. between her legs, followed by the most painful experience the most women will ever have to live through (and far more painful than anything most men will experience), just to drop the baby off with somebody else and go back to work. Parenting is a special joy and will be the single most gratifying experience in the lives of most people. All people have a natural right to pursue happiness. It is immoral to even suggest that staying home with your children for even the few months when they are most vulnerable is an unnecessary indulgence. Any company not willing to give you that is devouring your soul and will leave you spent, poor, and deprived of any source of true happiness.

P.S. Slashdot, if I use an <ol> it's because I want my list items to have numbers in front of them without having to add them myself. Otherwise I'd just use <ul> or a series of <p>s.

So Stallman thinks that if DRM is a standard part of HTML, it will be "easy" and "convenient" and so smaller time web sites will end up using it. Which they wouldn't do anyway because DRM is hard? Because they didn't think of it? Is it really that easy to piggyback on a standard method of embedding decryption codes? How much cheaper is it really to do this with web standards than with Flash or Silverlight? Cheap enough to make a brand new market catering to all of those video sites that don't already use DRM? Which ones are those again?

What I really want to know is that if these web site owners are so stupid that they will start using DRM because it's more convenient, how much could they possibly understand about DRM? Couldn't we as open source evangelists just make something open source and call it DRM and hand it out to those dumbasses? It doesn't matter that it isn't really secure (was it ever secure in the first place?). It sounds like Stallman's concern is that once DRM is standardized it will become popular. All that being popular means in the technology world is that the name turns into a buzzword and everybody gets to claim they do DRM now.

I can agree that Apple is reprehensible. That's not to say it does what it does for evil reasons. If you compare the iOS app ecosystem with the Android app ecosystem, you can see that Apple's stranglehold on apps increases security *for the average user* (meaning people who would happily install viruses on Android no matter how many times the OS warns them not to). Fragmentation is not a problem with iOS either, although that's as much about hardware control as about software control. Their overall strategy in everything userland is to prevent anything Apple from being configured for a poor user experience. This can be frustrating for those of us that know better, but it's an amazing boon to people who think the only way to send a picture in an email is to put it in a Word document and send it through Outlook.

I'm not a user of iOS, however. I use a Mac because fortunately it's just a well-designed interface on top of a Unix-based system. It took some getting used to but I eventually realized that many of the things that OS X doesn't let me configure I never actually had control over in Windows anyway. Of course nothing compares to the wonderful experience I had for the couple of years that I used Ubuntu as my primary OS, but for using a desktop OS that the rest of the world is compatible with it was a lot easier to switch to OS X than to go back to Windows.

Macs have a manual/auto switch so you don't have to choose.

Too many Slashdotters hate on the Mac without really considering that it's Unix, so you can do a lot of things with it straight from the Linux ecosystem. There are at least two (command line) package managers I know of that even try to maintain cross-compatible binaries for the Darwin platform. That earns it a special place for geeks like myself tired of trying to maintain things X11 configuration files (the newish auto-configuration systems make it even harder in my opinion to figure out how to change something that isn't working).

Also true of PC vs Mac.

Yay! You just earned the Slashdot achievement "Let's Bring It Back Around"! Unfortunately your attempt to bring the discussion back to the topic that spawned it is ultimately futile. So sad!

This needs some upvotes. The key here is that "Classic" automatics are not a computer deciding when to shift a manual transmission; they are a vastly more complicated mechanical system with different characteristics. Also, parent proves that both sides of the now-festering Slashdot feud can be right!

Just like it is with Bluray today, it will likely be that most if not all content distribution platforms will require you to use hardware DRM.

Hello AC, got something to say? Requiring hardware DRM for Netflix or Hulu or BBC on a computer would be suicide for those businesses. The only time when you can make that kind of demand is when the hardware is brand new and it's built-in from the very first device, like Blu-Ray. Otherwise, Netflix gets a hoard of angry customers who are not willing to go down to the store and buy a physical piece of hardware just to use their service.

Even if it's as simple as a USB dongle, the content provider suddenly has to manage physical distribution. Netflix could probably handle it if they give the things away through their existing mail service, but hardly anyone else has any kind of distribution channel like that so such a requirement would instantly kill their profit margins.

The sensible thing to do is to stand by an open Web, with open standards.

Open culture is not the same thing as open standards. Standardizing DRM in HTML5 may conceivably hurt open culture (in my opinion it won't, since everyone that wants DRM - Netflix et al. - is already doing it). However, it will definitely help open standards. DRM is a "feature" of flash/silverlight/whatever. Adding the "feature" to standard web technologies will take away one more reason for content providers to use those decidedly closed-source closed-standard third-party blobs of unknown binary. Those that don't want to run the new blobs of DRM-decrypting binary on their computers aren't actually suffering any loss, since that's how Netflix already works anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I understand why some people think DRM will protect the content, but I also understand why it doesn't. Almost everyone here on Slashdot knows that DRM makes legitimate sources worth less than pirated sources while doing nothing to diminish access to pirated sources. DRM causes more people to pirate, not fewer. And I'm completely on board with open culture and doing away with the worthless middle-men businesses that are strangling the dissemination of culture in order to cling to pre-Internet business models. At least, as soon as we can figure out how otherwise provide funding and distribution to an above-average subset of those ideas that need funding and distribution to be successful (hint: all of them not from people who are independently wealthy). But I think that standardizing DRM in HTML5 doesn't actually hurt open culture and could have the very beneficial effect of finally killing off Flash and Silverlight.

Outsourcing is a terrible idea. I assume parent is being sarcastic about "guarenteed [sic] results, low bugs per line count". East Asia outsourced software developers are famous for producing buggy code, or the wrong code, past deadlines.