The one without wires.

I've known lots of women in engineering (and dated a couple). They were definitely NOT the kind of women interested in fashion clothes

Yes but remember THEY ARE ALREADY IN ENGINEERING!!!!!!!

I'm not saying this fashion thing is the best way but it's stupid to say that things that don't appeal to the women in STEM today have no value, because if you want the number of women in STEM to increase substantially you have to reach out IN SOME WAY to the women who are NOT in engineering!!

Why can't a woman who likes fashion ALSO be interested in STEM if approached in the right way? Applying technology to the creation of fashion can be fascinating and I think is an excellent way to draw in more women that may have been uninterested in technology otherwise.

Microsoft has been funneling everything through their marketing, so we don't have much of a choice. Due to this, What they are saying is dependent on how they are saying it.

the human race will be long extinct, along with anything we ever built.

Three things I can guarantee will still be around:

1) Porn. Even as we evolve into beings of pure energy we will wire ourselves to be electrically excited by existing porn as a tribute.

2) Trolls. The art of trolling will be unimaginable at that point but we all know they will be there.

3) Emacs. It's too damn pretty to die.

You missed does more than play games.

But Apple hasn't...

Question is: Whose eyes will decide this question?

Finally, we have found the perfect use for Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Don't be an idiot. I did have trouble describing what the stuff looked like but it was a floating voltage, not heavenly interference.

Asymmetric encryption (like all sane network protocols rely on) does not require secure key exchange. However, NSA has had more than one finger in the development of the schemes actually used, for hashing, encryption and handshaking protocols, so it is hard to exclude a backdoor. And, of course, you need to assume that both terminals are secure. And depending on what CAs you trust, the point might be moot.

It's evidence that bathroom surveillance is not what it should be (or at least not used properly).

I am the author of a small university dating website, and I recently had this explained to me. Looking at something like the "Genderbread person" it seems that sexual-identity isn't the simple set of options that I originally designed i.e. "{Male ,Female} seeks {Male, Female, Either}". In fact, it's a 16-dimensional space, with floating point coordinates
(4 axes, each with a mean and std-dev, and the same 4+4 for what you seek).

BUT... what is a computer programmer to do? I don't have the slightest idea even what pronouns to use, let alone how to sensibly represent this 16-D space, or make it searchable. Any ideas? There's an excellent site about "Falsehoods programmers believe about names"... could someone write something similar for gender?

In the end, my response to the requestor was that, regrettably, we had started out with a design saying that sex was boolean (M/F), and would they please pick the nearest match for themself, then elaborate in the comments. I made a design error when I started out, but haven't the time to fix it now (I estimate a man-week to fix and test all the instances where the codebase assumes that !M F), and for a 600-member site without membership fees, this isn't practical. But I'd love to see some documentation of the correct way to handle the problem, so that maybe in future I can fix the design.

"Just following orders" isn't widely regarded as a legitimate excuse for being a son of a bitch.

I had my brain connected once to a pulse generator via a surface grid of electrodes. (This was before epilepsy surgery at Stanford, and most of the grid was on the right occipital cortex.) During this procedure they would send an increasing series of pulses of 5, 10, 20 mA etc. down to each grid position and ask if I saw anything after each one.

About 80% of the electrodes were actually kind of boring. They would produce a characteristic speckling somewhere in the leftward field of view at a certain radius and angle. Other electrodes made very weird stuff appear. One caused everything on the left side of the room to suddenly look extremely brightly hued. It looked like a grocery aisle with cheap fruit drinks. The colors got more intense with additional current.

There was a problem near the end with a bunch of uncomfortable hallucinations. Every tiny little point from the pulse generator had this upsetting weird look to it, like a kitten with its head crushed. They somehow weren't going away, and I started bitching about something seeming to accumulate in my field of vision.

They told me at this point that my brain wasn't correctly grounded to the bed frame. I wasn't able to ground it myself since all I could reach on the bed was plastic. As soon as they regrounded it, for a split second I saw some sort of bright thunderbolt approach from the left and sweep all the stuff away. It felt like a relief somehow but I'm not sure WTF I was seeing.

1995 Civics do not go 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Maybe they did in 1995, but not now. At least *mine* did not. It was much closer to 15 seconds. I guess you had to be my passenger to get that reference, s/Civic/yugo/g

The thing is, so many of our current problems -- climate change, environmental exploitation, pollution, energy scarcity, food costs and in many cases, political conflict are magnified greatly by large populations.

It's really hard to see the benefit to human civilization that a global population of 8 or 10 billion brings versus 2 billion. Many of the extra 6 billion people are in poverty, live squalid lives and contribute to political instability. Those that aren't in poverty drive resource exploitation (eg, deforesting the Amazon for commercial farmland), greenhouse gas production, etc. There's really little that can be said for a world population past 1-2 billion people.

A world with fewer people demands fewer resources. It has more space, more room for error and demands less stringent political controls to manage big populations and big population densities.

IOPS, blah blah blah.

The more I think about IOPS the more I think it is a manufactured statistic designed to "prove" performance yet at the same time being something you can't compare to another environment.

For example, every storage environment has a different I/O size and read/write mix, rendering IOP comparisons between storage devices moot.