"Were I to follow all .. of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book." Oh no! When you put it that way, it would be awful to have wasted all that time putting the book together! I mean if we're going to weigh the possibility of making hydrogen bomb construction easier, thus endangering the lives of millions/billions of people in the future, versus some author having spent time putting together a book and then having it be a big waste of time, we have to side with the author. I mean seriously, how self-centered do you have to be as an person to make that argument?

To answer the other questions here -- Assuming the information is already available elsewhere doesn't mean anything because: (1) It's possible that the author is exaggerating (for his own 'I want to publish' reasons) how available that information is, and (2) it saves villains the work of finding and putting that information together on their own - information they might've overlooked.

But, I suspect Slashdot is going to stick with the old "let's make all information available" arguments, proving why they don't and shouldn't actually work in geopolitics. I remember a lot of those crappy arguments flying around when some scientists were talking about publishing the genetic sequences of highly-virulent and deadly strains of flu. Keep working on your quixotic quest to make a deadlier 21st century, Slashdot.

"Men, and I include myself, are shit." You sound like a self-loathing male.

"To this day, I am very upset that we have all done a grave disservice to ourselves by turning our backs on a 50-50 chance of benefiting from a female Einstein." nobody is arguing that women should be shut-out of tech. They are arguing against discrimination against boys. Tell me how locking boys out of opportunities helps us produce the next female Einstein.

Yup, but lots of Slashdotters love to get any angry about DRM and that's pageviews, baby!

Yup, just like counterfeiting money. Show me one person harmed by my creation of counterfeit money. You CAN'T! Therefore I'm right! [/sarcasm]

My current company did most of their work in Objective-C. It's a bear. One of the worst parts is all the retain and release calls. They're used for memory management, and god help you if you forget because there's no obvious way to see the problem. Our current company is ditching Objective-C entirely and moving to QT and C++. My boss, who wrote all the Objective-C stuff, says that Objective-C has become a mess over the past 5-10 years as Apple is promoting Objective-C for both iOS (iPhone, iPad) and OSX (desktop) applications, which has caused all kinds of problems and bloat. I've had all kinds of problems with Objective-C, so I don't doubt his characterization of it.

It looks to me like you just gave up on actually trying to argue your point, and decided to pretend that you won.

Somehow, I don't believe you, because I read it, and there was only one chapter that talked about race at all. The authors remained agnostic about whether the measured IQ gap between black and white people was genetic or environmental. Characterizing the book as "a pile of racist crap" seems pretty uninformed given those two facts.

Let's take a moment to dissect what's wrong with that Adam Savage quote: "Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women." The internet is made-up of a billion people. If you describe the internet as doing anything, as if it were a single human being, it's going to come-off as bizarre. First of all, if the internet was a person, first and foremost, it would be schizophrenic - because so many different opinions coming out of one mouth would necessarily be contradictory. Second of all, you can find any extreme opinion you want on the internet. This means that "we'd all agree that the internet has a serious problem with [fill in the blank]." is probably true because there's no consensus about anything on the internet, therefore, in order to say the internet thinks [fill in the blank], you have to pick-out some minority who believes one thing and then represent it as if it was "the internet".

There's a flaw here in comparing the 45% number to the great depression. If those jobs went away quickly, it could cause something worse than the great depression. However, if they go away slowly, people have time to migrate to other types of jobs. We've seen this already - and it's contained in the video itself. In one part of the video, they talk about how automation has allowed the percentage of people working in agriculture to shift from 90% of the economy to a few percentage. In other words, a millenia ago, you could accurately have said, "agriculture makes up 90% of our economy. Automation will reduce the number of people working in agriculture to a few percentage (let's say 3%). That gap between 90% and 3% means that 87% of the workers will be unemployed. It will be vastly worse than the great depression!" The problem is that it didn't quite happen that way because the transition happened slowly. Admittedly, there was some unemployment as a result of automation, but at no time was there any vast levels of unemployment - nothing near 87% at any one time.

How the heck did this turn into a discussion of "privilege"? Yeash. Everything is not about "privilege" and the good guys vs the bad guys isn't defined by who has more "privilege". The idea of ending anonymity online is important for everyone, not just the "less privileged". In most cases, when a website has a comments section which is based on Facebook usernames, I just don't comment at all. I really don't need anyone mining my comments 5 or 10 years from now, so I just flat-out refuse to participate on those discussions, for fear that my comments will be taken out of context or misunderstood and then used against me. That creates a chilling effect for free speech *for everyone*.

It has more to do with the blatant pandering. Hell, if this is your argument, then we might as well turn all superheros female in service to women's empowerment because all of them have unrealistic superpowers.

Here's the thing: individual energy use is fairly insignificant. Turning off the light leads to a miniscule reduction of total energy use because: residential energy use is only 14% of humanity's total energy use [ Source: http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/... ], you are just 1 person out of 1 billion people living in the developed world (i.e. people with high-energy consumption), and turning off a light or two leads to a small reduction in your individual use. In other words: a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.

If people are concerned about global warming and humanity's energy use, you can do totally ineffective things like turning off a light or two more often, or you can push for more effective means of curbing global emissions: change the source of our energy (for residential energy, industrial/commercial energy, and transportation), push for more energy-efficient devices (e.g. a lot of Western European countries use about half as much energy per-capita as the US), and throw taxes on carbon-based energy sources to influence consumers via their pocketbook and influence the market towards forms of energy without all those carbon-emission externalities.

I can see that the conservatives are out in droves on this Slashdot story, flaunting their ignorance and conspiracy theories. You guys should really be ashamed of yourselves because you're only making yourselves look like cavemen.

I can't find the article right now, but I've read that porn studios have seen a revenue drop of something like 50%. From what I've heard, they're very concerned about it.

That's a nice theory, but you haven't addressed the elephant in the room: virtually all resumes for tech jobs are from white men. I don't even know how they came up with this 35% number. I've never worked at a tech company where 1/3rd of the technical workers were women (usually, HR is very female and that's about it). I think my Comp Sci classes were around 90-95% male.

Wow. That article is all over the place. I swear some three-sentence paragraphs had three different thoughts. I think part of the problem with these kinds of essays is that guys get tired of being blamed for everything. (For comparison, just try to think back to any mainstream article that blamed women for anything.) That's why guys are always getting defensive - because guys are always getting the blame. Rather than this essay, I recommend Mark Manson's article: http://markmanson.net/school-s...