Maybe it's just because you young folk have a short memory, but the first OS I remember is MacOS 4.3. It ran off a floppy and used a second floppy as a scratch disk. It was so amazing when I got a hard drive. 40 meg of space. That was just insane. Who could hope to use 40 meg of space. I remember toying with Minix. I got it on disk and played with it. It was nice but I couldn't imagine what to do with it.

Though maybe it was IBM 360. I used one, or a terminal, which is more the truth, in the late 70's in High School. Worked in the attendance office doing data entry. Remember those punch cards.

Wilson states that to do good science and to be a good scientist you don't need to be a math wiz. Iddo states to be employable in the tech and science field the more math the better. Am I the only one who has noticed these aren't the same point? Iddo is worrying that if your C.V. doesn't show enough math you won't get the position to do the science at all. Wilson says you can find a place for yourself that uses the math you already know. Wilson is optimistic, Iddo is realistic/pessimistic. Wilson succeeded and is a giant. Iddo has watched his students struggle and have to wait tables to get by.

In the end Wilson is following closer to J. Bronowski in Science and Human values and Iddo is closer to my grandmother. Bronowski cared about humanity, grandma cares about me.

I live in a gender switched world. My wife is a programmer for a major Wall Street firm, and I stay home to raise the kids. She has been at the firm for 25+ years and is a manager who is part of the hiring team. I've been a SAHD for 20+ years. When we attend those various office functions I notice a fair amount of female programming staff. Way over 10%. The section my wife manages is over 50% female. What is different is that this is a mainframe COBOL environment. When I talk to the male programmers about tech we discuss with linux distro we like and how so & so did what ever. The women discuss how they are using tool X to solve problem Y. Tool X is what they have, it cost a lot of money, it does the job. They are not interested in the tools themselves, they are interested in the problem they are solving. Understanding what the user needs, how that might be different then what they asked for, and doing all of this in a timely fashion is the topic of this and every day.

After that they are interested in how much money is being made, what the benefits are, time off, just like any other job. So we are talking about long term job stability, good office environment, how many stalls are in the bathroom, who is and isn't and idiot.

Asking why women aren't represented in tech misses the point. The question should be what does a tech job provide that an HR or accounting job doesn't.

In that case we are in complete agreement. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I get why people get so enamored of what computers can be made to do. As someone with writing based learning disabilities Mac and spell check changed my world. I went from not being able to finish High School to Honors in College. WriteNow and MacWrite Pro with that little 9 inch black and white screen were magic in the most pure Harry Potter way. I took my minor in computer science so I could understand this tool that freed me.

I'm amazed by what people don't care about and don't want to know. Just make twitter work .. Wow I'm the mayor of something on Foursquare ... What are people saying on Facebook? Send me your contact info and we'll set up a date. It goes on and on. Just because the first one was a good idea doesn't make the second, or third, or fourth one a good idea too. Matt Hanan found out that Apple's Opaque nature makes them difficult to trust. I've spoken to friends about how all of this interconnected, I'll do it for you-ness may not be a good idea. That cloud services have to be monitored and secured. What I get back is a suspicious look and being asked why I want to take their twitter from them. How can they live without it, it's magic. If you point out that magic has side effects and things you don't see I get more suspicious looks. It's rather bizarre.

The MacOS checks each string as you type it, that's how it spell checks and things like that. If you look at the language and Text panel in the System Preferences you will see check boxes for spell checking and replacing text with certain symbols: like a copy write symbol if you type (c). This is how if you get a date in your email the OS can offer to make an appointment in iCal for you, passing info between applications is an OS function. That process has a flaw which causes a crash when it encounters that particular string. There are some more detailed explanations above.

Did you capitalize the F in file? Are you running a version of Mountain Lion? The bug seems to be that the routine is not handling the capitalization properly.

If you're like me and send feedback to Apple when things go sideways, you can't on this. The Crash brings down the error reporting function "Problem Reporter". As soon as you click into the text field to describe the error it crashes too. Please note from my log:

2/2/13 8:43:18.001 PM Problem Reporter[517]: assertion on /SourceCache/DataDetectorsCore/DataDetectorsCore-269.1/Sources/PushDown/DDResultExtraction.c:1576 "CFStringHasPrefix(urlVal, CFSTR("file://"))" failed :wrong extraction: File:///
2/2/13 8:43:18.001 PM Problem Reporter[517]: wrong extraction: File:///
2/2/13 8:43:18.001 PM Problem Reporter[517]: An uncaught exception was raised
2/2/13 8:43:18.002 PM Problem Reporter[517]: condition "wrong extraction: File:///"
2/2/13 8:43:18.003 PM Problem Reporter[517]: (

I love the last line, is that open parenthesis supposed to be there all alone like that? This is a horrendous bug.

I noted that MSOffice seems to be immune. MS still uses Carbon instead of Coca as their framework. Is this a case of the old ways are still the best ways? Or is this an other case of Apple needs to improve their Quality Assurance.

Adam Engst of Tidbits has an article up on the Tidbits site on a Pages 4.3 bug that nearly prevented him from publishing his Take Control ebook on iTunes 11.

Well, so much for the quality of Apple software compared to Microsoft. MSOffice 2011 handles this string perfectly. Every piece of Apple software goes down in flames. Word makes it into a link, Excel and Power Point treat it as text, I didn't pay for Outlook so I don't know about it handles this string.

One of the joys of kickstarter is that lame ideas like this will just go way.

You'll just piss off both sides by being reasonable. A lot of this info exists, but isn't correlated or understood. As poster after poster has pointed out the discussion about guns has become about being right, not about doing anything. As far as I can see there has to be a rough agreement on the bounds of regulation before anything else will be done.

I haven't read every post but there is another elephant in the room. Race. The vast majority of gun rights advocates are white, the vast majority of victims and criminals are people of color. The discussion becomes for the whites: you shouldn't take our guns because they (people of color) can't control themselves, and we need our guns to protect us from them. As for the violence: well, it's just a form of natural population control.

  When I was told this by an old cop I know, I was stunned. I said I didn't agree, but didn't try of convince him otherwise. I just wondered how to go around him.

Oh, as for the massacre of children, it was a random aberration and can't be controlled. This conversation occurred around the time of Columbine.

Amen

As a moderate, the short version of my point is that I don't believe that crime is a relevant point in gun laws. So if we discount crime as a reason what do we have left: politics and Liberty. Neither of which provide a reason for heavily regulating gun ownership. So if we don't have a reason to regulate guns, we shouldn't.

On the other hand a reasonable low level of regulation to keep weapons out of the hands of the actively insane and to provide a minimum level of competence seems fine to me. As a young person in the late '70s going on my first of several unsuccessful hunting trips in Upper NY State I was required to attend an all day NRA sponsored class. We learned how to handle a rifle, and a pistol, safely, if not accurately, and how to clean and store the weapons we had. How to travel cross country safely with a rifle. What weapons were appropriate for hunting what. A .30-.06 is not good for squirrel. A .22 pistol is fine, if you like a challenge. I tried and didn't get any squirrel, but did bag 3 oaks and a good size pine. And, I don't care what anyone says, those tress kept ducking.

As for the statistics, I don't think they prove anything. We don't know why crime went up in the mid 20th century and we don't know why if fell in the late 20th century and has kept falling. Yes, crime fell in States with very open gun control laws, it also fell by the same amounts in States with very tight gun control laws. It has varied across counties and cities and neighborhoods. As the OP noted, there are very safe neighborhoods in Newark. I'm in NYC, the drop in crime here has been stunning. Happy, but still stunning.

Conservatives who want to overturn gun laws because guns stop crime are wrong; conservative who want to overturn gun laws because they never worked in the first place are right.

The second amendment is to ensure that The People maintain the means to protect their Liberties. It was purely political.

This article also disproves your point. There are lots of guns in Newark - that doesn't make it safe. There are lots of guns in Virginia, that doesn't make it unsafe. So stopping crime doesn't seem to work as a reason to allow or encourage gun ownership.

This leaves the political reason. I don't need guns to protect me from criminals, I need them to protect me from my elected officials. And, Verizon - but that is a different thread.