>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?
I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.
Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.
What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.
Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.
This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.
I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry.
So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.
He's absolutely right. Women are too smart for careers in computers. Most intelligent women take a close look at the unrepentantly fucked-up culture that surrounds computing careers, and run like hell.
It's men who are dumb enough to tolerate the aspy-programmer types, the sneering arrogant IT guys, the mailing lists full of flaming personal attacks leveled by closet bullies empowered by semi-anonymity, the phallic-compensating gadget consumerists, constantly "helpful" types who manage to insult while trying to rescue, and the sexually inept who use pinup wallpaper and leer at any woman in eyeshot. Membership in (or at least tolerance of) a repellant boys' club is an almost-mandatory feature of our industry.
Men don't have to be passionate about computers and programming to do well in our field. It's possible to be a day-job geek who never plays video games, doesn't own an iphone, and doesn't read xkcd, yet still thrive in high-tech. They get flamed them for a few newbie questions and they'll just think you're an asshole. But brilliant women who are not passionate about the field are smart enough to tell us all to go fuck ourselves after the first serious flame, because they know nobody should have to put up with that shit.
So yes. Women are in fact generally too smart for careers in computers. He nailed it.
This. My 60-year-old father can tell the make and model of any car manufactured before the catalytic converter, just by hearing the sound of an engine. As a career veterinarian with 30+ years of experience and an interest in staying abreast, he is intimately familiar with the latest in small animal medicine. But when it comes to anything with transistors, he knows only the basics. He's always found them frustrating and irritating, and only started using email about 6 years ago when forced into it by an extended vacation my mother took alone. He only got a cell phone 2 years ago. I used to spend hours each month helping him maintain his slow-because-he-bought-a-P4-with-SDRAM Windows computer.
After being fed up with years of parental support, I convinced him with much prodding this past spring that instead of an HP, he should spend a bit more to buy a refurbished aluminum iMac with a full extended warranty and a Time Capsule. I was done with limited Windows profiles, spyware,Firefox with IE skins and changed icons, and all the rest. The Mac was a great decision. He's in love with it, and my Mom is now plotting her own mac purchase.
I spent the largest part of the two hours of setup copying files via thumb drive, configuring his Safari Top Sites page, and getting Skype turned on so he can talk to my brother in Italy. Haven't really thought about it since, but after years as a reluctant computer user, he's blossomed with the Mac. The iPod he never used to use is suddenly full of podcasts and music, and we'll talk about the Writer's Almanac show a couple of times a week. His digital camera no longer stores all of his photos for viewing on the little screen, and he doesn't go to Walgreen's to get help make prints anymore. - instead, they're in iPhoto with face tags, organized into events, and he uses his own inkjet with photo paper now. He never has to futz with the mic or camera when he's doing a video call with my siblings. He's an avid skier, so we put the snow reports for his season ticket resorts on his Dashboard, as well as the weather reports and clocks for various places around the world where we have family.
This is turning into a Mac ad, and I didn't mean that. Clearly all of these things can be done with Windows/Linux. My point is that the right combination of technology, in my case an iMac, managed to excite my father into an interest in my own passions, while simultaneously opening up all the really cool parts of the internet to him. And in the process, I no longer have to do any tech support for him. I don't have to worry about backups, I don't have to worry about viruses, I don't have to worry about email attachments, I don't have to worry about "How do I..." phone calls.
Instead, we have more things to talk about, and he's able to finally use these fantastic tools from which I've made my career. So: if the technology your family is using doesn't work for them, whether they're currently on Apple, Linux, or Microsoft OS's, try a different one. It's made all the difference for me.
Caveat: I really can't recommend buying a computer without a user-serviceable hard disk unless you also buy the extended warranty. Apple wants $450 to replace the 320GB hard disk on an out-of-warranty iMac with another 320GB. I found out the hard way on my own iMac. To replace the disk in an iMac you have to remove the glass and the screen. Get dust between those two during the repair, and it's game over. This is the rare case where the warranty is money well spent.
A walled garden is by definition a monopoly force. If multiple organizations charge all entities to appear in their network, then interconnection becomes a classic prisoner's dilemma. Connecting to other gardens opens the door to competitive pricing for access to the complete network, rather than an all-or-nothing deal. AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve were eventually done in by the ability of news providers and corporations to host their own sites on the World Wide Web for a single fee, rather than paying each walled-garden provider separately.
If these entities were not forced to compete with a subsidized, not-for-profit network that happily allowed them each to peer not only with one another, but also those who chose not to subscribe to or publish on any walled-garden service, what would have become of the marketplace?
A simple test that I ask big-L Libertarians to engage in before I will discuss anything political with them on the internet:
Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure. In order to be taken seriously, Be sure to account for how we would have moved beyond the walled-garden networks of the late 80's early 90's, cite ARPAnet, and reference current backbone peering economics, including the recent maneuvering by Google which prompted the whole network neutrality debate in the first place.
Nobody's passed it yet.
Wow. You're really committed to being right about this. I'm going to try and explain it anyway, even though I'm fairly certain this isn't going to go anywhere with you. Maybe someone else will read this and Get It, because I'm almost certain that you won't.
First, that 5 minutes included formatting the HTML for the reply and proof-reading. Not time-consuming, but in the context of 300 seconds, not exactly trivial either.
Second: Because only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women, it has created a fraternal atmosphere where jokes such as Stallman's are an acceptable part of the FOSS society. This becomes self-perpetuating, because sexist jokes and attitudes become more acceptable in a homogenous culture. Meanwhile, apologists are free to say "Women are totally welcome, if they can hang with us," thus relieving themselves of the responsibility of creating an environment that is more welcoming toward outsiders. It's the woman's problem that she is offended and unable to be "one of the boys," and not the responsibility of those who are acting offensively.
When the brave and the pioneering outsiders do come into the culture and attempt to change it so that it is more welcoming and they can be more comfortable, they are met with overwhelming resistance. Some of it, such as the Ruby pr0n presentation or the continued adulation of booth bunnies, is brazen. Other opposition, such as your own, is more subtle. You are insisting that there is nothing wrong with the current way things are done, that there is no reason to change, that there is no evidence of institutional sexism in the FOSS world, and that accusations of such are outlandish. Meanwhile, the number of women involved in the movement remains the same paltry 1.5%, because the established culture that excludes women remains static. Nothing is done accommodate those who would otherwise join the movement, were the movement itself not structured so as to be exclusionary.
Third: There is an issue of magnification that disappears when you go hiding behind the statistics. For every woman who is willing to stick it out in the face of something like Shuttleworth's comments, there are uncounted numbers who hear the message loud and clear: They are not welcome as FOSS developers. It doesn't matter if only 0.1% of the traffic on the kernel list is sexist, because it only takes a few to chase away many. If a small number of men project a clear message that women are not welcome, and they are not shouted down by ten times as many other men, then the message is deafening: Those few are our mouthpieces, and we are content to let them speak for us. In this instance, lack of public disavowal is seen as tacit agreement.
It's hard admitting that you're part of something that hurts people, especially if it's something you love. I understand. The initial reaction of denial that I had was much the same, but all the denial in the world doesn't make it any less true. The FOSS movement is changing its attitudes toward sexism much more slowly than the field of computer science and IT in general, but we can't stay put forever. It's my feeling that we're entering a period of growth, and growing is painful. But the potential reward is great. Right now, the best and brightest minds of half our population are smart enough to tell us to fuck ourselves, because they won't put up with our shitty, sexist attitude. If we get smart in return and create a culture where they are welcome, I guarantee the results will be more than worth it.
That's the result of a 5 minute google search.
Happiness is twin floppies.
