Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Women are more biased? (Score 1) 467

There's a gap of $3409 between the male's suggestions for pay and a $4333 gap between the female's suggestions for pay. That's curious. I can understand that women might offer a lower wage across sexes based on being paid a lower starting wage, but I don't understand why there would be a bigger gender difference.

Comment Re:Moral relativists contradict themselves (Score 1) 840

There are some simple, uncontroversial metrics out there: logical consistency and consistency with real world data.

Ethical beliefs are based on reasons and facts. Ones that do not are baseless, and not worth believing. The remaining ones can be judged based on our two metrics. Is the logic consistent? If no, then the belief is false. Are the facts they claim consistent with reality? If no, then the belief is false.

For example, a member of Al-Quaeda might say that women should not be educated because they are all too stupid to learn anything. This is demonstrably false, since we have successfully taught very many women in the West. Accordingly, their belief - at least on this basis - is false.

These metrics are universal, despite not knowing the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and do successfully distinguish between some true and false ethical systems. That doesn't mean finding the one, true moral system is easy, but it DOES mean that not everything is relative.

Comment Re:implementation (Score 1) 347

Regarding #3, there may be a problem with getting the necessary expertise: if you've not worked with any involved company, you'd be less likely to have the the technical knowledge to understand the standards being discussed. Clearly though, belonging to both the standards committee and a company would be a tremendous conflict of interest. Probably better would be to allow one to transition from company to standards committee or vice versa after a period of three years.

Comment Re:Home School (Score 1) 1268

I understand her pain. I would routinely have nothing to do for the last 30 - 45 min (that's 1/3 to 1/2 of class) of my college-prep physics class in 12th grade. I routinely finished math tests 30-50 minutes early in my pre-calc class too. Just about everyone else took the entire class to finish... I still don't get why. At least they allowed me to read. My recourse was to educate myself: trig, calculus, vectors, programming, and a good deal of Spanish...
Operating Systems

Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says 631

alphadogg writes "With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft. The current approach to harnessing the power of multicore processors is complicated and not entirely successful, he argued. The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the operating systems model. Today's computers don't get enough performance out of their multicore chips, Probert said. 'Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?' he asked. Probert made his presentation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Universal Parallel Computing Research Center."

Slashdot Top Deals

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die. -- C.S. Lewis

Working...