This is the most vacuous rhetoric I've ever seen here.

With no definition of what would satisfy making the world better and how tech isn't doing it, these words are basically meaningless. I could just as easily ask why aren't the medical, financial, media, or any other field not making the world a better place. Seriously, consider:

"I don't feel that doctors, nurses, administrators, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society. It seems like it's mostly about short-term gain and not much about making the world better. That may be just the way the market works.

Is it that there's no profit to be made in solving the most important problems? I'm puzzled by that as I would think that a good solution to an important problem could find some funding from somewhere but maybe government, for example, won't take investment risks in that way?"

Now, medical professionals everywhere, defend yourselves from . . . completely hollow rhetoric.

huge success.

Seriously, what other form of media changes the minds of 6% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats? I'd bet this is at least as successful as most any other kind of media, and seen far more often.

I'm not sure if it's evidence exactly, but I'm not sure evidence is required. Requiring evidence of someone's intention is almost always impossible. Listening to the opinions and warnings of industry experts is a worthwhile thing to do even if they can't prove someone else's intentions.

The article gives some details as to what got him going here:

"Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem," he wrote in the Guardian at the time. "They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers."

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'm fairly certain it's equally or more important that you actually play them on Mac and Linux?

Valve shares the actual download and usage statistics with publishers, don't they? They need to see users actually playing them on these platforms if we want them to think these platforms are actually contributing to their success.

Setting aside the accuracy/sample bias of a survey like this, they seem to fundamentally misunderstand the business.

How much infrastructure does the average customer on each one actually use? I mean if it's 30 and 31 percent, but the average customer on AWS is using five times the resources, Azure is still much, much, much smaller.

"6. No one is asking for this

Raise your hand if the thing you wanted most from your next phone was either fewer ports or more dongles.

I didn’t think so. You wanted better battery life, didn’t you? Everyone just wants better battery life."

As the article says, what everyone really wants is more battery life in their phone. Is the best way to increase battery life something other than just making the battery bigger?

As a percentage of the size of the battery, I'd imagine all the empty space taken up by the 3.5 mm jack is quite a lot. Seriously, is there any better way to increase the size of the battery? I'll trade a dongle on my headphones for 15% more battery.

I admit this is sort of off topic, but this story just made me consider: why do I suddenly have ads on /.?

For many years now, I've had no ads with a little message explaining that since I've had a story on the front page, I could browse Slashdot ad free. Did this go away with the last regime change?

The thing is, whether he's a scientist or not, doesn't even matter. It's (at least as far as I can tell from the article) just a straw man she's created to answer a question no one's asked.

It would be like if someone makes a claim, say that smoking causes lung cancer. The person making the claim, we'll call him Dr. Smith, is an MD, but not an oncologist. If I say "Dr. Smith isn't an oncologist, he's no more an oncologist than I am, so you shouldn't believe him" then well, I'd be a goddamn idiot. Dr. Smith is still way more qualified than I am, and Bill Nye is way more qualified than Palin, and it still isn't even really the issue.

The various links seem to define cuckoldry as a father raising a child that isn't his, but the study is measuring children who have a father that don't have the expected father. Common sense tells me that's not the "cuckoldry rate." Fathers can have more than one child, but children can't have more than one father. I mean if 1 in 100 children have this unexpected paternity, if a father has three children, wouldn't it seem likely that he has about a 3% chance of being a cuckold? Maybe the false paternity tends to cluster together such that if one kid isn't biologically the father's, it's likely the siblings are too, but I see no reason to think that.

The measure would be better called a false paternity rate or something similar, not a cuckold rate. Or am I missing something obvious?

This is not the first company to try this, what they don't say at least up front, is how tricky this business would be.

According to one in NY, She Taxis only 2% of drivers right now are women.

Will a lot more women flock to this job if they feel it's safer? It seems from a business point of view, these people are really banking on that being true. All law aside, it's an interesting experiment. I mean this dynamic comes up all the time in most conversations about gender disparity. "If we just got rid of all the harassment, there'd be far more women coders" is something I've heard plenty of times before. This is the closest thing to a controlled experiment we're ever going to see.

. . . some brilliant agent finally thought to try 123456 on the pass code screen.

Um, your own link (the first one) says that bar charts should always start at zero.

"Of course column and bar charts should always have zeroed axes, since that is the only way for the visualization to accurately represent the data. Bar and column charts rely on bars that stretch to zero to accurately mirror the ratios between data points."

The whole premise seems to be accepted pull requests = accepted developers. I mean they say:

"To what extent does gender bias exist among people who judge GitHub pull requests?
To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub, then investigated why differences might exist."

The authors note that women are more likely to submit pull requests that aren't tied to existing open issues. They seem to conclude that this reinforces the idea that women have the best track records, that these requests are the hardest to get accepted.

"Thus, if women more often submit pull requests that address an immediate need and this is enough to improve acceptance rates, we would expect that these same requests are more often linked to issues."

I interpret that totally the other way. The paper equates getting a pull request accepted with being accepted, that's just not how (in my experience) development works. If you submit a patch for some feature add that only you've thought of, and it conflicts with nothing else, it's easy for a maintainer to accept. A patch for a known, open issue is much more likely to have regression considerations, and compete with other patches. If five people all submit a patch for one issue, odds are good at least four of them are going to be rejected. It's kind of like measuring an employee's productivity by how many lines of code they write. Experienced developers see that as largely silly.

I agree with all of that, at least the first part. If you expanded your quote a little bit more, I thought I said as much.

My point was simply that stating that renting is the equivalent to taking on unsecured debt, which seems to be expressing the sentiment that it's always throwing money away, is ridiculous. I'm not claiming anything more than that. You seem to be implying I'm claiming something about one being better than the other overall, and I'm not. Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to be trying to correct me ("Here's the thing . . . ") but I don't see where you disagree with me.

As to the second part, I don't think it would be a crap shoot. Much of the advantages we give buyers in the market only apply to your primary residence. (Such as the exemption from capital gains.) We artificially skew the market towards individual home ownership. It's not just a matter of price correction. If we took them away, it would make a lot less sense for individuals to own. The corrected market would have a lot more investment properties.