Recent Comments

Why would species matter? It's not as though "race" has any biological meaning. I think that's nitpicking - the point is bigotry, not whether bias falls within a particular category.

The developers also had a woman collegue but still ran into problems.

It's like xkcd knew to put this out a few days ago. So that we could all repost it today!

That comparison really doesn't work since any god wouldn't be the same species as man. Therefore the answer must be no.

"What's more, Albert Einstein was born on this day."

Interesting useless fact. So was L. Ron Hubbard, amongst millions of other people.
Perhaps Scientologists are celebrating the Pi Day?

The KKK is certainly racist, but it's not racist to believe in racial superiority. It's only racist to be wrong about it. (To the extent that "race" is an actual thing.)

Let's try a little exercise: the Christian god, assuming it exists, is perfect in every way and is superior to you and your race. Is that a racist thing to say?

I would say that the brain gets "moulded" in certain ways as we get older, mainly through the environment we are growing up in.
Kids can figure out gadgets quicker as they are not following patterns that we have set in our heads.

You're right. It's like our money isn't enough for the banks; they're coming to take our time, too. And then we'll need time transplants, so the medical industry profits as well. Plus it's not funny anymore because comedy is all about timing, much like my post.

No, I'm pretty sure the KKK is intentionally racist. They *do* believe that their "race" is superior to others. We are not yet in a world where intentional racism doesn't exist. Its not a "bad joke" or "troll". Its the real, "these people are inferior to me because of their race" deal.

I loved classes like that. Not only do you get the pride of still being there after the cut, but you can take more of a "now that those tagalongs have fallen back, let's get down to the real work" kind of attitude. Of course, there were a couple of times I stayed past the cut and ended up failing myself, but I still enjoyed it while it was happening.

The world isn't as homogeneous as some people would like it to be. Men will look at things from a male perspective, no matter what you do to try and change it.

is that women are quite prepared to take on hard challenges, courses, whatever, and succeed.

However, anecdotally, the social/community/practical pay-out for effort seems to be a higher requirement for women to justify their commitments, than does anything intrinsic about the specific challenges. It is not clear to me that investment in STEM knowledge has these qualities. Investments in STEM often involve isolated study for mechanical or technical applications -- interactive aspects are not always present or valued. I'm not sure how one would go about testing for these kinds of differences in priority, however, nor whether my hypothesis is complicit in stereo-typing?

Mastering "music" can rival most things in STEM, in my opinion, but the payoff is that people can hear what you have mastered and enjoy it directly.

Who would have thought that Target IT security was almost good enough to catch the hackers?

is to keep putting fun and safe challenges in front of my kids because they do climb learning curves incredibly swiftly.

I worry about why we lose this free-form learning as we grow up. I don't believe it has to be that way. Do we "teach" it out of people?

There are plenty of systems and complete (even slightly overlapping) coverage in the area the signal was lost, that's why it's an actual mystery. A birdie asked for seismic information and some Chinese had a positive answer but it doesn't seem to be widely used as news yet, possibly too embarrassing or maybe someone got cold feet after all the duds. If that's where it is then we're still unlikely to learn what actually caused it.

TURBINE started round about 2011. 3 years ago. It should scale much faster than your average botnet. 3 years is a long time; they're already everywhere they can be. If you're ever interesting enough they use it and encryption and obfuscation won't do any good at all. They own the bare metal.

Is that why you're all so very very quiet? I thought "everybody" was scheduled for at least five more years of deep denial.

You don't want to do that, trust me :3

It could scale, make the pseudocode "var modpointValue = totalCommentsNumber / userbaseNumber" stick to some fixed ratio close to what it is now. Change the variables to what makes most sense. Define it per article if necessary.

This comment is two days late, influential people might not see it, please spread the idea and modify as needed.

I think you're using the wrong word. It's not ugly so much as unattractive. Beauty is a part of that, but attractiveness is far more important, as if you're not attractive, you won't find a mate, and your genes will hit a dead end. Attractiveness is a much more complex beast, and involves things like fitness as a parent, which is why wealth makes a difference to women, and so on.

I cannot agree with your assertion about racism, it would make the entire word meaningles. The word racism simply describes any statement or belief that different (human) races are different beyond color of skin. This gets ugly when this is taken so far as to say one race is superior/inferior to another because of these alleged differences.

When it comes to the character portraits, I agree with most of what you are saying, especially this part:

However, there's nothing particularly enlightened here - no one likes to fantasize about being ugly. Even the grizzled-veteran-with-the-knife-fighting-scars fantasy is just a different kind of attractiveness.

Personally I think they made the characters far too ugly and weird - they don't have to be pretty, young supermodels, but they certainly don't ALL need to be ugly either.

Same here. I started my Com. Sci. program with nearly 400 (not all in one class of course). My university actually reserved, still does, seats for women in the program, which is a huge point of contention because they have a hard time filling them and most of the women who do join, didn't have the grades to be there in the first place and drop out after the first semester.

There were only three women, started with over a hundred, in my graduating class of 70. I'm good friends with one who went on to work for IBM Canada. Of the other two, one's a stay at home Mom, which is still admirable, but you don't need a degree to do it. And I haven't spoken to the other, but I hear through mutual friends she's apparently a hostess for a high end restaurant doing very well for herself. We all graduated at a bad time economically, after 9/11, so I kind of wonder how the rest of my class made out. I'm only still in contact with six, but we're all doing well at jobs in our field.

I'd say that a work can only be sexist or racist if its creator doesn't mean for it to be. Intentional racism is generally either a bad joke or a troll - done to provoke. The KKK isn't intentionally racist, assuming that they actually believe what they preach.

As for the folks in the article, these people seem to be searching for something to feel guilty about. There are some real negative stereotypes, but smooth skin? Homogenised facial structures (whatever that means)? Their solution seems to have been to make all of their female characters either old or weird looking, and from a player's perspective (male) I kinda like that. Putting so much thought into the portraits seems to have given them more character than most. However, there's nothing particularly enlightened here - no one likes to fantasize about being ugly. Even the grizzled-veteran-with-the-knife-fighting-scars fantasy is just a different kind of attractiveness.

That said, how we relate to our media is an interesting subject. The best article that I can recall was this one comparing four versions of The Office. It's not all about beauty, but that's part of it:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2006/09/foreign_office.html

Have the "Target was targeted" jokes been run into the ground yet? Wacka wacka!

I find it amazing watching a 1-2 year old child successfully use a tablet or other gadget then try the same pitch to zoom on a dead tree magazine.

When I was in college, the school would kick you out of the program if your GPA dropped below a certain threshold in the core classes (science, math, etc) and higher threshold for classes in your field (computer science for me.) Furthermore, the thresholds where quite high, 3.0 and 3.5, I believe.

The school allowed anyone to "drop" a class without any GPA penalty if done by a certain date. This led to the mass-abandonment of the harder classes midway through the semester. After this date, a lecture hall of 300 calculus (or whatever) students instantly became less than a hundred.

Yep, and you all fell for it hook line and sinker. Look how you repeat it here as if it were the truth while a site admin comes in saying 'botched DNS transfer.'

Shame on you clueless drama-mongers. I thought you'd be smarter, but apparently thinking that was a mistake.

And it was 400TB. Not 40. 40TB isn't even enough for my video chat software and the amount of servers I can set up and run, with 200 concurrent video users in them, each pushing 30 FPS (assuming their cams have enough lighting and their computers can handle 30 FPS.) Near-instant DDoS mitigation guarantees require a ton of bandwidth, even in the cloud.

These LEDs emit a broad spectrum without the use of a phosphor, whereas normal LEDs are typically monochromatic.

Nope, it's not fixed, as I had to register an account to post.

So, looks like both new sites have their own issues, still.

I love how everyone thinks I had something to do with this. Proves that the current crop of SN is too easily led and not very bright. You're going to consume yourselves soon enough, especially with mattie_p rolling censorship in IRC, now.

Stick with ass, because I did that to expose you drama-mongering fools, and you took every last bit of it and ate it, then asked for more.

As you see by the uninformed assholes in this entire thread talking about a DDoS from me when one of the site operators comes in saying it was a botched DNS transfer.

It's far too easy to expose the ignorant and easily-led, which is why I did it, to show that a huge chunk of the SN crowd is not very bright. Looks like part of the pipedot community is working the same way, too, as evidenced by the comments in this story thread.

Hook, line, and sinker.

I thought you'd all be smarter than this.

You could probably get a refrigerative loop working from solar power. If you send up enough panels with it you can do anything, but if you're spending so much on it, you'd want to see some very obvious reasons to do it. Other than Pirate-Bay style "there's no laws in space!" kind of thing I'm not sure what would compel anyone to do it.

From the number of comments on SN, they aren't there either. I'm worried folks have scurried back to the other guys.

Indeed, I presume the unlimited mod points is a temporary measure. If it was not, the scoring system would have to cap out much higher. The site that pipedot is inspired by really did - and still does for the moment - have the best moderation system I have yet seen.

I fully expect drama to come to this site once more people arrive. That said, we are fortunate to not have any major drama even with the amount of people that we have here.

The larger section of the community may not be here, but that can change over time. In the meantime, I'll continue to follow Pipedot closely.

How about a Beowulf Cluster of these?

I struggle to even say Daylight Savings time instead of referring to it like "fast time" and "slow time" like my grandmother did.

Not formated in story form. Sorry ^^

Matt Angels' post seems to have answered most of the dangling questions.

Thanks for the right answer. That makes sense now that I think back on it. I'd have to agree that kind of sucks for cooling then.

Build up the stabilizer muscles in your lower back with strength excercises. Also, move around - don't stay slumped in the same position all day. Done.

Objects in orbit can also get very warm when in direct sunlight as they can't readily convect the energy gained from the sun away to a vacuum, so you'd also need to convert that heat into a form of radiation that can be disposed of. It's not an insurmountable problem, but I suspect you'd be much better off just by giving a little big more thought to locating data centres on Earth to climes more suited to passive, or at least renewable, temperature control.

Exactly what space needs, ten years from now these will be obsolete, and just end up being further impediments to future orbiting objects.. hopefully, they're designed to de-orbit after a few years.

Umm... vi.

Please, this is not a matter of opinion. This is a matter of truth vs. untruth. This is a matter of good vs. evil. It is time for people to man up (and woman up as the case may be, although surely women are too smart to use emacs) and do the right thing. Too long have people suffered under the ineffectiveness of inferior text editors with arthritis inducing key sequences and ONLY ONE MODE!!!

It must stop.

[esc]:wq
[esc][esc]
Aw fuggit!

Have you read the IRC logs? NCommander is no political master-mind and he does not know how to white wash himself, his own description of the events leaves one feeling sympathetic towards Barabas, the IRC logs tell a different story. My take is that Barabase wanted to run a business but at the same time was enjoying the benefits of the free labour that comes with a community project. Sooner or later it was going to turn ugly, IMO it is just as well that it happened sooner.

This link, http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/03/12/0542209 refers.

Your intuition would be right for conductive cooling such as air/water cooling, but the amount of heat that is radiated only depends on the temparature of the object, the environment doesn't influence this in any way.

is another man's RC model airplane, I guess.

FFS, everyone knows notepad is the ultimate text editor.

Do you even realize that the CIA and NSA are different agencies?