There's a browser add-on for that at fbpurity.com
It lets you filter out words and makes the interface cleaner too. I've used it for years.
87 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2009
That's exactly the problem: companies *have* been hiring on criteria other than technical competence: men have been hired over women with the same qualifications in the past. This is about redressing the balance.
And they have been working with schools, but sadly only relatively recently - and the effects won't be seen for about another decade. Until then, what do you do? Rest on your laurels, or ensure that there are great role models to look up to?
There appears to be some misunderstanding and FUD in the comments about what's happening.
Many large tech corps are finding that their monocultures are to their disadvantage. So in Intel's case _amongst other measures_ they are _also_ offering a signing bonus for the people they consider to be lacking in presence.
This doesn't mean that they're hiring less qualified women over men! It means that nowhere near representative numbers of women are applying for the jobs in the first place. What they want is a larger pool of qualified candidates in the first place.
Quotas aren't being forced upon them, most definitely not upon small companies.
And in fact, the Norwegians found that board-level quotas do kinda work: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/women-on-board-norway-s-experience-shows-compulsory-quotas-work-a-705209.html
It's difficult for us as men (particularly those of us at the very top of the pyramid: white, male, middle-aged, straight) to even _see_ the huge hurdles that women, ethnic minorities, & LGBT people face in their daily working lives. As a female colleague said to me: "women just have to adapt to the man's world". Those who don't, don't survive, unfortunately: and we lose great talents because of it.
So companies are already using a multi-pronged approach:
- incentives to employ more minorities
- improvement of company culture
- encouraging young minorities to pursue STEM education
Now, which one of these provides the quickest initial results?
Please, I urge those of you who don't see a problem, to go and actually talk to women and other minorities in IT and ask what their working life's really like: you'll be surprised, just as I was.
To those of you who "yawn" at the news: he didn't come out for you. No need to read on (or go to the effort of commenting to say that you don't care).
But unfortunately yes: a lot of people do care.
There's the religious fanatics who today are still trying to legislate to deny gay people the rights that they should be allowed to enjoy (heck, look at the number of UK MPs/Lords who tried to block equal marriage last year)
And the visibility does two jobs:
1 - (not so relevant for a CEO in San Francisco) showing the general population that gay people do exist and want to have the dignity that's otherwise denied to them is an important message that helps counteract the sort of legislation I just mentioned.
2 - it shows younger gay people that (a) they're not alone, and (b) they have successful role models in all walks of life.
Did you know that the attempted suicide rate among gay teens is around 20-30%, even in "western" countries? And the % of homeless youths who are gay in the UK and US is somewhere around 30 to 50%.
Surely it can only be a good thing for those young people that they have a hugely successful role model to look up to?
Stroke order does matter, but only for handwriting - there are a few reasons for it, such as making sure the character looks in proportion.
Or, if you're finger-signing a character on the palm of your hand then if it starts with, say, a left-to-right line, then that immediately excludes the thousands of characters that don't start like that. If you get what I mean.
But you're right, it doesn't matter for typed text at all.
The irony of you going to the effort of writing a comment (and thereby negating your "who cares?") aside...
I suspect the embassy workers do care. And the few UN teams that are there. Visitors who do international business need to access the outside world, too (not just Russian/Chinese but you'd be surprised how many foreign companies operate in NK).
Really? Even though the scientific evidence proves that it's not the case?
I thought it was widely proven that watching porn / playing violent games doesn't lead people to copy what they see on screen?
In fact (and I'd need to have a proper search for this sometime) there was a loose inverse correlation between access to porn and incidences of sexual violence.
But then again, when did politicians ever use facts to decide laws?
How in the name of all that is unholy is it possible for an image to cause injury?
The only way I could possibly imagine that to happen is if you burn the image data to a CD, then fashion said disc into some sort of ninja throwing star.
As Dickens's Mr Bumble so aptly put it:
"If the law supposes that, the law is a ass. A idiot."
As I think I understood the article...
When particles are smashed at the right energy level, Higg's bosons are produced. But we can't detect HBs themselves.
However, HBs decay into other types of particles (in almost every collision it becomes a pair of quarks, and very infrequently it's other particles). The trouble is, many of the other particles in the collision *also* produce particles just like those.
= Needle in a haystack.
However, in 0.1% of collisions, HBs produces a pair of photons, which are what you can measure. If you add up their energy & mass it should equal the energy and mass of an HB (good old Einstein at work, there).
IANAPP (I am not a particle physicist), so if there's anyone out there who actually understands it, please correct me!
Here's an article about Halley's comet that discusses mass loss:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/astrocourses/AST101/readings/comets.html
Apparently, some of a comet's mass (including water etc) will come off, usually in the time it spends in the inner solar system (where it's warmer - further out it's completely frozen). As it leaves the inner solar system, the evaporate gradually refreezes.
As a comet loses its ice, the darker coloured rock surfaces are exposed, so it gains more solar heat and so could theoretically change its orbital path over time.
IANAA (I Am Not An Astrophysicist)
If you read the article (gasp!), you'll see that amongst other issues, there was no plan in place to rehouse the people whose villages would be flooded by the dam. Given the enormous problems people in China are still having because of being displaced by megadam projects, it makes sense to postpone the project until a suitable plan's in place.
I say, yes, go for hydroelectric, but don't make a ton of people needlessly homeless to do it.
Yes tom, I wasn't saying that mozilla was doing that. I was taking the opportunity to paint a broader picture of the situation so that people can understand the context in which these 2 devs are no longer working for that company.
Judging by the general tone of the comments on this page, it seems that there's a little lacking in the understanding of (a) the facts of the case and (b) the reality of the extent of sexism and discomfort around homosexuality in the IT industry that lingers today.
Like you, I don't think they're going about their protest in the most useful way, and it probably won't make a dent on mozilla's business.
Well Connor, that's what inequality feels like. Welcome to my world.
And I also find it frustrating that there are groups that exclude others in preference of their own kind. Be it religious schools, single-race universities, gay bars that don't allow straight people in, whatever.
But on the subject of whipping boys, name me just one time in the last 2000 years of western civilisation where it's been a bad idea to be a straight male. It's a minority that's finally finding out what unfairness feels like.
Pardon me for reading the original blog post, but they're not asking other people to join the boycott.
They're saying that they'll not work for a company that has that particular person at the helm, because that person has actively paid for a campaign that would break up their business and their marriage.
Nothing at all. But what I see in the corporations I work at is that their the demographic that still makes up the huge majority of upper management and execs. Heck, in germany it's almost exclusively so.
Given that these corps are in a world where the majority are women, where IT talent is pretty young, and where --let's say-- 5% are gay etc, you must wonder what's going on.
It's also a sector which is trying hard to be inclusive in order to attract talent: after all, especially in areas like software development, gender/sexuality should have absolutely no effect on your skillset. I chose my employer because they're striving not to be yet another bunch of white middle aged straight males.
So it's important to make ensure that when a person enters a top flight position that the ethos of the company isn't going to be compromised by the person at the helm.
Remember also that this is the US, where money easily buys political influence: the dev here doesn't want mozilla suddenly buying the sort of votes that would endanger his marriage or his company.
Whether he's going about it the right way is another matter altogether.
I heard rumour that CERN (its campus straddles the Franco-Swiss border) tried to solve the issue by making a deal with a Swiss provider. They got the telco to put a cell or two on the French side of the campus so that they wouldn't get stung by roaming charges just for getting a push message while they popped down to the canteen for a coffee and a croissant.
Mind you, it is very good coffee, so it's almost worth the roaming charges :)
Ah yes, you mean the Daily Heil reporter who ran 4 miles through pitch black, unmapped, unsignposted streets past armed guards, walked around the hotel, ran the 4 miles back before sunrise and claimed to be the first person to have visited it, despite having produced no photographic evidence (and despite a tour group having been there a month before)?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2245054/Welcome-Hotel-Doom-The-3-000-room-monstrosity-Kim-Jong-Uns-starving-dictatorship-North-Korea-foreigner-stepped-inside--now.html
This is true: it's not competitive: here in the state of Baden-Württemberg I can only get KabelBW, and not Kabel Deutschland. Oh, and contracts are usually a minimum of two years.
Certainly the mobile networks are competitive, but until we can up sticks and change to whichever provider we want it's pretty much a regionalised monopoly