Do "Women in Tech" conferences and workshops help to close the gender gap by actively working against the legacy of a male-dominated industry, the same way affirmative action works against the historical disadvantage of minorities?
"The Twitter you experience today is rich and immersive, full of images, gifs, Vines, audio files and videos from some of the world’s most recognizable figures and brands."
Then you'll absolutely love their "strategy statement".
"Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world."
That along with: "Many of you use Direct Messages to reach the people and brands you’re only connected to on Twitter."
So the blog post's target audience seems to be their own users (you experience/use), but spoken in advertiser-speak. It's a not so subtle reminder that the user is the product.
Day comes over to shake her hand. Lori is laughing as Day declares her "the greatest Tetris player in the world," then turns to me to add, "And I must say, she's also the prettiest."
Maybe if gamers didn't think it's ok to casually objectify female gamers there would be more women playing and it wouldn't be such a big deal that this player was a woman.
As a man who a few hours ago was complimented on my beard (which btw is a total castaway & 6 months of growth type of beard) and how it makes me look "handsome" in a casual business situation, I see this type of statements as flawed and near-sighted. The female in question is married and I have a significant other and the comment was issued in a small break between talking about software all morning. I felt neither threatened, reduced to looks, or uncomfortable in any way. My ego got a very slight boost if we're actually keeping score. I don't see why the person in this story should feel objectified by being told she's pretty.
Nevertheless, I decided that I should go ask my girlfriend what she thought about this situation and about your comment. You know, to get the female perspective. Her answer was pretty much in the same boat... And then she starts a 15 minute rant about how modern women are destroying the values set by real feminist women who worked their asses off to achieve some notion of equality, and how Coco Chanel is the reason women now wear pants and hats.
Our collective opinion? The fact that being told you're pretty or handsome is seen as objectification and something to be avoided is because we've become so out of touch with reality and out own humanity that entitlement has become as much a problem as objectification is.
This is just a random thought, but it does occur to me that a lot of effort is expended in discouraging guys from objectifying women, but little to no effort is expended in doing sort of the opposite: encouraging women to objectify guys.
I've never really thought about it before, but maybe the most natural solution is to just level the playing field rather than trying to get a big group of people to stop doing something that they more or less naturally do. We're definitely seeing this happen with celebrities and big budget movies, for instance. Nobody's stopped objectifying women, but they have started objectifying men more than ever before, at least as far as I can tell. I've heard more about Chris Pratt being hot this week than I have about any female celebrity, for instance, including his female costar Zoe Saldana.
This is just a random thought, but it does occur to me that a lot of effort is expended in discouraging guys from objectifying women, but little to no effort is expended in doing sort of the opposite: encouraging women to objectify guys.
That's because the people who think objectification of women is bad tend to also think objectification of men is bad. Those people don't want to live in a world of ubiquitous or or even just balanced objectification; they want to live in a world with none.
I don't think ridding the world of all sexual objectification is even remotely realistic. It's human nature to do it, and you're not going to change human nature. Are you going to make it illegal?
Culture modifies human natural behaviour in all sorts of surprising ways. You cannot tell out of hand which behaviours are natural (whatever that means) and which are cultural. Why are women's appearances scrutinized to much greater extent than men? Is it because our culture* discourages male objectification, or because it encourages female objectification?
Even if it is natural, that doesn't mean it's desireable. That's just an appeal to nature.
While laws are an extreme method, they're routinely used to better ourselves, and even more often to better others. It's worked for (what we currently consider) undesireable behaviours like theft, smoking in public places, environmental pollution, seatbelt wearing, illegal parking, murder, and looking funny at cops. That's a pretty varied list, so why wouldn't it work for sexual objectification? I don't think we should use such a drastic approach, but it's not ridiculous, either.
> Is it because our culture* discourages male objectification, or because it encourages female objectification?
Both. There's still a lot of latent homophobia throughout the US. What I mean by that is that there are many folks who are decidedly pro-gay-rights, but still feel uncomfortable around the sexualization of the male gender.
There's one thing I'm interested in: happiness. What's going to make the most people happy? Many laws that are morally prescriptivist, like those banning gay marriage, end up just oppressing people because it turns out gay marriage is perfectly fine and doesn't harm anyone.
I don't believe open displays of sexuality are harmful to anyone so long as we don't have double standards and we do exercise good judgment. So the idea of outright banning them by law does indeed seem completely ridiculous to me. It's just as ridiculous to me as banning gay marriage or banning porn or banning prostitution.
The reason we do have double standards is precisely because we've been led to believe over generations that the sexualization of men is wrong. Because many men haven't learned to be comfortable with their own gender, homophobia has been able to flourish for decades. It's gross when two guys kiss, right? Of course it is--you can find millions of people who will agree with you because they've carefully been hidden from that their entire life. Banning sexualization and sexual objectification will just lead to future generations who are even more incapable of coping with the realities of human sexuality in ways that aren't immensely harmful to many people.
It's a pretty icky thing to say, to be sure. This person set a new world record and she's receiving comments about her appearance? This woman performed an incredible feat of skill and she's being reduced to her looks. Doesn't sound like much of a compliment when you frame it like that, does it? Sounds like sexism to me.
Uhh, he just complimented her on becoming "the greatest Tetris player in the world", an achievement which is 100% unequivocally not due to being female or pretty (the machine does not care), and is not reduced in any shape or form by being either.
What are the practical consumer-level implications of this? My understanding is that every internet-enabled device needs a unique IP address. If there are no more unique addresses, can no more devices connect to the internet in this region?
Excuse me if I'm being dense, but why does every internet enabled device need a unique IP? I thought the service providers had unique IPs and we just made our requests through them.
This is where many people can share one IP. But NAT has problems - you can make connections, but you can't accept connections from elsewhere. And it sometimes breaks particular applications.
The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now.
> The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now
Slow maybe, but unlikely? No, not really. IPv6 internet has grown fairly steadily (and afaik at a growing pace) since its inception and I don't see any reason why that trend would slow down or stop. There hasn't been any real opposition or alternatives for IPv6, mostly just indifference and ignorance. More and more new gear supporting IPv6 natively out of the box is being deployed on the field, reasons for not enabling it are dwindling. XP just got deprecated, most end-user stuff probably already supports IPv6. Old network engineers retire someday, and new generation is well aware of the issue at hand.
Because journalists have an incentive to attract readers, and it worked. The blog post made it to the front page of HN.
(I don't think I've ever written a news article about a tweet and likely would not, barring extreme examples such as @WhiteHouse tweeting that the president had resigned or somesuch.)
For anyone (like me) who thought the headline meant that Netflix is no longer available on Chromecast, that is not the case.
Google and Netflix had partnered on a promotion to include 3 months of Netflix for free with the Chromecast device, but they've ended that promotion due to overwhelming demand.
Well obviously URLs are for people because raw IP addresses are unsuitable, but that doesn't mean that textual URLs as they exist today are our best option. Even well-designed URLs are too complicated. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5498198 is mostly devoid of meaning even to me. I can tell that that URL is referencing a discussion on Hacker News, but "Hacker News" or the title of the article are not present in the URL.
Hierarchical URLs betray the underlying model of the internet as a series of interrelated documents. People don't care about understanding the layout of files on a web server; they just want to open Facebook, or their email, or perform a search. Nobody types "http://www.facebook.com into their browser. They either click a bookmark or type "facebook" into the search or URL bar. What happens next is up to the browser.
The best solution would conform to the already existing mental model that people have. They don't think of a website as a bunch of documents on a web server (despite the shared vocabulary with printed media - words like "page" and "bookmark"). Their mental model is probably something like buildings on a city block. You can pick one to go into, and when you're inside you can do things and learn things that are unique to that building. Rooms are connected by hallways and doors. There are windows where you can see outside or into other buildings. You can bring things with you into the building and take things out when you leave. To get back to a room in a building that you've been in previously, you can either go back to the front door and follow the path you took originally to get to the room, or you can "bookmark the page", which is like a shortcut directly that room.
