Comments on Matt Ryall's Weblog

Re: Kim Jong-il and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

2011-12-19T08:53:50+11:00

Another good example — the German Democratic Republic wasn’t the democratic part of divided Germany.

Re: Word²: a massive multiplayer online Scrabble game

2011-09-30T15:14:13+11:00

how do i sign up to experince?

Re: UDP port forwarding with socat

2011-09-29T12:11:44+11:00

iptables is OK

Re: Two articles on women in Asia

2011-09-26T14:13:43+11:00

Thank you for your thoughts, Erica. Yours is one of the most emotive and personal comments I’ve ever received here. Thanks again.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any easy answer to this situation. It will require careful monitoring by governments and organisations in many places around the world.

Re: Two articles on women in Asia

2011-09-23T18:47:02+11:00

On learning what Asians were doing to their female fetuses and babies—long ago in my innocent past—I once thought, “Well, at least this vile practice is self-limiting…millions of men will die childless, and that’s millions of less tragedies for Asian women. And maybe now these cultures will learn to value their girls!”

How wrong I was. How naive, and even stupid I was. The books—and the Economist article —-I’ve read recently all say the same thing: this is DEADLY news for surviving women, girls and infants.

They are already traded like toys in Yemen..by their fathers, no less. They’re drowned or abandoned in China, and no doubt elsewhere. Now there will be even more sex-traficking of little girls and adolescents. Soon, the articles imply, teen girls will be locked away in purdah even in non-Muslim places.

My husband and I have had bitter fights about this subject. Randy maintains that this IS a self-limiting practice, aborting your baby girls, and that impregnating little 12-year-olds WILL eventually result in the extermination of a culture, if only because these little girls die so often.

I maintain this. If girls were the throwaway slaves they appear to have been in Asia’s past, and the rare, sellable oddity they soon will be there, than it doesn’t matter. The practice will spread, by definition: men will roam neighboring countries, buying little girls, and men will get the idea that their daughters are “valuable”, and will readily sell them. Especially when they have nothing else.

Randy counters, “That’s BS. Men want profound relationships. They’re just not good at getting them in some places.”

I counter that men want sex and sons, and that’s that.

Randy yells, “Bull&*%$!!!!!”

The argument usually ends with us both in tears, missunderstood. And I still want to know: why are men so utterly careless with females? And Randy, I’m sure, wants to know: when will women realize how integral they are to life, and GROW UP?”

I’m only being flip here because I can. I can read and write (thank you, Mother). I was fed well and encouraged (thank you again, Mother!). The yawning mass of womanhood on this planet can’t. And werent.

And I simply don’t know what to do about it.

I really, really want to know what pro-abortionists think of the Asian disaster. I’m not even being nasty. Really. What do they think? And what should we do now that it’s about to explode?

Can we at last hug our girls?

Re: Why wireless networks are slow

2011-09-08T23:40:55+11:00

What is the practical value(speed) that can be achieved with 54mbps or any wireless network?

Re: Mac OS X Lion upgrade notes

2011-09-05T17:50:37+11:00

I wrote a script that checks if your installed apps are compatible with lion. Get it at http://www.0project.com ;)

Re: Manually installing Java on OS X Lion

2011-09-05T05:49:40+11:00

this worked great matt.. adrian that didn’t work. I just got the looping as I was getting with other java relient apps.

Re: Manually installing Java on OS X Lion

2011-08-30T11:21:04+11:00

The easiest way to force java to install on Lion is to simply open Terminal.app and run the command ‘java’. Software update will pop open and offer to install Java for you. I recommend installing the Java Documentation package from connect.apple.com as well so you get the source code and javadoc turning up in IntelliJ (make sure you point IntelliJ at the developer JDK, I believe it’s under /Developer but I could be wrong).

Re: Two articles on women in Asia

2011-08-23T23:04:36+11:00

Timely post Mat, as there is an opinion piece in the SMH outlining a new test that can determine a babies sex for around $25.

In terms of making it more available to India/China this is not good news

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/choosing-babys-gender-threatens-to-skew-societys-sex-ratio-20110823-1j881.html