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L.A. County Bans Use Of "Master/Slave" Term
SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."
Funny that my first instinct was to check Snopes, and what do you know but that's the provided link. Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.
Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered? How the hell am I supposed to shop for wires now?
It's not an "interesting twist" on political correctness, it's just another example of it.
graspee
I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with. It is twisting our language too rapidly and preventing the free exercise of speech. Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin. They must realize that a language develops because people make new terms and apply new definitions to existing words based on events with which they are familiar. You cannot force us to speak differently just so a puny minority will not be offended.
Politicians, I think it is YOU who are offended, not the minority which you claim to represent!
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
LA County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave'
Is this the same LA County that has rampant police corruption and brutality problems?
The one in the state, California, that is facing a massive deficit?
Glad to know they have their priorities right.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Even so, it's a pointless request, and if enforced would probably mean that LA County couldn't buy hard drives at all, since most drives have clear labels on how to set the "master" and "slave" jumpers.
Uh oh, this post is probably officially data non grata in Los Angeles COunty now.
Someone you trust is one of us.
"L.A. County Bans use of Master/Slave Term. ...
LA County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references."
Contrast this to the snopes article, which says: The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term "Master/Slave" in product descriptions and labelling.
There's a big difference between request and require. And banned? Hardly. I doubt anyone's going to get fined or sued over this.
Except that the primary/secondary notation is already used for the cable arrangment. Currently it's the:
...
Primary Master
Primary Slave
Seconndary Master
Secondary Slave
Tertiary Master
So we should be calling them the Primary Primary drive?
bananas like monkeys.
Here's a test for you. Try using the word "niggardly" in a sentence and see how many thin-skinned feebs decide to tar and feather you for being a racist.
People need to get over their accute desire to be offended at every stupid little thing and just get on with life. And governements, of all sizes, need to stop wasting time and taxpayer money on useless, pointless bullshit and work on real problems.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
There's a difference between political correctness (dumbass term) and using racial slurs. The former is an overreaction to a potential slight, the latter is an attempt to offend.
And yeah, I know it was probably for effect.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Then those Americans are ignorant.
Slavery -- human slavery, I mean, not the machine kind -- is a curse that has afflicted humanity throughout its existence, and continues to do so today. To limit one's viewpoint of the word to a specific period in the history of a young nation is to pretend that the suffering of the (at a guess) tens of millions of slaves throughout history who were not black Americans has no meaning
Two-thirds of my father's family died in the Holocaust, but you don't see me acting as though genocide is something that only happens to Jews.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The team on this project was about half black and half white. I was having an animated discussion with another of the (white) programmers when a couple of the (black) programmers came in. They watched the discussion for a little while. I looked up at them, and one said, "Don't say slave."
"No?" I asked.
"Nuh uh," he replied, with just slightly too straight a face.
So I bet my career: I turned to the other (white) programmer and said, "Fine. So the Massah machine needs to hold record counts in the array so it can..." and everybody cracked up. We discussed terminology a bit, and decided to call the controlling box the "controller" and the indexing boxes the "indexers." About 70% of the folks actually using our application were black, we figured, and not too savvy on computer terminology, so fuck it: we caved, just to be on the polite side.
Moral: we all had a good laugh. Here in Atlanta proper, there are more white than blacks. In state government, there is plenty of minority representation. And we all get along pretty damned well---I was voted the second whitest white boy in the office by the (mostly black) administrative staff (and damn was the whitest white boy pissed).
I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words. Most actual black people can look after themselves, and, having better things to worry about, tend not to give a damn.
This is not my sandwich.
As is web weaver for god's sake. A good change? Ha. A master does not imply evil doings. A martial arts master or a master carpenter generally don't have slaves. Master implies that they the best at what they do. Yes, it also implies authority, but not cruel domination. Gah. People drive me insane. Some of these offended groups are probably the same ones that burn 'inappropriate books.' Pooh on them.
I'd rather have lived a hundred years ago. Except of course, for all my grumbling about rampant political correctness and other hogwash, I'd be much more pissed about the lack of women's suffrage, real racial inequality, and the other issues of the day. The moral? There isn't one really.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
In informal contexts, I always use the singular "they". Fuck, it's been part of the English language for seven centuries. Just because Latin-misinterpreting prescriptive grammarians didn't like it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Basically you sound like you want to use / establish a vocabulary that is guaranteed not to offend anybody in the workplace, ya?
Easy : keep on using your existing vocabulary and just don't hire niggers or bitches. Voila! nobody at the office gets offended, guaranteed!
An alternative, of course, is to expect that all employees work in the existing environment and accept that words may be used that if they really, really wanted to they could twist into totally unintended meanings and be offended by them (ie, Master/Slave hard drive settings, cylinders in automobile settings) - by accepting the existing work environment as it stands ensuring that they (and others like them) are welcome to the workplace now and in the future.
This Politically Correct crap has done nothing towards making work environments better for the 'oppressed' (ie, blacks, latins, women) and has done quite a bit towards making hiring managers very, very biased against hiring any of those and being very, very subtle about working towards that effect. I will give you a 100% written guarantee that none of the above are ever getting past zillions of employment screenings in corporate America, and the hiring managers know better than to admit my true motives in which candidate gets chosen.
They are all totally upset with the direction employment is going in corporate America, and yet they are bringing it on themselves. They scream about not being able to get a job, and yet the ones that did get hired pull this PC shit. Well there we go - can't say they weren't asking for it. Big time.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I think several things need to happen here:
First, I encourage anyone and everyone to write to all the hard disk manufacturers you can think of, and strongly discourage them from changing this naming convention. Politely explain that the entire world should not change because of one person's lack of familiarity with the master/slave relationship of hard drives. (This terminology is actually used in other fields besides hard drives, to denote any mechanism or device in which this relationship of control is found.)
Second, if you've gone as far as doing that, you should consider writing to the county of Los Angeles to let them know how ridiculous and silly their request is.
I do not usually interfere in things like this, or ask anybody to do so, but I strongly believe that this is a frightening trend that is growing in too many areas. For example, a book called "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" by Diane Ravitch gives example after example of things that school textbooks cannot say because they are politically incorrect. If you read this book, you'll eventually ask yourself, "Well, what exactly can you talk about?" That's the problem. If the entire world needs to change each time one person (or a small group of people) is offended by some terminology, then we will eventually live in George Orwell's nightmare.
As other Slashcrackers have noted, soon you won't be able to call a connector male or female, because somebody with an as-yet unknown gender (like an alleged child molester named MICHAEL JACKSON, though it's unlikely you've heard of him) will be offended at that.
This is ridiculous, because the notion that women should be allowed to choose whether or not to wear a dress is a completely Eurocentric philosophy, and is certainly considered offensive to those from more traditional cultures. Such practices are discriminatory to those from a traditional Vietnamese, Korean or Chinese upbringing, where women are expected to wear dresses. This blatantly violates their right to have their own cultural identity.
You see? You can pick any extremist point of view, whether you actually believe it or not, and justify it just as these people have, whether it's liberal or conservative. The pendulum swings both ways, babycakes.
True in formal writing or speech... for now. Check back in a century and I'd bet you'll see the singular "they" accepted. It's easier than formulating a new, concise, elegant approach to "he/she". And rant all you want, but the world is never going back to the default "he".
Nor, IMHO, should it. Language evolves and no language does it better than English. The language expresses the needs of the culture -- if the culture as a whole (or even in large part) decides the old way is inadequate, the language will change accordingly.
Or, to put it succintly, the only languages spoken "perfectly" are dead ones.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Damn, you sure showed bigotry and intolerance in your description and assumptions about this girl. Maybe she misheard and embarrassed herself, but it turns out you are, in fact, an asshole.
Wow. Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on and jumped to conclusions about those.
*SHE* assumed that my friends and I were racists.
*SHE* demonstrated her naivete and hypersensitivity.
*SHE* is the one who started screaming at me.
*SHE* learned that I am, in fact, an asshole. And proud of it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there is not) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as "she", a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say "he-or-she", and "his-or-her". That is easy to do if you do not care about language, but then if you do not care about language you do not deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the "reader" as "he", but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female. As a matter of fact I believe I do, more often than not, think of my readers as female, but that is my personal affair and I'd hate to think that such considerations impinged on how I use my native language
What doesn't surprise me at all is that someone found an (arbitrary) word to be offended with. Happens all the time. What does surprise me (or hmm, maybe it doesn't) is that this was picked up by some committee and acted upon officially. Where does it end?
We (here in Holland) live in a very diverse culture, with lots of different people crammed into a tiny country. Anything you do or say is bound to offend someone else. Politicians here preach tolerance until we're sick of it... they think being tolerant of other cultures means to adapt yourself so that you will not offend members of those other cultures. Not only is that impossible, but one cannot help but notice that this requirement to adapt is somehow never applied to the minority groups. Ie. I cannot say anything offensive about Muslems, Jews or other minorites (just an example!), but if they do or say something that offends me, I'm called racist or intolerant if I comment on it, and I will be sternly reminded that I 'should respect their culture'.
Tolerance is a two-way street, people. On the one hand, you should be aware of the fact that some things you find normal are going to piss other people off, and you try (within reason) to minimise that. But on the other hand, you (and especially the minorities and politicians) should accept that other groups will do things that'll offend you. Rather than expecting everyone to change to suit your world view, accept that you'll be offended from time to time and do not make a big deal out of it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Plants don't have central nervous systems. Plants don't feel harm.
:)
Your supposition doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion. Many organisms do not have central nervous systems but do respond to stimuli that are harmful to them.
YOU are starving your fellow man.
Are you accusing me of eating someone else's steak?
A quick look at the human physiology (eye placement for binocular vision, types of teeth in the jaw - canines and incisors as well as molars and bicuspids, etc.) all indicate that humans are omnivorous by design. That means that humans were designed to eat both "meat" and "veggies". The choice of whether or not to eat from either classification of food is just that - a choice - because you *are* designed to take from both categories of foods, regardless if you like that fact or not.
I wonder what the vegetarian community thinks of the Atkins Diet