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."

Comments

Automobile clutches too

[natpoor]

The clutch assembly in cars have a master and a slave cylinder (well I'm not an expert, but at least manuals do).

Mine went out once. You can't engage the clutch anymore!

Insert snarky remark about oppressing the auto industry here.

I have an idea.

[Raven42rac]

How about balance your fucking budget, THEN worry about stupid shit like this.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[Jhon]

They've got all the ideas they need. Our city government (I live in LA) has gone over the deep end. This is worse than their ban on "Lap Dances" at the local "mens clubs". The same solution used by the "Gentleman's Clubs" should work. Get enough signatures on a petition to force a ballot measure and FORCE the City Council to either spend dozens of millions of dollars to put it up for a vote or STFU about the issue.

Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.

Thank God for the referendum.

Life Imitates Jokes

[noddyholder]

I've joked about this a few times at work when the (military) instructors I work with discuss the latest in command directed PC nuttiness. They can't use the term cockpit, it's a flight deck. Neither can they say white board or black board. Those are now officially marker boards and chalk boards. I used to joke that we can't use master/slave anymore due to a NAACP lawsuit against the computer industry. Guess it ain't a joke anymore.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[Zeinfeld]

When will it be okay to use the word 'slave'? It has a fairly distinct meaning. Should the possible offence, in this case, almost non-existent, cause the word to be abolished altogether because of what people connote the word with?

The terminology in question is actually inacurate. There is no sense in which the 'master' drive in an IDE configuration controls or even sends commands to the slave. The drives appear in the BIOS as number 0 and 1. The only drive that is privilleged is drive 0, connector 0 which by convention is the master boot drive, but that is merely a convention, it could easily be configurable in the Bios.

As to the offense issue, it could be offensive if we still had a 'bring back slavery' movement or we had pro-slavery members of congress making coded references.

We don't have that for slavery but we still have that for segregation. Trent Lott is no longer Majority leader but he still serves in Congress and there are quite a few Republicans who play games that pander to racism and speak favorably of crypto-racist causes and crypto-racist groups. Nobody would dare praise the KKK these days, but the CCC, nudge, wink, geddit?

The US is still a country where black voters can be kept off the ballot through dishonesty, or do you think it a coincidence that the company chosen by Katherine Harris to purge the voter rolls of convicted fellons disqualified tens of thousands of legitimate qualified voters, most of whom just happened to be black? Is it coincidence that certain local police forced 'just happened' to mount roadblocks on roads that connected mostly black townships and the polls?

Of course these are not coincidences, the southern strategy is not dead. That is why at the next election we are going to be organizing monitoring groups to make sure that these election tactics cannot be repeated. We will be using the Internet to broadcast alerts about roadblocks, and we will be getting press and camera crews direct to the scene.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[eblum]

And how should we refer to "Slavery abolition and Emancipation"?

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[Anonymous Coward]

> Will we not be able to have male and female ends

Funny you should mention that. When I was in college (early 90s) I worked in the computer labs. A rather hard-core feminist coworker heard me talking about male/female cable plugs. I told her it was an industry term, and what else can we call them? She insisted it'd be better to use terms like "plug" and "receptacle". I wonder if she works for LA County? :-)

Fed up with PC speak?

[pyite]

Orwell wrote an interesting piece entitled Politics and the English Language which shows how much more concerned people are with how things are said than successfully delivering the actual content of the message. It's an interesting read, check it out.

This isn't new.

[kaszeta]

Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.

Strangely, I didn't thin this was a farce, since I've lived through exactly this nonsense once before.

The year was 1993, and I was working as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in their High Flux Isotope Reactor. While I was there we got visited by the Secretary of Energy (Hazel O'Leary) and her "Science Advisor" Jim Hall (who later went on to chair the NTSB). The tour was notable for two reasons:

1. Jim Hall made a comment about how he was surprised that spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactor looked almost exactly like the new ones (aside from the inner and outer assemblies fresh out of the reactor, which were still glowing), since he thought "they'd look all black, like burnt wood."
2. A week later we got an official memo from Jim Hall, mentioning that during the visit "Hazel was disturbed by the use of the phrase 'Master/Slave Manipulator'" and suggested that "we shouldn't use that phrase anymore." I've still got a copy of this memo somewhere (along with the "radioactive frog" memo of some notoriety), if I find it I'll post a link to a scan as a followup.

Much lunchtime discussion over the next week resulted in a variety of alternative terminologies, including "master/bitch", "pimp/hoe", and "indentured servant." The last of these actually made it into some drawings, and the Powers That Be were not amused.

So no, I'm not surprised. Not one bit.

One example is one too many

[Hogwash McFly]

Being a resident of England (or should I say 'United Kingdom' in order not to alienate my Irish/Welsh/Scottish compatriates?) I have seen more than a lions share of political correctness. It seems like every week that I open up the newspaper to find a half amusing/half irritating article written about a particular group of people who seem to have a beef with the way they are 'labelled'.

Example Old Age Pensiors (OAPs) - 'We are offended by the name given us and see it as ageist. Therefore we would like to be known as Senior Citizens' (um, cause that doesn't refer to your age?)

I'm sure everyone out there in /.dom has has experienced the mailman/mailperson debacle.(milkman, garbage man etc. are all also valid)
Hey while we're at it, why not plurally refer to ourselves as Personkind! One small step for a person, one person-of-irregular-height leap for Personkind!

And it doesn't stop at there! A school in this banned sportsday because it is deemed as unfair to those who don't win. Aww boohoo so your little snotty kid lost the egg and spoon race, we better give 'em all a medal, cause 'EVERYONE'S A WINNER!'

Mothercare have, or were going to, release an updated version of Humpty Dumpty in which the poor egg shaped fellow was put back together and lived happily ever after in order to protect children from a perilous dilemma. I know I'm taking this political correctness thread off on a bit of a mollycoddle tangent, but they're all related to one thing - The Bubble Wrapped Society.

Re:Female/Male next?

[�nertia]

Beleive it or not but use of gendered language is actually quite influencial on how we perceive attributes and sterotypes of technology to be. Quite alot of people have commented on the use of blatant sexual metaphors in egineering sciences, this is an old issue. And if you look through any psychology journal on language you will no doubt find some studies on this practice. A good book on metaphor which tells of how they serve to highlight or hide information depending on source and target domains is Lakoff & Johnsons, 1980 seminal work entitled metaphors we live by.

The master slave argument is bound to elicit pretty strong feeling in many subgroups, just because the majority of readers on slashdot are white males, does not mean that everyone shares the same ambivilence or distance from such issues as apartheid and racism. I doubt calling an interface a trade center jack, because it contains 2 collapsable cicuits triggered, by a fast moving taliban controler, would receive the ambivilence that the master/slave connector does. Just remember that for some people the connections are closer to home.

Worlds have power, but that power is very dependant on who is looking.

Re:My response to the county

[Iceparr0t]

"whoever came up with this term (I betcha it was a white guy) probably thought it was cute." This is exactly the problem. There is no reason that just because somebody decided to call something master and slave, to define the relationship between the drives, means that that person was in anyway refering directly to American Slavery. Those terms have been around for thousands of years, well predating our own country. Those two things are WORDS that have several MEANINGS. They chose those words to decribe a situation which seemed to follow that relationship. Every useage of these words does not in anyway refer to the enslavement of millions of Africans. "Imagine if the "Trashcan" on your desktop were named "Auschwitz" by some clever computer scientist" That is quite a stretch to go to that from Master/Slave. Auschwitz can only really bring up one meaning, the slaugtering of the Jews (who by, were oppressed horribly for thousands of years, compared to the relatively short time in which Slavery existed in the US, and no I'm not Jewish, I just know a little about history). "and you are not at all bothered by the Cleveland Indians mascot". Although I am not bothered by those teams, I understand that somebody who is a Native American Indian could take offense. Again however, those teams mascots are direct references to a certain set of people, where the terms Master and Slave are about as general as White and Black. I

This happened in 1985 (maybe early 1986)

[jmcnamera]

I was just out of school at Data General (minicomputers) in 1985 and we were told to stop calling the paired CPU's for a fault tolerant system master-slave.

We started calling it Father-Son, but someone complained again so soon it was Mother-Daughter.

Fortunately, the FT portion of the project was cancelled and we were able to get on with things.

Frankly, I thought master-slave was obnoxious. However it just kept going, there were other names as well that kept getting squashed.

Not that bad...

[xSquaredAdmin]

LA County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references.

They said vendors who are working with the county, not all vendors in the county.

Truth is stranger than fiction

[unassimilatible]

Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered?

Courtesy of yesterday's opinionjournal.com Best of the Web Today (which also reported on the master/slave controversy):

Meanwhile, the Chicago Maroon reports the University of Chicago is facing a problem with students who aren't potty-trained. Nate Claxton, who appeared on a panel at the university's Center for Gender Studies, said that, in the Maroon's words, he "knew people who had contracted bladder infections because choosing a gender bathroom bothered them so much that they did not go to the bathroom all day." Here are some more highlights from the panel:

Members of Feminist Majority, Queers & Associates, and the Center for Gender Studies organized the panel as part of the Coalition for a Queer Safe Campus. "Going to the bathroom is a moment where definition is very important in choosing a door," said Mary Anne Case, one of the panelists.

She pointed out that many women's restrooms have a caricature of a person in a dress on it. "Going into it implies that we are willing to be associated with that image. There are only two [images] to choose from. This moment involves an act of self-labeling."

The feminists, "queers" and gender studiers want unisex bathrooms:

Ana Minyan, the moderator of the panel, said that bathrooms will be called gender-neutral, rather than co-ed, because, "this terminology is generally used to refer to two sexes while the gender-neutral tends to be associated with more diversity and fluidity within the sex-gender continuum. As our aim is to make everyone, no matter what their gender and/or sexual persona is, more comfortable, we are using the term gender-neutral."

One Roger Simon thinks it's a great idea: "I believe that if all parts of the body were treated equally, and there was not so much emphasis on genitalia, than people could move beyond gender differences and grow mentally and socially." Well, call us small-minded, but the idea of going to the bathroom and having a girl at the next urinal doesn't exactly put us at ease.

Political correctness, like other totalitarian ideologies, demands absolute purity.
-- James Taranto

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[misterplow]

One Roger Simon thinks it's a great idea: "I believe that if all parts of the body were treated equally, and there was not so much emphasis on genitalia, than people could move beyond gender differences and grow mentally and socially." Well, call us small-minded, but the idea of going to the bathroom and having a girl at the next urinal doesn't exactly put us at ease.

In Japan (and probably other countries in at least Asia . . ) it is common for non-residential toilet facilities to be cleaned throughout the day by elderly women. The "girl at the next urinal" scenario is a lot more common than you might think. Took a while to get used to it, but now I don't even think (or look) twice. Only once did a cleaning woman come in who seemed to be somewhat young (which time made me pause for a second, to be honest)

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a current UofC student who is a straight male and only heard about this through the newspaper.
All they want is to switch a couple of bathrooms in two buildings to not be male/female. We already have many non-sex bathrooms in dorms because we don't care who we are using the bathroom next to. These bathrooms were made non-sex because everyone in those dorms voted for them to not have an assigned sex. This way instead of walking down the hall to use the bathroom, you can use the one across from your room. So, does making a few more non-sex bathrooms bother most students?
No.
And if it makes someone else's life easier, all the better. Remember they are only talking about a few bathrooms to make a portion of the population more comfortable. Why not?

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[benja]

This is a real problem for real people. Care to explain what is so strange about it?

Although I find it surprising that they would emphasize the self-labeling aspect so much and the problem of others' reactions so little, at least in the quoted excerpt. When you risk violence or verbal abuse because of being "in the wrong bathroom," that's an even bigger problem than having to label yourself "woman" or "man." Better Than Choclate has a scene illustrating that very well. Maybe it's not so much of a problem in a University setting. One would hope...

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[Reziac]

Was recently at a new theater where there were restrooms labled "women" (with the standard stylized "woman in a dress" graphic) and "family" (with stylized graphics of a man, a woman, and a child all holding hands), but far as I saw, none labeled "men". ???!!

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

[ziggr]

A Woman's Guide on How to Pee Standing

The girl at the next urinal is indeed a lot more common than you think.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[Zeinfeld]

The Civilian Conservation Corps.?

Concerned Citizens Councils. They had a similar relationship to the KKK that Sinn Fein has to the IRA. They are basically two sides to the same coin, the public acceptable face is used for recruiting and the other side of the coin does the threats and murder.

BTW The reason why Senator Byrd is not attacked by Democrats or the NAACP for having been a member of the KKK is that 1) it is now a VERY long time ago and 2) he has publicly and repeatedly repudiated both the KKK in particular and the idea of racism. Compare this to Senators Thurmond and Helms, neither of whom ever repudiated their seggregationist positions, they merely downplayed them.

As for the reason why the Democrats and Republicans changed places? It was a short term political gambit by Nixon. In the aftermath of the civil rights act Nixon launched the 'southern strategy'. This was centered on wellcoming segregationists into the Republican party. The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists.

I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party. There are not too many homophobes, racists and other bigots in the 21 to 40 age group.

It's defined in the Dictionary!

[prozac79]

Go to Merriam-Webster Online and lookup "slave" in the dictionary. You will see that one of the technical definitions of "slave" is "a device (as the printer of a computer) that is directly responsive to another". This is one of the official meanings people! Do we now need to change it and append "except in L.A. where someone who didn't know anything about computers was offended for no reason".

And besides, what is wrong with the words "slave" and "master"? Yes, slavery itself is wrong, but the word itself is not. It does not refer to a specific race, creed, religion, etc. There are plenty of words that are used in our language that could have a bad connotation if taken in the wrong context. If "slave" is wrong in a computer context, then her are some other things that are not correct:

• Mouse: vermin that spreads disease so that has to be renamed to "x/y coordinate changer"
• Joystick: sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "gamer's handle"
• Motherboard: too much bias toward a certain gender so that has to be renamed to "parentboard"
• Hard Drive: again, sexual connotations so that has to be renamed to "magnetic storage device".

Any use of these old words will result in immediate imprisonment and fines.
-prozac79
"Making email fun again, one letter at a time"

Take a note from Depeche Mode...

[BrynM]

Rename it "Master and Servant".

I can't laugh at this stuff anymore

[HarveyBirdman]

The saddest part is that no one in any position with any influence or power will stand up against things like this. Everyone, including the vendors, will bend over and take it hard and long. The marching morons will forever triumph as long as ideology rules the mind of humanity.

We can make fun of it all day here on Slashdot, but nothing will be done about it. The idiots will win this one, just like they win all the others.

It's far past the point of not being funny anymore.

Re:Colored Paper and Manholes

[theonetruekeebler]

The whole "white paper"/"colored paper" thing happened at Harvard University around then, too. Someone scribbled out "colored paper" and wrote "paper of color." You'll recall that "person of color" was one of the first pitiful late-1980's PC stab at fucking up everything.

I can't believe the reponse to this...

[badmammajamma]

People are actually surprised by this??

This is nothing. Many years ago IBM banned use of the term "motherboard" since it could be considered offensive to some mothers. Instead they call them "mainboards." They also won't use the graphic of a tree in an icon becuase some Japanese might consider it offensive since the tree could look too much like a mushroom cloud.

Corporate America has been leading the way for political correctness for many years. Apparently some of you didn't get the memo.

That goes for software too, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I quote from the letter sent by LA County (emphasis mine):

As such, it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.

I suppose LA County considers text displayed in software output, documentation or source code subject to the same standard? Even if the term "services" doesn't specifically refer to software, this is probably their opinion anyway. Neither do I see any exceptions for suppliers of either "free" or "open source" software. Master/slave domain name servers, anyone?

As an interrim solution, pending the removal of any offensive language from your code, I suggest adding a clause to the software license agreement exempting LA County administration from using it. If they don't want to do business with you, it's their choice.

Then, when they still end up using your software after having failed to read the license, and contact you to complain about your references to master/slave relationships, make sure to remind them about the DMCA and unlicensed software.

ran into this at work recently

[Kraken137]

in our case, a member of the team was giving a presentation explaining how our LDAP servers were set up to allow for load balancing and failover. the presentation referred to the master and slave LDAP servers. a member of the audience told him that was offensive to her, and demanded that they cease using those terms.

god people piss me off.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[nathanh]

For what it's worth, I find it interesting that folks always assume this is a racial (specifically, about black slaves) issue. Slavery has been around for millenia, as anything from a way to pay off a debt (fairly rare, and different from indentured servants) to the penalty for losing a battle in war.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't until your comment that I realised anybody was talking about racial slavery (specifically, black slaves). I suppose that's the benefit of not being educated in an American environment. I assumed the LA County official was simply outraged at the concept of slavery, not the racial implications of American slavery.

Re:Singular They - Insightful my ass

[dspeyer]

Now what I wonder about is how will we conjugate it?

At present, most people conjugate verbs following a singular "they" with the plural forms, for greater euphony. I would much rather it go the other way -- singular conjugations could de-ambigouize the singular they. After all, very few English verbs have the same singular and plural forms in the third person (well, not in the present, anyway)

It would also be logically consistant. Then it would really be a matter of a single word taking on a new meaning, a common phenomenon which all linguists accept, and not a matter of adding further convolutions to English grammer. Does anyone really want their grandchildren to have to memorize another exception?

Re:BigBlockMopar in University...

[BigBlockMopar]

I'm pretty sure we're hearing the version you *wish* you had said after thinking about it later.

Of course! But I still got to call her ignorant, I still welcomed her to contact the Dean of Engineering, and I still made fun of her wooden sandals and pursuit of an arts degree.

Re:Oh, that's nothing...in San Francisco..

[Lucky_Norseman]

The really scary part is that "I'm just kidding. I hope no one believes this." was necessary.
It could actually happen. Unless we start electing people who are closer connected to reality.

It wasn't Lenin's wit

[varjag]

What is clear however is that they seem to be bringing us a sort of fusion McCarthyism, part Lenin (originator of the line 'whoever is not for us is against us')..

The phrase was coined by Jesus Christ.

Yes, I was shocked too when I first encountered it in New Testament. "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad." Matthew 12:30.

You wouldn't find this particular phrase quoted much, though.

Re:It wasn't Lenin's wit

[WWWWolf]

You wouldn't find this particular phrase quoted much, though.

But misunderstood even more, just like a lot of the Bible. It is certainly very easy to take severely out of context. Jesus is referring to unity in spiritual matters, in the grander scheme of Good versus Evil, God versus Beelzebub. He is saying he cannot possibly be with Beelzebub if he is capable of exorcising his devils - such thing would mean disarray among Beelzebub's ranks. Likewise, he points out, you are either with God or you are with Beelzebub, and since Jesus is with the good guys, people should follow him.

In spiritual matters, Christianity seems rather black and white: There is Good and there is Evil. You're either, but you can't be both. This is what Jesus refers to with his "he that is not with me is against me".

Likewise, and this is important part - he points out it won't do much good or bad to criticise him ("whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him") - he's just here doing miracle stuff and preaching, too bad if you don't believe him. But to go against the Holy Spirit, against the things Jesus talks of, means you're certainly not a good person. ("but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.") There is a certain level of difference between saying "Jesus was not worth listening" and "Everything that is good and holy must go". Former is ignorance and fear, latter is a good example of evil thoughts.

Re:My response to the county

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Indeed. It's happening to Palestinians today too.

Re:Taking action

[oshy]

If companies dont change then there will be no more stupid items like this being spread arround as the ones doing so wont have any usable hard disks or cable connectors.

If you want some non-PC terms, try looking at the offshore oil drilling industry.

eg: Rat hole, Dog house and Cow c*nt.

Heres some more

[t_allardyce]

GIMP
Thin client
FAT
Raster
Brute force
a blind system

and my favourite:
finger me for my number

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

[Experiment 626]

The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists. I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party.

I disagree. I think that on the whole, if you were to take a sampling across the political spectrum and ask whether people should be treated the same regardless of their race or color, you would get a lot more "yes" replies from Republicans. Democrats, on the other hand, would reject this philosophy in favor of an affirmative-action approach, swinging the pendulum of discrimination the other way instead of putting it behind us once and for all. Unfortunately for them, I think the former position has broader (though perhaps less vocal) support among mainstream voters.

So if by "racists" you mean Nazis and Klan members, then perhaps they do vote Republican, but if you look at racism in the broader sense of basing the treatment and opportunities you give to people on the color of their skin, then the Democratic party would certainly be the larger bastion for racism in America.