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

if they knew EAN Codes

[phoenix123]

then they'll froze in horror: UPC/EAN barcodes use symbol "6" as a designator for stop, end and block separator. That way "6" is never used as a numerical part or "payload" in the code - it exists only in the coded stripe form: (6)block1(6)block2(6)

As todays barcodes consist of 2 blocks, practically every barcode carries the "6-6-6" on it.

Same thing: the inventors tried to avoid any "six"="sex"-references and "*666*"-occurances. Of course this means every product bears the mark of the beast as described in the bible meaning the end is near.

No joke, try to find a human-readable number 6 on a barcode :)

Harrr harr the end is nigh!!!1!!!11 :)

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

[ShieldW0lf]

as discrimination based upon race, gender, or physical condition has become less socially acceptable, we began to frown upon the use of pejorative terms associated with race

Um, does anyone else think that referring to master and slave as perjorative terms associated with race is MUCH more offensive than using the terms to refer to hard drives?

Re:Oh come on

[Jack Auf]

Well, at least in Florida, yes.

Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida secretary of state Kathleen Harris illegally removed tens of thousands of eligible Democratic voters from the voting rolls by wrongly claiming they were felons, who Jeb Bush declared are not allowed to vote. In fact virtually none were felons, and anyway Bush was wrong: reformed felons can vote in Florida. Why did they do it? A large percentage of the people targetted by Bush and Harris were Democrats. What they did was against Florida election laws and the election officials had informed they were breaking those laws. But to ensure that Democrats wouldn't vote, Harris then also avoided counting over 100,000 ballots from mainly black-dominated (usually Democratic) counties. The end result of this caper was Jeb's brother G.W. Bush being wrongly declared President, and the democratic process being subverted.

Harris and the Bushes were aided in their misdoings by the company that had been contracted to provide "scrub lists", which identify which citizens aren't allowed to vote--this company it turns out made essentially no effort to verify that people on the lists they were providing were not allowed to vote, and made apparently deliberate errors in misidentifying voters, such as wrongly matching a hypothetical felon who recently moved to FL from Georgia named Eric J Jones to Floridian non-felon Erica L Jones, preventing Erica from voting. Social security numbers were not used for matching. Although the Floida legislature has since passed a law requiring that Harris not use a private company to produce scrub lists, she has deliberately broken that law and hired a company anyway.

Source: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, by investigative reporter Greg Palast.