No, I think the next paragraph makes their intentions clear: "Individual carriers would determine whether subscribers would have to pay to be unlisted."
I wish someone would explain to me why I have to pay someone NOT to include my name (and why I pay every month).
> He was responsible for driving through the senate the key appropriations leading to the creation of the internet.
Really? Which bill was that? Considering that he wasn't even elected to Congress until 1977, I find this hard to believe.
While it's certainly true that he never said that he "invented" it, his actual claim that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" is spurious.
Please provide me with one single bill that he, as a Congressman, Senator, or even VP, authored or provided leadership over that created or funded any fundamental aspect of the internet.
What if architects did the same thing? Build dynamite into a building so if they don't get paid, they can just take the law into their own hands and BOOM...
So, because Galileo was excommunicated for heresy (and NOT because he was following the scientific method), anyone who preaches a pseudo-science can now claim that people are not treating them fairly either. Just remember, while they laughed at Edison and Marcconi, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Or you can read about what many think is real science, polygraphy.
There may, in fact, be a way to explore psychology in an empirical and scientfic manner. But I don't think we're anywhere near that stage yet, and I am bothered by the notion that people's livelihoods are affected by the latest fads in psychology.
Even, assuming we reach the point where one can be plugged into a machine that can empirically measure our worth as humans, I would hope that such uses would be outlawed for any purposes other than treatment of individuals. I don't want to live in Gattaca or Huxley's Brave New World.
* Humorous only because they didn't happen to me. They're actually quite sad and frightening.
As long as your employer agrees, that's fine. However, if I decided that taking home a few computers was a fair perk for me sitting in an office all dayt and I did so without my employer's consent, I would be stealing.
My employer does explicitly allow me to keep my miles.
> a world where the employer has the right to refuse me a job based on the fact that I can't do it properly.
I guess we're still pretending that there is some real science behind these tests. In the original poster's case, he was not considered at all because of his test score. What if, objectively, he had more work experience and education and had a lower salary demand than the candidate that was ultimately selected for the job?
And, as I've said before, what if we can scientfically determine that white men best work in an environment without anyone who is not also a white man. Even if that is true, we live in a society that has developed a social conscience and does not tolerate such discrimination. I can not see any difference between your "psychological profile" and your race, gender or physical disabilities.
Now I can imagine that there are some jobs that do require certain characteristics. A moving company would be justified in not hiring a quadraplegic to a position of moving boxes around. But you're going to have a MUCH harder time convincing me that an introvert is incapable of a job that involves human interaction. In fact, I would think you would have an easier time convincing a jury that your psychological profiling was nothing but a facade for illegal discrimination.
> would they rather hire the exuberant, extroverted people person...
Can he count change as well as I can? Does he have any experience? Will he try as hard as I will? Are you sure he's not going to spend too much time chatting with one customer and ignoring the next person in line?
> If they're programming, but they hate it, and want to be an artist, should I really hire them to be a programmer?
If they are qualified to do the job, yes, you should.
> The merits' can and should include things like 'will they get along with the rest of the team'...
And if the rest of the team happen to spend their Saturdays at KKK meetings, do you feel justified in excluding minorities?
> Somebody like me, for example, an INTP probably shouldn't be hired for a marketing job.
If you are qualified and are seeking the job, you have an equal right to be considered for that position. In todays economy, do you really think that everyone is going to get their ideal job?
I love my job. I'm sometimes surprised that I don't have to pay my employer to do what I do. But if I were laid off and could not find a similar job, I would do any job that I needed to support myself and my family, even if that means working at McDonalds. I can guarantee you that I would NOT be happy in my work, but I would be capable of doing all that is required.
But you're proposing a world where I have no right to accept a job that I would be unhappy at.
> Somebody like me, for example, an INTP probably shouldn't be hired for a marketing job.
Nevertheless, if the marketing job paid $200K and the INTP job paid $20K, you may be willing to do that job. You have a right to be equally considered for the job.
Interesting also that the INTP site uses a picture of Einstein. I wonder if he was pyschologically suited to working in a patent office?
As for whether or not an INTP can do well in marketing, the "Famous INTPs" include lots of politicians. I would think a politician is perfectly suited to marketing...
SATs are also not the sole criteria for getting into a school (and, partly due to the acknowledged bias, are becoming less important). In the original posters case, he was never evaluated as an individual. No interview was allowed because of his score.
If there is a racial/gender bias in this test and the test alone can keep you from employment, the company is discriminating.
I'm surprised that my original comment was marked as flaimbait. I think my analogy was perfectly apt and I'm very curious how one can justify discriminating on an employee because he doesn't fit the correct psychological profile.
Let me seperate my objection to this form a discrimination from the notion that this is anything but pseudo-science. For the sake of argument, I will pretend that their is some objective aspect to these tests.
Is a company justified and picking only a certain personality profile for employment (regardless of what that profile may be)?
I know where I work the Legal department has told us we can't ask women if they plan to get pregnant. An employer might well be justified in not wanting such candidates. After all, pregnant women are likely to take advantage of the Federal laws that allow them to take leave for a number of weeks without losing their jobs. As an employer, I might be justified in not wanting to waste my time training someone who isn't going to stay in the workforce. Women, statistically speaking, are more likely to abandon their careers for family.
> you are essentially allowed to do anything you want
This is not the way our Legal department understands things. We our only allowed to ask candidates questions relating to their qualifications to do the work.
I also wonder what will happen if someone does a study and finds that males and females or different minority categories tend to have different scores on these tests. I would be shocked if there was not some correlation between race/gender and various subjective personality profiles. We already know that there is a cultural bias in the SATs.
It might be nice if employees socialized more outside of work. That would likely lead to getting along better at work. Nevertheless, we can NOT hire an employee based on what he indicates he will do after hours, be it Church on Sunday or Civil Rights demonstrations on Saturday.
If you think it's ok to hire only nerds because they all think and act alike, how is this different than only hiring Republicans?
Clearly you're not. I looked over the sample OAD test and if you're using it in any way as a basis for hiring, you are hiring people for something beyond how well qualified they are for the job.
How does one's satisfaction of their current job (or any psychological profile) alter their qualification to work for you?
> We usually end up rejecting all the candidates based on their interview, that the tests say we should reject anyway.
Have you ever thought of making your interview decision before looking at the test results? If you know going into the interview that they "failed", that knowledge is likely altering your perception of them during the interview.
From a scientific point of view, it would also be interesting to compare the performance of employees who were hired (regardless of test results), and see if those that failed actually do better.
I also wonder if there is a gender/racial bias in the test results. If so, you're likely setting yourself up for a discrimination lawsuit. At my place of work, they make us go to training before we are allowed to interview candidates. The emphasis in the training is on the fact that we can only ask candidates questions that relate to their job. I don't think the lawyers would like us asking candidates if they are "Appreciative in their current job," as that has NOTHING to do with whether or not they are qualified to perform the job that I am offering.
A fine example of an illegal question from King of the Hill:
Hank: We're all Christians around here. How 'bout you?
Correct. NY and CT no longer outlaw detectors. Though I thought I had heard otherwise, DC also appears to continue to outlaw them along with VA. They certainly don't put up signs like VA does.
http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/radar4.htm l
I remember seeing (in News of the Weird, I think) about some local cop that was taking criminals and putting their hands on a copy machine and claiming that it was a polygraph. He loaded the paper try with pages with "He's Lying" pre-printed on them. He'd ask you a question, hit the copy button, and there would be a page with an image of your hand and "He's Lying" written on it.
He apparently got a few confessions this way, but I believe they were overturned.
Anyways, let's not pretend that there's anything beyond Gilligan's Island science by calling them "polygraphs". They're lie detectors.
Except that the labels tend to bill the artists for things like production and promotion and tour support. So while the artist may earn $800,000 from album sales, they wind up owing the label a million.
The whole Dmitry Sklyarov affair was because he wrote a program to trivially break Adobe's DRM. The document was "encrypted", but before viewing it on the screen, it was decrypted.
DeCSS was an attempt at DRM. DVD's contain encrypted data (and LOTS of it). The problem is, before you can see it, your player has to decrypt it.
To hear Hollywood tell the story, they believed that this was going to stop piracy and that DeCSS has cost them billions of dollars. The fact is, it wasn't the person that cracked DeCSS that cost them money, it was the person that convinced them that the content could actually be secured that cost them...
Encryption is useful for storing and transmitting information where a hostile person might be able to intercept the document, but if you plan to give the document to someone and allow them to view it, they will have to decrypt it.
As for using DRM to let people know that a document can't be copied, we have our own solution around here to let people know what they can copy. We put a line across the top of each page that states the documents Classification. Even then, people sometimes forget to put that on their printouts. I can't imagine that DRM will somehow make the users incapable of forgetting to set their permissions appropriately.
> How does finding holes in a system automatically make that system "not work"?
We're talking about the security equivalent of putting up a sign that says "please don't rob me". It is so trivial to get around that it's going to cause more problems than it could possibly solve. The biggest problem I can see is companies that will actually BELIEVE that it will work and will trust MS to keep their documents secure instead of those pesky policies and background checks and NDAs.
With music files, I can vaguely imagine that DRM might make perfect digital copies enough of a hassle that a there may be a slightly smaller number of illicit copies circulating. But internal memos and Word docs don't even need remotely perfect copies and it will always be trivial to, for example, read such a document aloud.
Further, I can imagine LOTS of scenarios where this will make life a hassle for honest and trustworthy users. I get a fair number of perfectly innocent and non-sensitive emails that can't be read from the Lotus Notes IMAP server because the user set "always encrypt" as their default.
I wonder how many calls tech support will get from people who can't print documents that they authored because they didn't understand the permissions that they set.
I usually use Open Office to read Word docs sent to me. I imagine that DRM will be the end of that. That, from MS's standpoint, is about the only real reason to pursue this.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think the next paragraph makes their intentions clear: "Individual carriers would determine whether subscribers would have to pay to be unlisted."
I wish someone would explain to me why I have to pay someone NOT to include my name (and why I pay every month).
> He was responsible for driving through the senate the key appropriations leading to the creation of the internet.
Really? Which bill was that? Considering that he wasn't even elected to Congress until 1977, I find this hard to believe.
While it's certainly true that he never said that he "invented" it, his actual claim that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" is spurious.
Please provide me with one single bill that he, as a Congressman, Senator, or even VP, authored or provided leadership over that created or funded any fundamental aspect of the internet.
I almost believed you until someone else told the same story, but not in first person. Then I found the urban legend on snopes...
What if architects did the same thing? Build dynamite into a building so if they don't get paid, they can just take the law into their own hands and BOOM...
Phrenology was once also accepted as a science.
Here's a site with lots of humorous* examples of the misuse of psychological tests.
Or you can read about what many think is real science, polygraphy.
There may, in fact, be a way to explore psychology in an empirical and scientfic manner. But I don't think we're anywhere near that stage yet, and I am bothered by the notion that people's livelihoods are affected by the latest fads in psychology.
Even, assuming we reach the point where one can be plugged into a machine that can empirically measure our worth as humans, I would hope that such uses would be outlawed for any purposes other than treatment of individuals. I don't want to live in Gattaca or Huxley's Brave New World.
* Humorous only because they didn't happen to me. They're actually quite sad and frightening.
> Miles are a very appropriate perk ...
As long as your employer agrees, that's fine. However, if I decided that taking home a few computers was a fair perk for me sitting in an office all dayt and I did so without my employer's consent, I would be stealing.
My employer does explicitly allow me to keep my miles.
> a world where the employer has the right to refuse me a job based on the fact that I can't do it properly.
I guess we're still pretending that there is some real science behind these tests. In the original poster's case, he was not considered at all because of his test score. What if, objectively, he had more work experience and education and had a lower salary demand than the candidate that was ultimately selected for the job?
And, as I've said before, what if we can scientfically determine that white men best work in an environment without anyone who is not also a white man. Even if that is true, we live in a society that has developed a social conscience and does not tolerate such discrimination. I can not see any difference between your "psychological profile" and your race, gender or physical disabilities.
Now I can imagine that there are some jobs that do require certain characteristics. A moving company would be justified in not hiring a quadraplegic to a position of moving boxes around. But you're going to have a MUCH harder time convincing me that an introvert is incapable of a job that involves human interaction. In fact, I would think you would have an easier time convincing a jury that your psychological profiling was nothing but a facade for illegal discrimination.
> would they rather hire the exuberant, extroverted people person...
Can he count change as well as I can? Does he have any experience? Will he try as hard as I will? Are you sure he's not going to spend too much time chatting with one customer and ignoring the next person in line?
> If they're programming, but they hate it, and want to be an artist, should I really hire them to be a programmer?
If they are qualified to do the job, yes, you should.
> The merits' can and should include things like 'will they get along with the rest of the team'...
And if the rest of the team happen to spend their Saturdays at KKK meetings, do you feel justified in excluding minorities?
> Somebody like me, for example, an INTP probably shouldn't be hired for a marketing job.
If you are qualified and are seeking the job, you have an equal right to be considered for that position. In todays economy, do you really think that everyone is going to get their ideal job?
I love my job. I'm sometimes surprised that I don't have to pay my employer to do what I do. But if I were laid off and could not find a similar job, I would do any job that I needed to support myself and my family, even if that means working at McDonalds. I can guarantee you that I would NOT be happy in my work, but I would be capable of doing all that is required.
But you're proposing a world where I have no right to accept a job that I would be unhappy at.
> Somebody like me, for example, an INTP probably shouldn't be hired for a marketing job.
Nevertheless, if the marketing job paid $200K and the INTP job paid $20K, you may be willing to do that job. You have a right to be equally considered for the job.
Interesting also that the INTP site uses a picture of Einstein. I wonder if he was pyschologically suited to working in a patent office?
As for whether or not an INTP can do well in marketing, the "Famous INTPs" include lots of politicians. I would think a politician is perfectly suited to marketing...
SATs are also not the sole criteria for getting into a school (and, partly due to the acknowledged bias, are becoming less important). In the original posters case, he was never evaluated as an individual. No interview was allowed because of his score.
If there is a racial/gender bias in this test and the test alone can keep you from employment, the company is discriminating.
> you are better off hiring women ...
Which is just as illegal as only hiring men.
I'm surprised that my original comment was marked as flaimbait. I think my analogy was perfectly apt and I'm very curious how one can justify discriminating on an employee because he doesn't fit the correct psychological profile.
Let me seperate my objection to this form a discrimination from the notion that this is anything but pseudo-science. For the sake of argument, I will pretend that their is some objective aspect to these tests.
Is a company justified and picking only a certain personality profile for employment (regardless of what that profile may be)?
I know where I work the Legal department has told us we can't ask women if they plan to get pregnant. An employer might well be justified in not wanting such candidates. After all, pregnant women are likely to take advantage of the Federal laws that allow them to take leave for a number of weeks without losing their jobs. As an employer, I might be justified in not wanting to waste my time training someone who isn't going to stay in the workforce. Women, statistically speaking, are more likely to abandon their careers for family.
> you are essentially allowed to do anything you want
This is not the way our Legal department understands things. We our only allowed to ask candidates questions relating to their qualifications to do the work.
I also wonder what will happen if someone does a study and finds that males and females or different minority categories tend to have different scores on these tests. I would be shocked if there was not some correlation between race/gender and various subjective personality profiles. We already know that there is a cultural bias in the SATs.
It might be nice if employees socialized more outside of work. That would likely lead to getting along better at work. Nevertheless, we can NOT hire an employee based on what he indicates he will do after hours, be it Church on Sunday or Civil Rights demonstrations on Saturday.
If you think it's ok to hire only nerds because they all think and act alike, how is this different than only hiring Republicans?
> we judge people entirely on their merits.
Clearly you're not. I looked over the sample OAD test and if you're using it in any way as a basis for hiring, you are hiring people for something beyond how well qualified they are for the job.
How does one's satisfaction of their current job (or any psychological profile) alter their qualification to work for you?
> If a company knows that a certain personality ... works best on their team ...
What if a company knows that white men work better together. Can you blame them if they don't hire women or minorities?
> We usually end up rejecting all the candidates based on their interview, that the tests say we should reject anyway.
Have you ever thought of making your interview decision before looking at the test results? If you know going into the interview that they "failed", that knowledge is likely altering your perception of them during the interview.
From a scientific point of view, it would also be interesting to compare the performance of employees who were hired (regardless of test results), and see if those that failed actually do better.
I also wonder if there is a gender/racial bias in the test results. If so, you're likely setting yourself up for a discrimination lawsuit. At my place of work, they make us go to training before we are allowed to interview candidates. The emphasis in the training is on the fact that we can only ask candidates questions that relate to their job. I don't think the lawyers would like us asking candidates if they are "Appreciative in their current job," as that has NOTHING to do with whether or not they are qualified to perform the job that I am offering.
A fine example of an illegal question from King of the Hill:
Hank: We're all Christians around here. How 'bout you?
Why would they have to pay people? Raging Cow is such a wonderful product, it sells itself.
Before I used Raging Cow, my life was miserable. Now I'm more popular than ever and my sex life has improved!
Where do I go to apply for my free stuff?
The end result will be that the system will be circumvented, but Citibank will claim that it's impossible and leave you liable for their mistakes.
Correct. NY and CT no longer outlaw detectors. Though I thought I had heard otherwise, DC also appears to continue to outlaw them along with VA. They certainly don't put up signs like VA does.
m l
http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/radar4.ht
> Then we got radar detectors, which are still illegal to use (if not to own) in some states.
I believe Virginia is the only state which continues to outlaw them.
I remember seeing (in News of the Weird, I think) about some local cop that was taking criminals and putting their hands on a copy machine and claiming that it was a polygraph. He loaded the paper try with pages with "He's Lying" pre-printed on them. He'd ask you a question, hit the copy button, and there would be a page with an image of your hand and "He's Lying" written on it.
He apparently got a few confessions this way, but I believe they were overturned.
Anyways, let's not pretend that there's anything beyond Gilligan's Island science by calling them "polygraphs". They're lie detectors.
And the MPAA can sit back and relax because all DVD's are encrypted with CSS.
See Courtney Love does the Math.
The whole Dmitry Sklyarov affair was because he wrote a program to trivially break Adobe's DRM. The document was "encrypted", but before viewing it on the screen, it was decrypted.
DeCSS was an attempt at DRM. DVD's contain encrypted data (and LOTS of it). The problem is, before you can see it, your player has to decrypt it.
To hear Hollywood tell the story, they believed that this was going to stop piracy and that DeCSS has cost them billions of dollars. The fact is, it wasn't the person that cracked DeCSS that cost them money, it was the person that convinced them that the content could actually be secured that cost them...
Encryption is useful for storing and transmitting information where a hostile person might be able to intercept the document, but if you plan to give the document to someone and allow them to view it, they will have to decrypt it.
As for using DRM to let people know that a document can't be copied, we have our own solution around here to let people know what they can copy. We put a line across the top of each page that states the documents Classification. Even then, people sometimes forget to put that on their printouts. I can't imagine that DRM will somehow make the users incapable of forgetting to set their permissions appropriately.
I guess I assumed that, at the very least, MS would include DRM in their Copy buffers...
> How does finding holes in a system automatically make that system "not work"?
We're talking about the security equivalent of putting up a sign that says "please don't rob me". It is so trivial to get around that it's going to cause more problems than it could possibly solve. The biggest problem I can see is companies that will actually BELIEVE that it will work and will trust MS to keep their documents secure instead of those pesky policies and background checks and NDAs.
With music files, I can vaguely imagine that DRM might make perfect digital copies enough of a hassle that a there may be a slightly smaller number of illicit copies circulating. But internal memos and Word docs don't even need remotely perfect copies and it will always be trivial to, for example, read such a document aloud.
Further, I can imagine LOTS of scenarios where this will make life a hassle for honest and trustworthy users. I get a fair number of perfectly innocent and non-sensitive emails that can't be read from the Lotus Notes IMAP server because the user set "always encrypt" as their default.
I wonder how many calls tech support will get from people who can't print documents that they authored because they didn't understand the permissions that they set.
I usually use Open Office to read Word docs sent to me. I imagine that DRM will be the end of that. That, from MS's standpoint, is about the only real reason to pursue this.
> On another note, if this works properly (big if) you will know that the next Halloween document is a fake.
Unless it's a picture of the screen or an MP3 of someone reading it or the author didn't set the permissions properly...