The danger of letting people have things that not even the _courts_ can inspect is far, far greater than any benefits you can name.
We already have our wetware and have had it for all of civilized history... they don't yet know how to decrypt that reliably, and we seem to have survived said "dangers" so far. Also, we've had crypto schemes that aren't backdoored for quite some time.
Govt just needs to get used to the fact that people can whisper over instantaneously over large distances. Adapt or perish. They've already had decades of warning this was coming, and decades after it came they still won't admit it to themselves. Trying to deny reality or legislatively curtail cryptographic activities will only lead us to ruin.
It's worse than that, because then people who really wanted security would turn to concealing the fact that they were using their own non-backdoored system through a lot of clever steganography. Which means, everyone would be a suspect of using illegal cryptography, so the government would then have to develop tools to detect steganographically hidden encrypted messages. Which means doing AI/entropy analysis on "all teh data" and accusing people because some heuristic fucked up and gave a false positive.
Sure, but it isn't an either-or. There is a whole spectrum of competencies in between, and frankly, if you are the type of person who would prefer to live in a world where most everyone speaks English, it is in your self interest to reach a bit to encourage people who are trying to use it, because they learn more of it that way. I mean unless the only words you want them to know are "fuck", "off", and "foreigner". In the case where someone bothered to ask a question, they are obviously motivated to try and understand the answer... appreciate that you have an attentive audience and do both them and yourself a favor out of enlightened self interest if for no other reason.
Do we really need an explanation of which gender they are identifying with today? None of that is relevant.
You don't need to know that. Probably best that you don't. That was my point... knowing or not knowing is not the issue, it is whether the answer you provide has generic utility.
Given that most people on SO posting questions and writing answers are white male native English speakers, why precisely do you find this picture so troubling?
I wouldn't use the word "troubling". Why it is a matter to be addressed, though, is because that becomes a self-reinforcing exclusive pattern. Feedback gain and such, ya know.
For example, using an analogy to the rules of American Football to explain something would be statistically less useful to female or European coders, as long as there is a more inclusive analogy that would check all the same boxes.
But at the same time, I also lament that tech like this could actually work for our betterment, if only we could find a way to ensure it was deployed by trustworthy people with adequate safeguards against misuse. For example this could identify people who need some form of support to get them out of whatever rut they are in (rather than labeling them as undesirables, throwing them on the trash heap, and hiring someone else o retrain from scratch). It could be as simple as them having a crappy sleep environment but not having the knowledge to figure that out and fix it. An investment of under a grand and they could be at the top of their game in weeks. Instead things just drone on as they are, no progress made.
It seems most cultures have disastrously undervalued the things that build up such communal trust, especially now in the Social Networking age. Corrosive practices like trolling have everyone thinking the worst of everyone else, and even explicit efforts to build trust webs (like China's social ranking system) backfire and only serve to bring out the worst competitive backbiting behaviors. Truly a shame.
The answer is: if in your head you picture every person you answer on SO/SE as a programmatically experienced white male native English speaker and address them as such, you are bound to provide answers that are more "welcoming" to that demographic than others.
If, however, you have managed to develop the interpersonal/professional skill of providing one-size-fits-all answers, you improve the accessibility of the site.
What SO/SE is saying is they want to adjust their guidance to their users to promote developing that skill, at least, to those who are not too much of an asshole to pooh-pooh such an effort and not bother learning.
I've tried a few of these TODO apps and have never ceased to be surprised at how little progress has been made since the paper desk calender. Zero of them have actually been worth using.
Just giving you notifications and showing you your tasks in order is a friggin CS101 homework level of core functionality.
Really what I need is one built for procrastinators where I can just say nope, not doing that today, and it'll remind me about it N days later... or in fact, tell me to do a task early because Friday all the other crap I put off is coming due, or say hey you know you wanted to remember to buy stamps and you are currently standing outside a post office. Or take the periodic semiannual "clean the bathroom drain" task and tell me to it it on a day when I have a light schedule, instead of exactly 365.25/2 days from the last time it fired when I'm doing my taxes and five other things. Or prioritize shit before bugging me about it. Or know (be able to be told) which tasks can be moved and which are stuff like dental appointments.
Yeah great. Cloud storage and sync to other machines. Whoohoo. Those are about as important as the stupid fonts, IMO. Focus on the core functionality for a change before every app devolves into a chatcalnewsmusicmailshoppingcontactsapp.
if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.
Do you actually live in the U.S.? If so, what rock are you living under to have escaped the news of the failed Nunes stunt and not know that that's essentially what happened... or that it is kinda the nature of the FISA court that the presented information would often compromise our or our allies' intelligence assets.
Politically, yes, it's pretty much just hippie punching, though aimed at currying support from the brain-addled Trump base, rather than centrists. There is almost definitely a financial layer to it, given that the whole administration is a giant shakedown.
Would you rather be in a checkout line of people who are going to tap their NFC card/cellphone against a reader, grab their receipt, and leave
You forgot the "wait 15-30 seconds while the PoS system does it's thing". Especially the chip cards slow things down. With an experienced cashier and and experienced non-senescent cash customer, cash is actually really fast.
Now, there might be a clear advantage if they could tie the customer loyalty cards in so we didn't have to wait for the assholes in front of us to type in their phone number because they never carry that card (my gut tells me these must be the very same people who get bent out of shape about 1 extra item in the express lane taking 0.5 seconds extra to scan.) Since the CC-everywhere users obviously do not care for their privacy anyway, that shouldn't be a problem for them.
Pretty much. I confine my CC transactions as much as feasible to reduce the risk of falling victim to e-fraud. Unless I eat there regularly, I am going to pay cash, and if you don't take it, you won;t get my business.
This does not jive with what some of the mom-and-pop cash-only business owners around here have told me. Merchant fees on CC processing are their main reason for not taking cards. The restaurants surveyed must be pretty friggin high-volume, have accounts at suck-ass banks, and be operating in crime-ridden areas.
Also making change is often faster than waiting for the transaction delay while processing cards if you are connected by POTS.
Slashdot Mirror
The danger of letting people have things that not even the _courts_ can inspect is far, far greater than any benefits you can name.
We already have our wetware and have had it for all of civilized history... they don't yet know how to decrypt that reliably, and we seem to have survived said "dangers" so far. Also, we've had crypto schemes that aren't backdoored for quite some time.
Govt just needs to get used to the fact that people can whisper over instantaneously over large distances. Adapt or perish. They've already had decades of warning this was coming, and decades after it came they still won't admit it to themselves. Trying to deny reality or legislatively curtail cryptographic activities will only lead us to ruin.
It's worse than that, because then people who really wanted security would turn to concealing the fact that they were using their own non-backdoored system through a lot of clever steganography. Which means, everyone would be a suspect of using illegal cryptography, so the government would then have to develop tools to detect steganographically hidden encrypted messages. Which means doing AI/entropy analysis on "all teh data" and accusing people because some heuristic fucked up and gave a false positive.
Learn the definition of inclusive, and stop bothering me with your gibberish.
If you only focus on the most sensational stories in the news, you are cursed to live in a distorted reality.
Sure, but it isn't an either-or. There is a whole spectrum of competencies in between, and frankly, if you are the type of person who would prefer to live in a world where most everyone speaks English, it is in your self interest to reach a bit to encourage people who are trying to use it, because they learn more of it that way. I mean unless the only words you want them to know are "fuck", "off", and "foreigner". In the case where someone bothered to ask a question, they are obviously motivated to try and understand the answer... appreciate that you have an attentive audience and do both them and yourself a favor out of enlightened self interest if for no other reason.
Thank you much, I'll check those out!
Do we really need an explanation of which gender they are identifying with today? None of that is relevant.
You don't need to know that. Probably best that you don't. That was my point... knowing or not knowing is not the issue, it is whether the answer you provide has generic utility.
Given that most people on SO posting questions and writing answers are white male native English speakers, why precisely do you find this picture so troubling?
I wouldn't use the word "troubling". Why it is a matter to be addressed, though, is because that becomes a self-reinforcing exclusive pattern. Feedback gain and such, ya know.
For example, using an analogy to the rules of American Football to explain something would be statistically less useful to female or European coders, as long as there is a more inclusive analogy that would check all the same boxes.
But at the same time, I also lament that tech like this could actually work for our betterment, if only we could find a way to ensure it was deployed by trustworthy people with adequate safeguards against misuse. For example this could identify people who need some form of support to get them out of whatever rut they are in (rather than labeling them as undesirables, throwing them on the trash heap, and hiring someone else o retrain from scratch). It could be as simple as them having a crappy sleep environment but not having the knowledge to figure that out and fix it. An investment of under a grand and they could be at the top of their game in weeks. Instead things just drone on as they are, no progress made.
It seems most cultures have disastrously undervalued the things that build up such communal trust, especially now in the Social Networking age. Corrosive practices like trolling have everyone thinking the worst of everyone else, and even explicit efforts to build trust webs (like China's social ranking system) backfire and only serve to bring out the worst competitive backbiting behaviors. Truly a shame.
In that context why does any of it matter?
The answer is: if in your head you picture every person you answer on SO/SE as a programmatically experienced white male native English speaker and address them as such, you are bound to provide answers that are more "welcoming" to that demographic than others.
If, however, you have managed to develop the interpersonal/professional skill of providing one-size-fits-all answers, you improve the accessibility of the site.
What SO/SE is saying is they want to adjust their guidance to their users to promote developing that skill, at least, to those who are not too much of an asshole to pooh-pooh such an effort and not bother learning.
I would greatly appreciate any pointers to those.
If more people treated government with the suspicion and hostility I do ( ie: what they deserve ), we'd be in a much better place.
If and only if they also find other avenues to give substantial amounts of money to sectors of the economy undervalued by the free market.
Without that, despite the graft, taxes are the best way to get things done.
Why don't you go back in time and ask Linus in 1991? "Almost nobody" was using that.
Yeah lots of classic confounding factors to account for here.
Though it would be amusing to produce an "actuarial cost of application lack of dark theme support" estimate just to rattle that cage.
Assuming stupidity of the user base is why our software is so dumb it makes us dumber the more we use it. Build something smart for a change.
I've tried a few of these TODO apps and have never ceased to be surprised at how little progress has been made since the paper desk calender. Zero of them have actually been worth using.
Just giving you notifications and showing you your tasks in order is a friggin CS101 homework level of core functionality.
Really what I need is one built for procrastinators where I can just say nope, not doing that today, and it'll remind me about it N days later... or in fact, tell me to do a task early because Friday all the other crap I put off is coming due, or say hey you know you wanted to remember to buy stamps and you are currently standing outside a post office. Or take the periodic semiannual "clean the bathroom drain" task and tell me to it it on a day when I have a light schedule, instead of exactly 365.25/2 days from the last time it fired when I'm doing my taxes and five other things. Or prioritize shit before bugging me about it. Or know (be able to be told) which tasks can be moved and which are stuff like dental appointments.
Yeah great. Cloud storage and sync to other machines. Whoohoo. Those are about as important as the stupid fonts, IMO. Focus on the core functionality for a change before every app devolves into a chatcalnewsmusicmailshoppingcontactsapp.
Instructions to delivery service: Just move dead body over to the side if package will not fit between legs.
Well, they didn't see it that way.
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/2...
if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.
Do you actually live in the U.S.? If so, what rock are you living under to have escaped the news of the failed Nunes stunt and not know that that's essentially what happened... or that it is kinda the nature of the FISA court that the presented information would often compromise our or our allies' intelligence assets.
Politically, yes, it's pretty much just hippie punching, though aimed at currying support from the brain-addled Trump base, rather than centrists. There is almost definitely a financial layer to it, given that the whole administration is a giant shakedown.
Would you rather be in a checkout line of people who are going to tap their NFC card/cellphone against a reader, grab their receipt, and leave
You forgot the "wait 15-30 seconds while the PoS system does it's thing". Especially the chip cards slow things down. With an experienced cashier and and experienced non-senescent cash customer, cash is actually really fast.
Now, there might be a clear advantage if they could tie the customer loyalty cards in so we didn't have to wait for the assholes in front of us to type in their phone number because they never carry that card (my gut tells me these must be the very same people who get bent out of shape about 1 extra item in the express lane taking 0.5 seconds extra to scan.) Since the CC-everywhere users obviously do not care for their privacy anyway, that shouldn't be a problem for them.
Pretty much. I confine my CC transactions as much as feasible to reduce the risk of falling victim to e-fraud. Unless I eat there regularly, I am going to pay cash, and if you don't take it, you won;t get my business.
This does not jive with what some of the mom-and-pop cash-only business owners around here have told me. Merchant fees on CC processing are their main reason for not taking cards. The restaurants surveyed must be pretty friggin high-volume, have accounts at suck-ass banks, and be operating in crime-ridden areas.
Also making change is often faster than waiting for the transaction delay while processing cards if you are connected by POTS.
I was about to say "I must have a really small spleen these days considering how much I hate holding my breath."
But I guess that reasoning is void, because I haven't been fully immersed in water in decades... so...