There are established methods of dealing with "stuffing the vote box", such as making sure it is shown to be empty before voting starts (inspectable by voters) and that voters are able to monitor it at all times between that time and when counting is complete.
Conversely, there is no equivalent method of ensuring that a computerized voting device is electronically recording votes honestly. None. Period. Your claim that tampering with storage media is also BS because it won't necessarily detect swapped media, and definitely won't detect if the media is original but the results recorded on it by the machine in the first place are fraudulent. (You press "Kerry", it records "The voter pressed Bush".)
Not to mention that the track record of such machines shows that often there *isn't* any auditable media, the machine transmits its data to a central counting point (which in some cases is alleged to have been swapped with a party-controlled substitute for a man-in-the-middle attack) and the local officials reset the machines at the end of the day, destroying even the lame pretense of an audit trail.
At least with paper, it's possible for voters to physically monitor the entire process to ensure that it's being done honestly - and if officials won't let them, then they know the election is being stolen.
Pedophiles are more likely to be heterosexual family members than gay men. (The gender of the child abused has little to do with the gender of the adults the person would choose to have relations with.)
By ensuring that scout leaders are exclusively heterosexual family members of a scout, they are in fact increasing the odds that children will be abused.
Oh, and for implying that gay men will abuse boys: fuck you too. You can rot in hell.
Your argument is BS in terms of being a reason not to have a paper trail: it doesn't matter what method of voting is used, someone can always twist the voter's arm, or the voter can always bring in a camera.
The point is to ensure that what the voter actually voted is what is reflected in the vote count, that people can't come along and change all the votes after the voters have voted. If the data is electronic, they can change it untraceably. If the data is on paper, they'd have to replace the paper, which is detectable, or falsify the counting process, which is also detectable. Therefore, paper is a workable solution, and fully electronic voting and counting is not.
I'll go one further. If it doesn't produce paper ballots which are readable by the voter to ensure they reflect the voter's intent, and which are counted rather than a direct electronic tally, the system can be hacked. Period.
As a computer scientist and programmer I have 0% confidence in any system which doesn't produce a paper audit trail, but even if it does, if the voter can't personally validate that the audit trail for their vote reflects their intent, the system could still just be producing a phony audit trail.
If they're willing to deal with the cost of a satellite dish in the first place, there's no reason it has to be mounted on the house. It could be mounted on a tree or a pole or a small out-building or something like that so as not to bother the integrity of the house.
Several of the major cell carriers which cover the Cape Cod area offer high speed data PCMCIA cards. If they don't have PCMCIA, they could get a router that will accept the card and output wifi, for a few hundred bucks.
If the goal is just to experiment a little with alternative power... why tie into the grid at all?
You could put in your power source (say, a solar panel) and an inverter and any batteries etc you want, and have an electrician hook it up to one outlet. Or maybe just a few. But, keep them totally separate from your regular electrical system. That way, you could experiment with your alternative power on a few outlets, and keep the rest of the house on the regular system, and not have to be concerned about the technical details or legal concerns of tying your "experimental" energy system to the grid.
I'm considering that I may do this in a few years. I plan to examine how much energy is used by different appliances, what solar equipment will cost, and try to apply solar power to 1 to 3 top energy consuming items in my home. It won't connect to the grid in any way, and I'll just have the "solar outlets" in one spot and the rest of the house on the normal grid.
Confront him in a context where there's proof
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Dealing With an IT Bully
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Having been in similar positions, I have unfortunately had to develop strategies for dealing with such situations.
1) If you must have a meeting with someone you know acts like that and talks like that, always bring witnesses. That way there will be someone to testify "oh my god, we made a simple request and he started swearing like a sailor!" to HR later, and he won't be able to tell lies about what you said. An audio recorder works too, but you can get in trouble if you don't make it clear that you have it and are using it, and if you do make it clear they usually won't meet with you and will try to make you look like the unreasonable one. Most people will ignore a coworker you brought along without explanation, and if they do ask for an explanation, you can just say "oh, I thought they might be involved later so I want them to hear the details."
2) Try to avoid phone calls with the person. If they call you, tell them you're busy and will get back to them right away, and then send them email. (If you have no better excuse, tell them you really have to go to the bathroom. Anything to get them off the phone.) If you have a phone call, even if it seems cordial, you never know what they might claim you said after the fact. If you must have a call with them, try to make it a conference call so you can have a witness, or invite someone into your office and put the call on speaker so the witness can hear it.
3) If you are having a phone call or meeting with them, if they become belligerent, swear at you, or use inappropriately insulting or hostile language, immediately tell them you will be pleased to communicate with them again in the future when they feel more able to control themselves, and then immediately depart or hang up without further comment. Take any witnesses with you.
4) After any unavoidable phone calls, immediately email them a summary of your understanding of the call. That way if they want to make claims about the call later, you can produce the email and say "I sent you call notes to prevent misunderstandings, and you didn't disagree with the notes, so if you failed to understand, that's not my problem."
5) Whenever possible, transact communications with the problem person by email. If they send you any emails in which they are hostile or directly and unequivocally insult you, immediately forward those emails to the person's boss and to HR with a request to know if this is the sort of language or remark that the company feels is appropriate business communication, and state clearly that it is difficult to do your job when reasonable requests are met with hostility and refusal to provide answers. If they actually physically threaten you in email, print it out and walk it directly to HR and insist that you want the police to be called.
6) Never delete any email except spam. You might need it later.
7) Never let any direct accusations about your competence that the person makes to your manager or to others pass unaddressed. Use courteous (no swearing) but blunt language to make clear that the accusation is completely false, provide copies of emails and other backup evidence as necessary, and be very clear that you are upset and insulted.
Unfortunately, people in the computer industry frequently have to deal with hostile users and occasionally hostile incompetent techs. (The competent ones rarely have anything to be hostile about.) I've had to deal with many. By remaining calm, restricting communications to email or channels where there are witnesses, and refusing to accept any BS, I've been able to get most of them terminated, and in the remaining cases I, like the author, felt it was best to move on because obviously the company was run by a pack of idiots.
Conversely, blue is the worst color to use for either text or background, and the worst combination of colors to use is blue text on a contrasting blue background.
I remember this because at the time I learned about it in college, I had a co-op job with a company whose application used blue text on blue background, full screen.
Before everyone gets excited over 3D porn, I think we should consider existing 3D technology, and how this differs.
Stereographic imagery has existed since before the creation of the camera. 3D cameras have undergone several bouts of popularity. As a child, I remember my grandfather getting out his ancient 3D camera, and my father had a 3D adapter for his regular camera. 3D lenses are now available for digital SLRs, and if you are interested in video, you can even get a box that converts 2D TV to 3D TV in realtime. (Note: CRT TV required. That aside, I've got one, and it works much better than I expected.)
Among the advantages of the system they're describing in the article we're discussing is that it actually has depth information for everything in the image, and using that, it can either be used for measurements or to pick out things in the image at specific depths. It also can be done with one lens, so the 3D image can be rotated while preserving the 3D effect. With conventional stereo imagery, you have to use 2 lenses, and if you turn the camera sideways to take the picture, you can only ever look at it sideways afterward.
In all, I think this new system sound like a great advance and I hope they'll license it cheaply so it can become widely used.
Why? This is a common tactic in the software industry. Just try announcing that you're going to publish an objective speed benchmark comparison of MS SQL Server vs Oracle vs MySQL, and see how long it takes for you to get several cease & desist letters.
The state, on the other hand, has a strong interest in testing voting machines. So, if the voting machine manufacturer wants to prohibit testing, the state should just respond "Ok, no problem, we will never buy another voting machine from you as long as you have this policy, and if you assert that we may not test machines that we have lawfully purchased from you, we demand a full refund or we will institute legal action to recover the full value of the machines."
The solution they're trying to create is called "Miro" and it's available free now. Can I have the 14 million euros now that I've solved their problem?
She's seven years old! Let her pick a password that's easy for her to recall.
That'll be just great when her computer gets hacked due to the easy password, and hardcore porn starts appearing on her computer that the hacker put there.
Children don't -get- privacy from their parents, unless the parents should choose to give it to them. A family is not a democracy--it is a dictatorship.
When I was 5, my family moved to a new house in which I for the first time had a lock on my bedroom door. I didn't really care about it, but my father for some reason was very uptight about it and made a big deal about telling me that I was never, ever to lock my door.
When I was 7 or 8, I went into my room one day and closed the door, and didn't notice that the lock accidentally jiggled itself to locked. (The knobs were cheap junk and the locks were overly loose, so this happened occasionally.) My father tried to come into my room moments later, and flew into a rage when he found the door locked. He refused to believe me that I had not intentionally locked the door, and as punishment he removed the door from my bedroom - for two years.
I never forgave him for that. It was very traumatic for me. I couldn't bring myself to even speak to him for months afterward, and when he asked me to do any household chores my only reply was "when do I get my door back?". I felt nothing toward him but angry resentment for the next 10 or 12 years.
You are not in a position to judge another family's personal interactions with regard to privacy. You don't know the people involved or their histories or their opinions. If the kid, at age 7, is already sufficiently bothered by whatever her parents did to her young brother's computer, and her elder brother is sufficiently bothered by it to try to prevent his parents from doing it to hers, maybe they're actually unreasonable nutjobs. It's not our place to judge.
I spoke with a young woman once whose parents placed such draconian restrictions on her computer use in her teen years (severe time restrictions, IM buddy list restrictions, email restrictions, web filtering, and the software sends frequent reports to the parents with screenshots) that it actually interfered with her school work (the computer would lock her out before she could finish typing her homework), not to mention her social life (her friends had difficulty communicating with her, since her phone usage was highly restricted and parental monitored too). When they attempted to send her off to college with a laptop with their draconian control software still installed and just as restrictive as ever, she told them where to shove it and left. I'd be surprised if she ever speaks to them again.
If the parents in the situation this Slashdot discussion is about feel that their 7 year old shouldn't be using the computer the brother gave her, they can ask him to take it back, they can put it in storage, they can ask their daughter to show them her emails and buddy lists and web favorites now and then, or they can put it in a family room so they can see what their daughter is doing with it. If they don't do these things, that's their parenting choice.
Meanwhile, we could be having an interesting discussion of how to create decent passwords for people (like children) who are unable to remember arbitrary strings. I've met adults with the same problem, so it's not a moot question.
the creators of XML made it for document markup
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
XML sucks in so many different ways, it's amazing. In fact I cannot think of a single thing that XML does well, or a single aspect of it that couldn't have been better planned from the beginning. I blame the creators of XML, who obviously didn't really have much of a clue.
XML was never intended as a data storage format. It was intended as a document markup format. The fact that people started immediately using it for arbitrary data came as a surprise to the people who created it.
Why XML is so popular
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 2, Interesting
XML is so popular because business people don't understand it and think it can magically do a lot of things it can't, so they choose software that uses XML when it really doesn't matter.
I have a lot of experience consulting with various organizations - some Fortune 500, some nonprofit, some educational - about their software selection process. I've watched many times as a vendor gives a presentation to my employer or client talking about how wonderous it is that their software saves all its data in XML so you'll be able to openly interchange it with everything. The business people's eyes glaze over and a happy glow suffuses their face, as they imagine that that means that any software's data that's saved in XML can be magically opened and understood by any other software that uses XML. They don't get the idea that there's a specific schema involved and that your word processor won't be able to automatically make sense of data generated by your database just because there's XML involved.
When I talk to my client after the vendor presentation I invariably learn that they think that XML is a sort of universal translator. I've had to explain why it isn't to so many clients I finally just wrote a white paper on the subject so when it comes up again I can just print it out and hand it to them. If I don't, I find my clients will reliably choose to buy the software that uses XML instead of the software that best meets their needs.
Believe me, the vendors knew that their prospective customers would act this way, and did everything they could to play up the idea that XML is magically interchangeable with all software, sometimes to the point of telling outright lies about it.
I am presently considering getting Dish TV service, and a new Tivo. They can work together you know. And some people actually buy tivos because (*gasp*) they work well.
And DirecTV actually *is* cheaper than cable here.
Saying "you don't know jack shit about women" isn't going to solve anything. The person to whom you are responding has a very common contemporary view of women held by many men. If you simply dismiss it, you fail to recognize that many men have this opinion, and they have reasons for believing it. You may not agree with their conclusions about women, and that's okay, but you should recognize that men have this opinion for a reason, and if you want men to stop seeing women that way, the burden is on *everyone* to make some changes to our culture to relieve mens' fears.
I am a gay man, so please understand that all of the following is an attempt to educate you about how men see the world.
Consider our high divorce rate. Men are not filing the majority of divorce cases; women are. Men file only a tiny minority of divorces.
Consider why women divorce. While there are unquestionably many cases in which women have been mistreated, that's still a minority of divorces. Extensive study has been unable to determine a way to predict the success or failure of a marriage, except for one factor: women who have a tendency to "trade up" from one thing to a better one are very likely to divorce, while those who prefer to keep what they have rather than "trade up" are unlikely to divorce. While most men don't know this as such, they certainly can feel the fact that they're being tossed aside for something their (now former) wife feels will be "better", rather than due to a particular failure on their own part. So they usually feel very bitter about their divorce, because they never wanted it.
Consider that in a divorce, a woman has a substantially better chance to get the house, and will get the children in almost 100% of cases, and will often get ongoing financial benefits from her former husband. So, the man comes away feeling like the house that was his home and which was supposedly equally his has been more or less stolen from him, and now it's hers, yet he still has to pay for it. This ensures he'll almost certainly never be able to have that standard of living again (although his ex-wife will), and he will feel that his children, who he loved, have been taken from him (visitation is BS, men know darned well that getting to see their children occasionally doesn't allow them to be a real parent any more), and he is likely no longer in a financial position to be able to start another family and have other children, because a huge chunk of his income is going to support the home and family he had that he feels his ex-wife has stolen from him.
Consider that there are many men in this situation, and they talk to their friends, including their single male friends. Also, their children watch all this, and their male children grow up watching their father try to scrape together his life and try to put together a little dignity and find some source of happiness, and never quite succeed in being what they used to be. Adult men see their fathers unable to retire because they were ruined financially for life by the divorce and the associated financial demands, so the fathers will have to work themselves to death. How do you think that makes a young man feel about women?
If you want men to lose this harsh perspective of women, we need as a culture to carefully examine divorce as we know it and start making changes to our culture and legal system so that men don't keep ending up feeling that they have been changed from husbands and fathers to slaves-to-their-ex-wives, and don't end up teaching others that they too could end up like this.
Chewing out men for feeling that way isn't part of the solution.
If the world was entirely gay, we would be wiped out in one single life cycle.
Dear god, it's bad enough we have to listen to this same tired old crap on every damn right wing "news" site, do we have to put up with it here on slashdot too?
Gay people are perfectly capable of having children and often do. Go to any major american city's gay pride parade and you'll see a large troupe of gay and lesbian parents marching with their children. We're just less likely to do so, because of a number of reasons prominently including worry that heterosexuals will try to take our children away from us, and the fact that since heterosexuals don't let us marry, it's more financially and legally difficult for us to have children.
Furthermore, the whole "if the world was entirely gay" BS is a strawman argument; it hasn't happened, it isn't going to happen, grow up.
Homosexuality is evolutionary suicide, and it doesn't matter whether you like that or not.
That's not what evolutionary biologists have to say about it. What seems to be the case is that having gay children benefits other children in the extended family because as they become adults the gay people would likely be interested in being an additional caretaker and provider for the heterosexuals in the family, thus improving their chance to survive to reproduce.
We gay people are here, we're not going to tolerate repression any more, and you have no choice but to live with the fact. So start dealing with it.
Maybe. But people who have paid their dues going to college may feel insulted to be led by a high-school graduate.
None of the people I've managed have, and almost all of them (maybe even all of them) had degrees. In fact, many of the people I've managed over the years have appreciated me enough that years after I'm no longer their boss they continue to turn to me for career advice.
I simply don't tell the people who work for me what my educational background is or how many years of experience I have, until they ask. Somebody will eventually ask, but it has been my experience that they tend to do so after they're already marveling at the depth of my knowledge of the job and the fact that I'm obviously looking after their well being.
If I walked into an IT department and didn't know anything about IT but took over as manager, I would expect the staff to resent me whether or not I had a degree. But, when I walk into any situation to take over, I know exactly what I'm doing - otherwise I wouldn't accept the responsibility in the first place. So they never resent me, because they can see I've earned my position and I treat them well.
Slashdot Mirror
There are established methods of dealing with "stuffing the vote box", such as making sure it is shown to be empty before voting starts (inspectable by voters) and that voters are able to monitor it at all times between that time and when counting is complete.
Conversely, there is no equivalent method of ensuring that a computerized voting device is electronically recording votes honestly. None. Period. Your claim that tampering with storage media is also BS because it won't necessarily detect swapped media, and definitely won't detect if the media is original but the results recorded on it by the machine in the first place are fraudulent. (You press "Kerry", it records "The voter pressed Bush".)
Not to mention that the track record of such machines shows that often there *isn't* any auditable media, the machine transmits its data to a central counting point (which in some cases is alleged to have been swapped with a party-controlled substitute for a man-in-the-middle attack) and the local officials reset the machines at the end of the day, destroying even the lame pretense of an audit trail.
At least with paper, it's possible for voters to physically monitor the entire process to ensure that it's being done honestly - and if officials won't let them, then they know the election is being stolen.
In the US, it is unconstitutional for the government to give funding to churches.
Pedophiles are more likely to be heterosexual family members than gay men. (The gender of the child abused has little to do with the gender of the adults the person would choose to have relations with.)
By ensuring that scout leaders are exclusively heterosexual family members of a scout, they are in fact increasing the odds that children will be abused.
Oh, and for implying that gay men will abuse boys: fuck you too. You can rot in hell.
The lawsuit wasn't claiming that as a private organization they didn't have the right to discriminate.
The lawsuit claimed that as they take tax dollars to run their organization, they are not a private organization.
Discrimination in the boy scouts: your tax dollars at work.
Your argument is BS in terms of being a reason not to have a paper trail: it doesn't matter what method of voting is used, someone can always twist the voter's arm, or the voter can always bring in a camera.
The point is to ensure that what the voter actually voted is what is reflected in the vote count, that people can't come along and change all the votes after the voters have voted. If the data is electronic, they can change it untraceably. If the data is on paper, they'd have to replace the paper, which is detectable, or falsify the counting process, which is also detectable. Therefore, paper is a workable solution, and fully electronic voting and counting is not.
I'll go one further. If it doesn't produce paper ballots which are readable by the voter to ensure they reflect the voter's intent, and which are counted rather than a direct electronic tally, the system can be hacked. Period.
As a computer scientist and programmer I have 0% confidence in any system which doesn't produce a paper audit trail, but even if it does, if the voter can't personally validate that the audit trail for their vote reflects their intent, the system could still just be producing a phony audit trail.
If they're willing to deal with the cost of a satellite dish in the first place, there's no reason it has to be mounted on the house. It could be mounted on a tree or a pole or a small out-building or something like that so as not to bother the integrity of the house.
Several of the major cell carriers which cover the Cape Cod area offer high speed data PCMCIA cards. If they don't have PCMCIA, they could get a router that will accept the card and output wifi, for a few hundred bucks.
In some states it's illegal to use furniture made for home use in a workplace, unless the workplace is actually in a home.
If the goal is just to experiment a little with alternative power... why tie into the grid at all?
You could put in your power source (say, a solar panel) and an inverter and any batteries etc you want, and have an electrician hook it up to one outlet. Or maybe just a few. But, keep them totally separate from your regular electrical system. That way, you could experiment with your alternative power on a few outlets, and keep the rest of the house on the regular system, and not have to be concerned about the technical details or legal concerns of tying your "experimental" energy system to the grid.
I'm considering that I may do this in a few years. I plan to examine how much energy is used by different appliances, what solar equipment will cost, and try to apply solar power to 1 to 3 top energy consuming items in my home. It won't connect to the grid in any way, and I'll just have the "solar outlets" in one spot and the rest of the house on the normal grid.
Having been in similar positions, I have unfortunately had to develop strategies for dealing with such situations.
1) If you must have a meeting with someone you know acts like that and talks like that, always bring witnesses. That way there will be someone to testify "oh my god, we made a simple request and he started swearing like a sailor!" to HR later, and he won't be able to tell lies about what you said. An audio recorder works too, but you can get in trouble if you don't make it clear that you have it and are using it, and if you do make it clear they usually won't meet with you and will try to make you look like the unreasonable one. Most people will ignore a coworker you brought along without explanation, and if they do ask for an explanation, you can just say "oh, I thought they might be involved later so I want them to hear the details."
2) Try to avoid phone calls with the person. If they call you, tell them you're busy and will get back to them right away, and then send them email. (If you have no better excuse, tell them you really have to go to the bathroom. Anything to get them off the phone.) If you have a phone call, even if it seems cordial, you never know what they might claim you said after the fact. If you must have a call with them, try to make it a conference call so you can have a witness, or invite someone into your office and put the call on speaker so the witness can hear it.
3) If you are having a phone call or meeting with them, if they become belligerent, swear at you, or use inappropriately insulting or hostile language, immediately tell them you will be pleased to communicate with them again in the future when they feel more able to control themselves, and then immediately depart or hang up without further comment. Take any witnesses with you.
4) After any unavoidable phone calls, immediately email them a summary of your understanding of the call. That way if they want to make claims about the call later, you can produce the email and say "I sent you call notes to prevent misunderstandings, and you didn't disagree with the notes, so if you failed to understand, that's not my problem."
5) Whenever possible, transact communications with the problem person by email. If they send you any emails in which they are hostile or directly and unequivocally insult you, immediately forward those emails to the person's boss and to HR with a request to know if this is the sort of language or remark that the company feels is appropriate business communication, and state clearly that it is difficult to do your job when reasonable requests are met with hostility and refusal to provide answers. If they actually physically threaten you in email, print it out and walk it directly to HR and insist that you want the police to be called.
6) Never delete any email except spam. You might need it later.
7) Never let any direct accusations about your competence that the person makes to your manager or to others pass unaddressed. Use courteous (no swearing) but blunt language to make clear that the accusation is completely false, provide copies of emails and other backup evidence as necessary, and be very clear that you are upset and insulted.
Unfortunately, people in the computer industry frequently have to deal with hostile users and occasionally hostile incompetent techs. (The competent ones rarely have anything to be hostile about.) I've had to deal with many. By remaining calm, restricting communications to email or channels where there are witnesses, and refusing to accept any BS, I've been able to get most of them terminated, and in the remaining cases I, like the author, felt it was best to move on because obviously the company was run by a pack of idiots.
Conversely, blue is the worst color to use for either text or background, and the worst combination of colors to use is blue text on a contrasting blue background.
I remember this because at the time I learned about it in college, I had a co-op job with a company whose application used blue text on blue background, full screen.
Before everyone gets excited over 3D porn, I think we should consider existing 3D technology, and how this differs.
Stereographic imagery has existed since before the creation of the camera. 3D cameras have undergone several bouts of popularity. As a child, I remember my grandfather getting out his ancient 3D camera, and my father had a 3D adapter for his regular camera. 3D lenses are now available for digital SLRs, and if you are interested in video, you can even get a box that converts 2D TV to 3D TV in realtime. (Note: CRT TV required. That aside, I've got one, and it works much better than I expected.)
Among the advantages of the system they're describing in the article we're discussing is that it actually has depth information for everything in the image, and using that, it can either be used for measurements or to pick out things in the image at specific depths. It also can be done with one lens, so the 3D image can be rotated while preserving the 3D effect. With conventional stereo imagery, you have to use 2 lenses, and if you turn the camera sideways to take the picture, you can only ever look at it sideways afterward.
In all, I think this new system sound like a great advance and I hope they'll license it cheaply so it can become widely used.
Why? This is a common tactic in the software industry. Just try announcing that you're going to publish an objective speed benchmark comparison of MS SQL Server vs Oracle vs MySQL, and see how long it takes for you to get several cease & desist letters.
The state, on the other hand, has a strong interest in testing voting machines. So, if the voting machine manufacturer wants to prohibit testing, the state should just respond "Ok, no problem, we will never buy another voting machine from you as long as you have this policy, and if you assert that we may not test machines that we have lawfully purchased from you, we demand a full refund or we will institute legal action to recover the full value of the machines."
Let the company dig its own grave.
The solution they're trying to create is called "Miro" and it's available free now. Can I have the 14 million euros now that I've solved their problem?
When I was 5, my family moved to a new house in which I for the first time had a lock on my bedroom door. I didn't really care about it, but my father for some reason was very uptight about it and made a big deal about telling me that I was never, ever to lock my door.
When I was 7 or 8, I went into my room one day and closed the door, and didn't notice that the lock accidentally jiggled itself to locked. (The knobs were cheap junk and the locks were overly loose, so this happened occasionally.) My father tried to come into my room moments later, and flew into a rage when he found the door locked. He refused to believe me that I had not intentionally locked the door, and as punishment he removed the door from my bedroom - for two years.
I never forgave him for that. It was very traumatic for me. I couldn't bring myself to even speak to him for months afterward, and when he asked me to do any household chores my only reply was "when do I get my door back?". I felt nothing toward him but angry resentment for the next 10 or 12 years.
You are not in a position to judge another family's personal interactions with regard to privacy. You don't know the people involved or their histories or their opinions. If the kid, at age 7, is already sufficiently bothered by whatever her parents did to her young brother's computer, and her elder brother is sufficiently bothered by it to try to prevent his parents from doing it to hers, maybe they're actually unreasonable nutjobs. It's not our place to judge.
I spoke with a young woman once whose parents placed such draconian restrictions on her computer use in her teen years (severe time restrictions, IM buddy list restrictions, email restrictions, web filtering, and the software sends frequent reports to the parents with screenshots) that it actually interfered with her school work (the computer would lock her out before she could finish typing her homework), not to mention her social life (her friends had difficulty communicating with her, since her phone usage was highly restricted and parental monitored too). When they attempted to send her off to college with a laptop with their draconian control software still installed and just as restrictive as ever, she told them where to shove it and left. I'd be surprised if she ever speaks to them again.
If the parents in the situation this Slashdot discussion is about feel that their 7 year old shouldn't be using the computer the brother gave her, they can ask him to take it back, they can put it in storage, they can ask their daughter to show them her emails and buddy lists and web favorites now and then, or they can put it in a family room so they can see what their daughter is doing with it. If they don't do these things, that's their parenting choice.
Meanwhile, we could be having an interesting discussion of how to create decent passwords for people (like children) who are unable to remember arbitrary strings. I've met adults with the same problem, so it's not a moot question.
Some people have the integrity to stand by their opinions whether others like them or not.
XML is so popular because business people don't understand it and think it can magically do a lot of things it can't, so they choose software that uses XML when it really doesn't matter.
I have a lot of experience consulting with various organizations - some Fortune 500, some nonprofit, some educational - about their software selection process. I've watched many times as a vendor gives a presentation to my employer or client talking about how wonderous it is that their software saves all its data in XML so you'll be able to openly interchange it with everything. The business people's eyes glaze over and a happy glow suffuses their face, as they imagine that that means that any software's data that's saved in XML can be magically opened and understood by any other software that uses XML. They don't get the idea that there's a specific schema involved and that your word processor won't be able to automatically make sense of data generated by your database just because there's XML involved.
When I talk to my client after the vendor presentation I invariably learn that they think that XML is a sort of universal translator. I've had to explain why it isn't to so many clients I finally just wrote a white paper on the subject so when it comes up again I can just print it out and hand it to them. If I don't, I find my clients will reliably choose to buy the software that uses XML instead of the software that best meets their needs.
Believe me, the vendors knew that their prospective customers would act this way, and did everything they could to play up the idea that XML is magically interchangeable with all software, sometimes to the point of telling outright lies about it.
I am presently considering getting Dish TV service, and a new Tivo. They can work together you know. And some people actually buy tivos because (*gasp*) they work well.
And DirecTV actually *is* cheaper than cable here.
Saying "you don't know jack shit about women" isn't going to solve anything. The person to whom you are responding has a very common contemporary view of women held by many men. If you simply dismiss it, you fail to recognize that many men have this opinion, and they have reasons for believing it. You may not agree with their conclusions about women, and that's okay, but you should recognize that men have this opinion for a reason, and if you want men to stop seeing women that way, the burden is on *everyone* to make some changes to our culture to relieve mens' fears.
I am a gay man, so please understand that all of the following is an attempt to educate you about how men see the world.
Consider our high divorce rate. Men are not filing the majority of divorce cases; women are. Men file only a tiny minority of divorces.
Consider why women divorce. While there are unquestionably many cases in which women have been mistreated, that's still a minority of divorces. Extensive study has been unable to determine a way to predict the success or failure of a marriage, except for one factor: women who have a tendency to "trade up" from one thing to a better one are very likely to divorce, while those who prefer to keep what they have rather than "trade up" are unlikely to divorce. While most men don't know this as such, they certainly can feel the fact that they're being tossed aside for something their (now former) wife feels will be "better", rather than due to a particular failure on their own part. So they usually feel very bitter about their divorce, because they never wanted it.
Consider that in a divorce, a woman has a substantially better chance to get the house, and will get the children in almost 100% of cases, and will often get ongoing financial benefits from her former husband. So, the man comes away feeling like the house that was his home and which was supposedly equally his has been more or less stolen from him, and now it's hers, yet he still has to pay for it. This ensures he'll almost certainly never be able to have that standard of living again (although his ex-wife will), and he will feel that his children, who he loved, have been taken from him (visitation is BS, men know darned well that getting to see their children occasionally doesn't allow them to be a real parent any more), and he is likely no longer in a financial position to be able to start another family and have other children, because a huge chunk of his income is going to support the home and family he had that he feels his ex-wife has stolen from him.
Consider that there are many men in this situation, and they talk to their friends, including their single male friends. Also, their children watch all this, and their male children grow up watching their father try to scrape together his life and try to put together a little dignity and find some source of happiness, and never quite succeed in being what they used to be. Adult men see their fathers unable to retire because they were ruined financially for life by the divorce and the associated financial demands, so the fathers will have to work themselves to death. How do you think that makes a young man feel about women?
If you want men to lose this harsh perspective of women, we need as a culture to carefully examine divorce as we know it and start making changes to our culture and legal system so that men don't keep ending up feeling that they have been changed from husbands and fathers to slaves-to-their-ex-wives, and don't end up teaching others that they too could end up like this.
Chewing out men for feeling that way isn't part of the solution.
Gay people are perfectly capable of having children and often do. Go to any major american city's gay pride parade and you'll see a large troupe of gay and lesbian parents marching with their children. We're just less likely to do so, because of a number of reasons prominently including worry that heterosexuals will try to take our children away from us, and the fact that since heterosexuals don't let us marry, it's more financially and legally difficult for us to have children.
Furthermore, the whole "if the world was entirely gay" BS is a strawman argument; it hasn't happened, it isn't going to happen, grow up.That's not what evolutionary biologists have to say about it. What seems to be the case is that having gay children benefits other children in the extended family because as they become adults the gay people would likely be interested in being an additional caretaker and provider for the heterosexuals in the family, thus improving their chance to survive to reproduce.
We gay people are here, we're not going to tolerate repression any more, and you have no choice but to live with the fact. So start dealing with it.
I simply don't tell the people who work for me what my educational background is or how many years of experience I have, until they ask. Somebody will eventually ask, but it has been my experience that they tend to do so after they're already marveling at the depth of my knowledge of the job and the fact that I'm obviously looking after their well being.
If I walked into an IT department and didn't know anything about IT but took over as manager, I would expect the staff to resent me whether or not I had a degree. But, when I walk into any situation to take over, I know exactly what I'm doing - otherwise I wouldn't accept the responsibility in the first place. So they never resent me, because they can see I've earned my position and I treat them well.