The software redefined the semantics of "discard" without informing the user.
What happened to him is certainly not a good situation, but I don't see how VSCode is redefining anything here.
You reference Git, but Git's discard action is presented as discarding changes, whereas he describes being presented with a prompt to discard his files and didn't pay enough attention to realize the difference. While I'm sympathetic to his situation, "discard" is defined as "To throw away; reject", which is exactly what happens both in Git and VSCode. It's just a matter of what's being discarded.
In the end, the problem here is entirely of the PEBKAC variety. Moreover, as developers we have access to powerful and destructive tools. If you don't know your tools well enough to use them safely, don't use them with anything that you'd be upset if you lost. A developer who doesn't know that and doesn't take proper precautions is a developer who's getting closer one day at a time to when they'll learn that lesson the hard way.
what is the difference if the police ask you to unlock your phone and you refuse?
It's similar to the distinction we make in cryptography between what you know and what you have.
Generally speaking, what you know is protected by the 5th Amendment. They cannot compel you to testify against yourself. What you have is not protected by the 5th Amendment. It's material evidence that can be used against you in a court of law.
Provided they have a valid warrant, the police still need a means to execute a search that doesn't rely on compelling you to share something you know. For years, that meant they had nothing they could ask us for, since all we had were passcodes, and they couldn't compel us to turn those over (which led to the false belief that they couldn't compel us to turn over anything at all that would allow access). But the police have the right to collect material evidence, such as a fingerprint, and use it in the pursuit of their investigation. And they have a right to access the contents of the phone. If it just so happens that your device is locked by something material, that's a shame for you, but it's not testimony: it's simply evidence that can be used against you. It's no different than having a key on you that can open a safe.
And really, when you think about it, this all makes sense. If the police weren't allowed to use material evidence that you were forced to provide against your will, we'd find ourselves in a bizarre world where pretty much any material evidence collected from a defendant (e.g. DNA, fingerprint, blood, etc.) would be inadmissible. After all, who would consent to "testifying against themselves" by allowing a DNA sample or fingerprint to be collected that could place them at the scene of the crime? In fact, it'd be so far reaching that we wouldn't even be able to seat the defendant in the courtroom against their will, since the jury may recognize that the person in the security footage is the same as the person sitting at the defendant's table, or an eyewitness may be able to point at them to confirm that they are the same person. They would, effectively, be "testifying against themselves" by being forced to provide something they have—their physical appearance—that can be used against them.
Thankfully, this is a case where common sense won out in the courts, since the courts have repeatedly held that material evidence is not testimonial in nature, and thus is not protected so far as the 5th is concerned. In fact, most of those examples I just gave are ones that the Supreme Court or appellate courts have mentioned in the major cases addressing the topic of what is or isn't covered by the 5th (usual disclaimer: IANAL).
All of which is to say, the courts have made a pretty clear distinction between testimonial and material evidence. Passcodes are protected under the 5th because they're testimonial in nature, whereas biometrics are protected solely under the 4th because they are material in nature. You can use either method to lock your phone, but the 4th is a significantly weaker form of legal protection than the 5th, so which you choose to use will come down to how you balance security and convenience.
I'm not sure what you were trying to disagree with in what I said, but I specifically used military craft as an example, so, yes, I know it exists. I even said so.
And a backup to that could be to gradually leak micro-beads with a distinct chemical signature that would float to the top to leave a trail. That way if the broadcasting electronics are damaged, there is a secondary way to find sunken planes.
Modern black boxes are already designed to emit an ultrasonic pulse that can be picked up via acoustic locating equipment. It starts once the black box hits the water, occurs once per second for the next 30-40 days, and should be able to be picked up from 2000-3000m away under typical conditions, or even further if the conditions are good. Even so, most regulatory agencies are already bumping the battery life up, just because 30 days was viewed as too few after MH370.
Really, when you get down to it, our society's record for locating black boxes is remarkably good. Since the 1960s when they were introduced, we've had thousands of crashes, many of which would have involved recovering the black box, yet we've only failed to do so—or took a long time to do so—in a few dozen of those cases (here's an incomplete list). As such, there hasn't been much pressure to rely on a satellite uplink or similar system, given that they're significantly more expensive to produce, much more complex (more parts that can fail), and most of them would require ongoing support and maintenance costs (e.g. something on the ground that collects the data).
Even so, the UN's regulatory agency that covers this stuff (the ICAO) has already mandated that by 2020, all new planes are required to have some method to ensure that the black box data is recoverable in case of a crash, whether by ejecting the box before the crash (like military craft) or through continuous transmission to the ground over the course of the flight, so these sorts of issues will hopefully be things of the past in a few more years.
Actually, the article isn't about P=NP or not in general. [T]he summary [...] specifically states that this P!=NP is proved only for a (very) specific problem.
All it takes to prove once and for all that P!=NP in general is a single counterexample to the claim that P=NP. If you can prove that P!=NP for any problem, you would have succeeded in proving that P!=NP at all, given that you showed there was an item in P that does not exist in NP.
It's like if I claimed that all hamsters are brown. Even a single counterexample would be sufficient to disprove my claim in general. Sure, there may be plenty of examples of brown hamsters, but proving that even one non-brown hamster exists would be sufficient to disprove the notion that ALL hamsters are brown. Likewise, just because some P problems can be solved in polynomial time (i.e. we know there's overlap between the P and NP sets, just like we know that many hamsters are brown), being able to prove that even a single counterexample exists would prove that the two aren't the same.
B) Anything Apple produces will be in their walled garden. While Apple products are generally my preferred hardware, even I almost always stay away from their media content, since I want my media to be available in as many places and ways as possible.
C) Some things are better left behind. While I would have LOVED more Firefly, going back to it now wouldn't be the same. It would make the season we have less special. I'd rather keep my nostalgia intact.
The problem isn't the research. The problem is the sloppy reporting about the research.
For my part, I'd hypothesize that the more likely trigger is something else that is responsible for driving BOTH energy drink use and substance abuse. For instance, people who have their lives together generally have no reason to turn to energy drinks; they've structured their lives so that they don't need them. On the other hand, many folks are poor at sleep and time management, resulting in more stress as they move from one matter that they've allowed to become unnecessarily urgent to the next unnecessarily urgent matter. Energy drink use would be a natural result in that situation for many people, as would turning to other mind altering substances to alleviate the underlying stress.
Again, the research did nothing to suggest a causation, so it's possible my little theory may one day be proven right (or not), but sloppy headlines suggest conclusions beyond those that are backed by science.
Yes, it does. The Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that it's impossible to enjoy the rights of the First Amendment without having it, so it too is a right that exists as a natural byproduct of the First Amendment. As an example, in Alabama v. NAACP they said that without the freedom to associate with whom we choose, we are incapable of exercising the right to free speech. Since we have the right to free speech, we must therefore also have the right to freely associate.
You are calling for this right when the excluded person is an alleged murderer and neo-nazi. Would you be so quick to call for this right if he were excluded because he is black or gay or Mexican?
You're seriously asking whether I consider discrimination against a protected class to be the same as discriminating against people on the basis of their espousing and practicing violence? If you can't see the obvious differences between the two and understand why one is perfectly acceptable while the other isn't, I have nothing more to say.
We all need to be guarding the other's rights no matter how repugnant the other's opinions (or actions) are to us.
Here's the thing: we certainly should fight for the rights of those with whom we disagree, but we must also never allow ourselves to be convinced that it's a violation of their rights if we exercise our right to not associate with them. By my count, exactly zero of his rights are being violated.
In fact, if we were to compel the various online services to serve those people, we'd be violating their right to associate (or not) with whomever they choose. As private individuals and companies, they have a right to not associate themselves with neo-Nazis, so while the defendant certainly has the rights you listed, and while we certainly should fight for those rights, that doesn't mean he's entitled to use private platforms developed by private companies. The fact that others of us are able to do so is a privilege, not a right; if he wants to enjoy those privileges, he must play by the rules they've set up, just like the rest of us.
He and those supporting him are not abiding by the rules of those services, so they're rightly being shut down. In no way is that a violation of his rights. It's simply those services exercising their rights.
Refusing to rent out your platform is not the same thing as censorship. They can still find their own way to get their word out. They can go build their own platform from which to shout hateful things. No one is stopping them, but by that same token, no private individual is under any sort of obligation to assist them in any way. Similarly, no one can be compelled to be a participant in their speech.
If you have a problem with that, go build your own platform. The biggest enemy to the free speech of nut jobs isn't the left: it's their false sense of entitlement that they are owed something by people and companies that actually owe them nothing.
I would sue GoDaddy with extreme prejudice if I was this lady.
If you were that lady you would be dead after being run over by a white supremacist, though you'd have one less neo-Nazi site disparaging your reputation online, so there's that small comfort.
Corporations are free to encourage or discourage a particular use of their services in order to try to ensure that their product ends up being what they want it to be. If you don't like what they're selling, vote with your wallet and go elsewhere.
When I was a kid, I was taught to distrust phone calls from anyone I didn't recognize, even if they claimed they were from a business with which we had a relationship. After all, how do we know it's actually them, and not someone else posing as them to steal credit card info, account codes, or other private information? We'd listen to what they had to say, but unless they verified their identity in some way, we wouldn't give them any information. If we wanted to follow up or act on anything they said, we would hang up and then call the phone number we had on file, that way we could be assured we were talking to the right people.
E-mails are not really that much different. I'll read through a message that looks like it may be phishy, but I won't click any of the links, even if they look legit (spoofing with Unicode characters is too hard to detect). If there's something the e-mail said that I want to follow up on, I'll go to my browser and go to the site myself to check on what they said. For anything that's truly pressing (e.g. breach of terms), you can be fairly certain that they'll make that info easy to find by simply logging in and checking for new messages/notifications/warnings/etc..
So why did he start handing out pamphlets instead of telling his manager to stop trying to hire women?
A) There's no "instead of" here. He sat down with Google's HR department to discuss his concerns over what he believed were illegal hiring practices taking place within Google in addition to writing the document that was leaked.
B) He never suggested Google should stop hiring women. Rather, he suggested that Google's hiring practices apply a lower standard to minority job candidates, and he called for them to either correct the imbalances or put an end to those policies altogether, that way all candidates are judged by the same criteria.
He was free to express his opinion, they were free to fire him.
With regards to the latter statement, not necessarily
He said he was aware of illegal hiring practices at Google (see page 6, footnote 6), so them firing him days later could be viewed as retaliation against a whistleblower, which is an illegal reason to fire someone in California.
Also, he identified himself on page 2 as a "classical liberal" (including with that link), not a conservative.
Moreover, he recommended against Google continuing what he is saying are illegal hiring practices that, contrary to California laws against affirmative action, disproportionately favor minorities. He's calling for the same standard to be applied to all candidates, rather than for some to be measured against a more lenient standard, as he's suggesting is currently the case. That, in and of itself, is not a bigoted statement, since calling for equal treatment is not bigotry, though I'll agree with what I assume would be your viewpoint that a bigot would use those same arguments as a guise to push their agenda.
Agreed, racism is wrong, regardless of the justifications used, though a recognition of scientifically verifiable biological differences does not make someone a racist. It makes them factual. That those facts can also be used to support racist ideologies is most certainly a problem that needs addressing, but it's a problem that we deal with by attacking the ideology, not the facts (though feel free to attack "facts"). We mustn't allow ourselves to get in the habit of denying inconvenient facts.
As for the case at hand, he suggested that because Google was institutionally blinded by its own ideologies, it's been incorrectly ascribing the entirety of the gender imbalance and diversity issues to problems with discrimination. He was trying to dispel that notion by pointing to a number of other causes for the gender imbalance issue, among them being his suggestion that the different genders exhibit different traits that predispose them towards different things, which he backed up with citations to various scientific publications.
His citing those publications isn't bigoted, in and of itself, but if he used them to make a bigoted argument, that would certainly be problematic and well worth attacking. I don't believe he necessarily did so (though I do think there are plenty of other flaws in what he wrote), but others are welcome to disagree.
Having actually read his paper, I don't recall that part. Could you point it out to me?
He alleged that Google was engaging in illegal hiring practices that disproportionately favored minorities in ways that California law specifically disallows, and he strongly suggested that the result of those hiring practices was that some candidates who were inferior regardless of their gender were nonetheless hired because of their gender. Put differently, he's saying that Google engaged in a form of affirmative action by lowering the bar for minorities, which is illegal, and ended up hiring less qualified candidates as a result, gender be damned.
Most of his arguments regarding the biological differences between the genders were aimed at dispelling the notion that gender imbalance in an organization is always the fault of discrimination within that organization. He admits that organizational discrimination plays a role, but he was trying to make the point that there are other causes at play—of which the differences in biological predispositions towards certain traits is just one—and that Google has over-emphasized discrimination to the point that it's engaging in illegal behavior, while under-emphasizing other causes for gender imbalances in the workplace, despite having the ability to develop fixes for them.
Whistleblowing implies that he was disclosing potentially illegal activity that google was engaging in.
Which is exactly what he did. You apparently missed the footnote on page 6 where he specifically claimed to have seen Google engaging in illegal hiring practices. Here's the quote (emphasis mine):
6 Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.
going so far as to assert the hypothesis that women were biologically not suited for the work crossed a line.
No, he neither asserted nor hypothesized that claim. I've seen that claim incorrectly repeated as people have tried to shove those words in his mouth, but what he actually said was that, speaking in generalities, different genders are biologically predisposed to different traits. He never said that those differences make a given gender unsuitable for a job, nor that they make any particular person unsuitable. Far from it, in fact, as he made it clear that he believes there's a great deal of overlap between the genders when it comes to those traits, and as such he called for assessing people as the individuals they are, regardless of gender.
He did however say that those predispositions are at least in part responsible for why we see gender imbalances in various industries. He also put forward several other causes that are partially responsible for the gender imbalances within any given industry, including cultural pressure to conform to stereotypes, discrimination (which he admits is a problem), and (the topic he spent a lot of time addressing) a lowering of standards as a sort of affirmative action/reverse discrimination.
As best I can figure, the people incorrectly parroting what you said are failing to understand the distinction between: A) Saying some people are unsuited because of their biology B) Saying some people who were unqualified for other reasons were allowed in because of their biology
He never said (A), whether explicitly or implicitly, but he strongly implied (B) when he said that he had personally seen Google engage in illegal hiring practices by lowering the bar for people from various minorities, and he called for Google to end that practice while embracing a common bar against which to judge all job candidates.
Now, I certainly don't agree with everything he said, nor do I agree with the way he said some of the things that I happen to agree with, nor do I think he did a great job of citing all of his claims (e.g. what the hell was up with his footnote about Marxists?), but if you're going to disagree with him, don't use straw men arguments. Attack the things that he actually said, rather than whatever you read via a secondhand source, which it's quite clear is where you got your information, given that he actually did cite research to back up most of his scientific claims. The whole thing only takes a few minutes to read, even with the tables, footnotes, and citations that were left out of the incomplete copies that a lot of the early knee-jerk reactions were in response to.
Apple had to downgrade the iPhone 7S to be as slow as the 7S+.
That's almost correct, except that neither of those models actually exist (yet?), and the modems in the 7 and 7 Plus models differed by carrier, not by the size of the phone. But I do agree that Intel's modem is inferior.
They also invented CDMA, which is the entire underlying tech of 3G networks
If you were to slap about a dozen asterisks on that statement to spell out all of the caveats, you might be able to get away with saying things that way, but if that's all you're going to say, then no, they didn't, and no, it isn't.
Assuming you're talking about CDMA2000, it was, at best, the underlying tech for a small minority of 3G networks (though some Americans have a disproportionate sense of its use, given that half of our 3G networks used it). UTMS on GSM networks was far and away the dominant 3G tech. If, on the other hand, you were talking about the concept of CDMA, which UTMS is built on in some of its implementations, that concept has been around in research since at least the '30s and has had implementations since at least the '50s. I was studying it in school before 3G networks were even a thing, so while it does underpin many 3G networks, Qualcomm had no hand in inventing it.
But Apple sued second
[Qualcomm's] chips are in pretty much every high-end phone. [...] Qualcomm is the undisputed king of the wireless modem.
FTFY. The US government's suit against Qualcomm, which came prior to Apple's suit, would suggest that the reason they're in every high-end phone is at least partly due to anticompetitive practices.
[Apple] said effectively "we're gong to keep selling iphones with both your actual chips, and your IP, and we're not going to pay anything anymore, even thoug you're charging what we contractually agreed to."
Actually, Apple is holding the payment in bond pending the court's determination of whether the contract is even legal in the first place, which is a fair question to be asking, given that recent Supeme Court rulings and the USG's suit would suggest otherwise. Also, if you'll recall, the withholding of royalty payments started weeks after the suit was filed, and came in response to Qualcomm not paying them the $1 billion in rebates it's contractually obligated to pay. And unlike Apple, they haven't, so far as I know, said that they're holding those payments in bond. They're simply refusing to pay them.
Let's be honest: they're both playing hardball, but suggesting Apple was first to break the contract is factually incorrect.
So heck yeah Qualcomm is right to sue back in that case and ask for an injunction.
This is the sort of dispute the ITC should definitely examine, from all sides.
Something we can finally agree on. I'm fine with Apple being under scrutiny, especially since I agree that they're breaking the contract too, but let's not overstate Qualcomm's case.
You say you "get" that other companies have in-house brands, but I don't think you actually do, given that you're suggesting Amazon is doing something different—something "insidious"—when really its no different than what everyone else has been doing all along.
Whether we're talking Walmart, Sears, Kroger, or pretty much any other national or regional chain, they all have access to the data you're talking about, and they're all leveraging it in the exact same way when they launch their puffed pice cereals, mattresses, and washing machines to compete with the name brands. The only thing Amazon is doing differently is that they're doing it online. Their practices (at least in this area) are no more nor less insidious than those of the brick and mortar places who came before.
Millarworld, founded by Mark Millar from Coatbridge, includes his portfolio of characters and stories such as Kick-Ass, Kingsman, and Old Man Logan.
While Millar certainly wrote the Old Man Logan storyline, I don't see how Millarworld could own the rights to it, given that he did the work for Marvel and used their characters extensively in the story. Seems like the BBC is reporting things incorrectly, but am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
The software redefined the semantics of "discard" without informing the user.
What happened to him is certainly not a good situation, but I don't see how VSCode is redefining anything here.
You reference Git, but Git's discard action is presented as discarding changes, whereas he describes being presented with a prompt to discard his files and didn't pay enough attention to realize the difference. While I'm sympathetic to his situation, "discard" is defined as "To throw away; reject", which is exactly what happens both in Git and VSCode. It's just a matter of what's being discarded.
In the end, the problem here is entirely of the PEBKAC variety. Moreover, as developers we have access to powerful and destructive tools. If you don't know your tools well enough to use them safely, don't use them with anything that you'd be upset if you lost. A developer who doesn't know that and doesn't take proper precautions is a developer who's getting closer one day at a time to when they'll learn that lesson the hard way.
what is the difference if the police ask you to unlock your phone and you refuse?
It's similar to the distinction we make in cryptography between what you know and what you have.
Generally speaking, what you know is protected by the 5th Amendment. They cannot compel you to testify against yourself. What you have is not protected by the 5th Amendment. It's material evidence that can be used against you in a court of law.
Provided they have a valid warrant, the police still need a means to execute a search that doesn't rely on compelling you to share something you know. For years, that meant they had nothing they could ask us for, since all we had were passcodes, and they couldn't compel us to turn those over (which led to the false belief that they couldn't compel us to turn over anything at all that would allow access). But the police have the right to collect material evidence, such as a fingerprint, and use it in the pursuit of their investigation. And they have a right to access the contents of the phone. If it just so happens that your device is locked by something material, that's a shame for you, but it's not testimony: it's simply evidence that can be used against you. It's no different than having a key on you that can open a safe.
And really, when you think about it, this all makes sense. If the police weren't allowed to use material evidence that you were forced to provide against your will, we'd find ourselves in a bizarre world where pretty much any material evidence collected from a defendant (e.g. DNA, fingerprint, blood, etc.) would be inadmissible. After all, who would consent to "testifying against themselves" by allowing a DNA sample or fingerprint to be collected that could place them at the scene of the crime? In fact, it'd be so far reaching that we wouldn't even be able to seat the defendant in the courtroom against their will, since the jury may recognize that the person in the security footage is the same as the person sitting at the defendant's table, or an eyewitness may be able to point at them to confirm that they are the same person. They would, effectively, be "testifying against themselves" by being forced to provide something they have—their physical appearance—that can be used against them.
Thankfully, this is a case where common sense won out in the courts, since the courts have repeatedly held that material evidence is not testimonial in nature, and thus is not protected so far as the 5th is concerned. In fact, most of those examples I just gave are ones that the Supreme Court or appellate courts have mentioned in the major cases addressing the topic of what is or isn't covered by the 5th (usual disclaimer: IANAL).
All of which is to say, the courts have made a pretty clear distinction between testimonial and material evidence. Passcodes are protected under the 5th because they're testimonial in nature, whereas biometrics are protected solely under the 4th because they are material in nature. You can use either method to lock your phone, but the 4th is a significantly weaker form of legal protection than the 5th, so which you choose to use will come down to how you balance security and convenience.
I'm not sure what you were trying to disagree with in what I said, but I specifically used military craft as an example, so, yes, I know it exists. I even said so.
And a backup to that could be to gradually leak micro-beads with a distinct chemical signature that would float to the top to leave a trail. That way if the broadcasting electronics are damaged, there is a secondary way to find sunken planes.
Modern black boxes are already designed to emit an ultrasonic pulse that can be picked up via acoustic locating equipment. It starts once the black box hits the water, occurs once per second for the next 30-40 days, and should be able to be picked up from 2000-3000m away under typical conditions, or even further if the conditions are good. Even so, most regulatory agencies are already bumping the battery life up, just because 30 days was viewed as too few after MH370.
Really, when you get down to it, our society's record for locating black boxes is remarkably good. Since the 1960s when they were introduced, we've had thousands of crashes, many of which would have involved recovering the black box, yet we've only failed to do so—or took a long time to do so—in a few dozen of those cases (here's an incomplete list). As such, there hasn't been much pressure to rely on a satellite uplink or similar system, given that they're significantly more expensive to produce, much more complex (more parts that can fail), and most of them would require ongoing support and maintenance costs (e.g. something on the ground that collects the data).
Even so, the UN's regulatory agency that covers this stuff (the ICAO) has already mandated that by 2020, all new planes are required to have some method to ensure that the black box data is recoverable in case of a crash, whether by ejecting the box before the crash (like military craft) or through continuous transmission to the ground over the course of the flight, so these sorts of issues will hopefully be things of the past in a few more years.
Yup. That's why I picked it as my analogy. I knew the counterexamples were well known.
Actually, the article isn't about P=NP or not in general. [T]he summary [...] specifically states that this P!=NP is proved only for a (very) specific problem.
All it takes to prove once and for all that P!=NP in general is a single counterexample to the claim that P=NP. If you can prove that P!=NP for any problem, you would have succeeded in proving that P!=NP at all, given that you showed there was an item in P that does not exist in NP.
It's like if I claimed that all hamsters are brown. Even a single counterexample would be sufficient to disprove my claim in general. Sure, there may be plenty of examples of brown hamsters, but proving that even one non-brown hamster exists would be sufficient to disprove the notion that ALL hamsters are brown. Likewise, just because some P problems can be solved in polynomial time (i.e. we know there's overlap between the P and NP sets, just like we know that many hamsters are brown), being able to prove that even a single counterexample exists would prove that the two aren't the same.
...you say, based off the three minutes of evidence between when the story was posted and when you commented.
A) We already got Serenity. The story is done.
B) Anything Apple produces will be in their walled garden. While Apple products are generally my preferred hardware, even I almost always stay away from their media content, since I want my media to be available in as many places and ways as possible.
C) Some things are better left behind. While I would have LOVED more Firefly, going back to it now wouldn't be the same. It would make the season we have less special. I'd rather keep my nostalgia intact.
The problem isn't the research. The problem is the sloppy reporting about the research.
For my part, I'd hypothesize that the more likely trigger is something else that is responsible for driving BOTH energy drink use and substance abuse. For instance, people who have their lives together generally have no reason to turn to energy drinks; they've structured their lives so that they don't need them. On the other hand, many folks are poor at sleep and time management, resulting in more stress as they move from one matter that they've allowed to become unnecessarily urgent to the next unnecessarily urgent matter. Energy drink use would be a natural result in that situation for many people, as would turning to other mind altering substances to alleviate the underlying stress.
Again, the research did nothing to suggest a causation, so it's possible my little theory may one day be proven right (or not), but sloppy headlines suggest conclusions beyond those that are backed by science.
This "right" does not exist in many states.
Yes, it does. The Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that it's impossible to enjoy the rights of the First Amendment without having it, so it too is a right that exists as a natural byproduct of the First Amendment. As an example, in Alabama v. NAACP they said that without the freedom to associate with whom we choose, we are incapable of exercising the right to free speech. Since we have the right to free speech, we must therefore also have the right to freely associate.
You are calling for this right when the excluded person is an alleged murderer and neo-nazi. Would you be so quick to call for this right if he were excluded because he is black or gay or Mexican?
You're seriously asking whether I consider discrimination against a protected class to be the same as discriminating against people on the basis of their espousing and practicing violence? If you can't see the obvious differences between the two and understand why one is perfectly acceptable while the other isn't, I have nothing more to say.
We all need to be guarding the other's rights no matter how repugnant the other's opinions (or actions) are to us.
Here's the thing: we certainly should fight for the rights of those with whom we disagree, but we must also never allow ourselves to be convinced that it's a violation of their rights if we exercise our right to not associate with them. By my count, exactly zero of his rights are being violated.
In fact, if we were to compel the various online services to serve those people, we'd be violating their right to associate (or not) with whomever they choose. As private individuals and companies, they have a right to not associate themselves with neo-Nazis, so while the defendant certainly has the rights you listed, and while we certainly should fight for those rights, that doesn't mean he's entitled to use private platforms developed by private companies. The fact that others of us are able to do so is a privilege, not a right; if he wants to enjoy those privileges, he must play by the rules they've set up, just like the rest of us.
He and those supporting him are not abiding by the rules of those services, so they're rightly being shut down. In no way is that a violation of his rights. It's simply those services exercising their rights.
Refusing to rent out your platform is not the same thing as censorship. They can still find their own way to get their word out. They can go build their own platform from which to shout hateful things. No one is stopping them, but by that same token, no private individual is under any sort of obligation to assist them in any way. Similarly, no one can be compelled to be a participant in their speech.
If you have a problem with that, go build your own platform. The biggest enemy to the free speech of nut jobs isn't the left: it's their false sense of entitlement that they are owed something by people and companies that actually owe them nothing.
I would sue GoDaddy with extreme prejudice if I was this lady.
If you were that lady you would be dead after being run over by a white supremacist, though you'd have one less neo-Nazi site disparaging your reputation online, so there's that small comfort.
Corporations are free to encourage or discourage a particular use of their services in order to try to ensure that their product ends up being what they want it to be. If you don't like what they're selling, vote with your wallet and go elsewhere.
When I was a kid, I was taught to distrust phone calls from anyone I didn't recognize, even if they claimed they were from a business with which we had a relationship. After all, how do we know it's actually them, and not someone else posing as them to steal credit card info, account codes, or other private information? We'd listen to what they had to say, but unless they verified their identity in some way, we wouldn't give them any information. If we wanted to follow up or act on anything they said, we would hang up and then call the phone number we had on file, that way we could be assured we were talking to the right people.
E-mails are not really that much different. I'll read through a message that looks like it may be phishy, but I won't click any of the links, even if they look legit (spoofing with Unicode characters is too hard to detect). If there's something the e-mail said that I want to follow up on, I'll go to my browser and go to the site myself to check on what they said. For anything that's truly pressing (e.g. breach of terms), you can be fairly certain that they'll make that info easy to find by simply logging in and checking for new messages/notifications/warnings/etc..
So why did he start handing out pamphlets instead of telling his manager to stop trying to hire women?
A) There's no "instead of" here. He sat down with Google's HR department to discuss his concerns over what he believed were illegal hiring practices taking place within Google in addition to writing the document that was leaked.
B) He never suggested Google should stop hiring women. Rather, he suggested that Google's hiring practices apply a lower standard to minority job candidates, and he called for them to either correct the imbalances or put an end to those policies altogether, that way all candidates are judged by the same criteria.
He was free to express his opinion, they were free to fire him.
With regards to the latter statement, not necessarily
He said he was aware of illegal hiring practices at Google (see page 6, footnote 6), so them firing him days later could be viewed as retaliation against a whistleblower, which is an illegal reason to fire someone in California.
Also, he identified himself on page 2 as a "classical liberal" (including with that link), not a conservative.
He actually didn't use any citations of scientific publications, that may be where some quotes originated but no sources are shown.
Perhaps you read one of the early, incomplete copies of the document that circulated late last week, rather than the original, full document that he published internally (it wasn't an e-mail), which contained footnotes and citations? In just a quick skim, I found that he linked to at least five separate papers in the first six pages alone, as well as including numerous additional links to articles, Wikipedia, and other sources that he used to back up his points or clarify the way he was using various phrases.
Moreover, he recommended against Google continuing what he is saying are illegal hiring practices that, contrary to California laws against affirmative action, disproportionately favor minorities. He's calling for the same standard to be applied to all candidates, rather than for some to be measured against a more lenient standard, as he's suggesting is currently the case. That, in and of itself, is not a bigoted statement, since calling for equal treatment is not bigotry, though I'll agree with what I assume would be your viewpoint that a bigot would use those same arguments as a guise to push their agenda.
Agreed, racism is wrong, regardless of the justifications used, though a recognition of scientifically verifiable biological differences does not make someone a racist. It makes them factual. That those facts can also be used to support racist ideologies is most certainly a problem that needs addressing, but it's a problem that we deal with by attacking the ideology, not the facts (though feel free to attack "facts"). We mustn't allow ourselves to get in the habit of denying inconvenient facts.
As for the case at hand, he suggested that because Google was institutionally blinded by its own ideologies, it's been incorrectly ascribing the entirety of the gender imbalance and diversity issues to problems with discrimination. He was trying to dispel that notion by pointing to a number of other causes for the gender imbalance issue, among them being his suggestion that the different genders exhibit different traits that predispose them towards different things, which he backed up with citations to various scientific publications.
His citing those publications isn't bigoted, in and of itself, but if he used them to make a bigoted argument, that would certainly be problematic and well worth attacking. I don't believe he necessarily did so (though I do think there are plenty of other flaws in what he wrote), but others are welcome to disagree.
he said that women are inferior engineers
Having actually read his paper, I don't recall that part. Could you point it out to me?
He alleged that Google was engaging in illegal hiring practices that disproportionately favored minorities in ways that California law specifically disallows, and he strongly suggested that the result of those hiring practices was that some candidates who were inferior regardless of their gender were nonetheless hired because of their gender. Put differently, he's saying that Google engaged in a form of affirmative action by lowering the bar for minorities, which is illegal, and ended up hiring less qualified candidates as a result, gender be damned.
Most of his arguments regarding the biological differences between the genders were aimed at dispelling the notion that gender imbalance in an organization is always the fault of discrimination within that organization. He admits that organizational discrimination plays a role, but he was trying to make the point that there are other causes at play—of which the differences in biological predispositions towards certain traits is just one—and that Google has over-emphasized discrimination to the point that it's engaging in illegal behavior, while under-emphasizing other causes for gender imbalances in the workplace, despite having the ability to develop fixes for them.
Whistleblowing implies that he was disclosing potentially illegal activity that google was engaging in.
Which is exactly what he did. You apparently missed the footnote on page 6 where he specifically claimed to have seen Google engaging in illegal hiring practices. Here's the quote (emphasis mine):
6 Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.
going so far as to assert the hypothesis that women were biologically not suited for the work crossed a line.
No, he neither asserted nor hypothesized that claim. I've seen that claim incorrectly repeated as people have tried to shove those words in his mouth, but what he actually said was that, speaking in generalities, different genders are biologically predisposed to different traits. He never said that those differences make a given gender unsuitable for a job, nor that they make any particular person unsuitable. Far from it, in fact, as he made it clear that he believes there's a great deal of overlap between the genders when it comes to those traits, and as such he called for assessing people as the individuals they are, regardless of gender.
He did however say that those predispositions are at least in part responsible for why we see gender imbalances in various industries. He also put forward several other causes that are partially responsible for the gender imbalances within any given industry, including cultural pressure to conform to stereotypes, discrimination (which he admits is a problem), and (the topic he spent a lot of time addressing) a lowering of standards as a sort of affirmative action/reverse discrimination.
As best I can figure, the people incorrectly parroting what you said are failing to understand the distinction between:
A) Saying some people are unsuited because of their biology
B) Saying some people who were unqualified for other reasons were allowed in because of their biology
He never said (A), whether explicitly or implicitly, but he strongly implied (B) when he said that he had personally seen Google engage in illegal hiring practices by lowering the bar for people from various minorities, and he called for Google to end that practice while embracing a common bar against which to judge all job candidates.
Now, I certainly don't agree with everything he said, nor do I agree with the way he said some of the things that I happen to agree with, nor do I think he did a great job of citing all of his claims (e.g. what the hell was up with his footnote about Marxists?), but if you're going to disagree with him, don't use straw men arguments. Attack the things that he actually said, rather than whatever you read via a secondhand source, which it's quite clear is where you got your information, given that he actually did cite research to back up most of his scientific claims. The whole thing only takes a few minutes to read, even with the tables, footnotes, and citations that were left out of the incomplete copies that a lot of the early knee-jerk reactions were in response to.
Apple had to downgrade the iPhone 7S to be as slow as the 7S+.
That's almost correct, except that neither of those models actually exist (yet?), and the modems in the 7 and 7 Plus models differed by carrier, not by the size of the phone. But I do agree that Intel's modem is inferior.
They also invented CDMA, which is the entire underlying tech of 3G networks
If you were to slap about a dozen asterisks on that statement to spell out all of the caveats, you might be able to get away with saying things that way, but if that's all you're going to say, then no, they didn't, and no, it isn't.
Assuming you're talking about CDMA2000, it was, at best, the underlying tech for a small minority of 3G networks (though some Americans have a disproportionate sense of its use, given that half of our 3G networks used it). UTMS on GSM networks was far and away the dominant 3G tech. If, on the other hand, you were talking about the concept of CDMA, which UTMS is built on in some of its implementations, that concept has been around in research since at least the '30s and has had implementations since at least the '50s. I was studying it in school before 3G networks were even a thing, so while it does underpin many 3G networks, Qualcomm had no hand in inventing it.
But Apple sued second
[Qualcomm's] chips are in pretty much every high-end phone. [...] Qualcomm is the undisputed king of the wireless modem.
FTFY. The US government's suit against Qualcomm, which came prior to Apple's suit, would suggest that the reason they're in every high-end phone is at least partly due to anticompetitive practices.
[Apple] said effectively "we're gong to keep selling iphones with both your actual chips, and your IP, and we're not going to pay anything anymore, even thoug you're charging what we contractually agreed to."
Actually, Apple is holding the payment in bond pending the court's determination of whether the contract is even legal in the first place, which is a fair question to be asking, given that recent Supeme Court rulings and the USG's suit would suggest otherwise. Also, if you'll recall, the withholding of royalty payments started weeks after the suit was filed, and came in response to Qualcomm not paying them the $1 billion in rebates it's contractually obligated to pay. And unlike Apple, they haven't, so far as I know, said that they're holding those payments in bond. They're simply refusing to pay them.
Let's be honest: they're both playing hardball, but suggesting Apple was first to break the contract is factually incorrect.
So heck yeah Qualcomm is right to sue back in that case and ask for an injunction.
This is the sort of dispute the ITC should definitely examine, from all sides.
Something we can finally agree on. I'm fine with Apple being under scrutiny, especially since I agree that they're breaking the contract too, but let's not overstate Qualcomm's case.
It does not contain people I don't like, or don't agree with.
It sounds as if Google's lists do, hence why most people wouldn't have a problem with your lists, but would have a problem with Google's.
You say you "get" that other companies have in-house brands, but I don't think you actually do, given that you're suggesting Amazon is doing something different—something "insidious"—when really its no different than what everyone else has been doing all along.
Whether we're talking Walmart, Sears, Kroger, or pretty much any other national or regional chain, they all have access to the data you're talking about, and they're all leveraging it in the exact same way when they launch their puffed pice cereals, mattresses, and washing machines to compete with the name brands. The only thing Amazon is doing differently is that they're doing it online. Their practices (at least in this area) are no more nor less insidious than those of the brick and mortar places who came before.
Millarworld, founded by Mark Millar from Coatbridge, includes his portfolio of characters and stories such as Kick-Ass, Kingsman, and Old Man Logan.
While Millar certainly wrote the Old Man Logan storyline, I don't see how Millarworld could own the rights to it, given that he did the work for Marvel and used their characters extensively in the story. Seems like the BBC is reporting things incorrectly, but am I missing something?