Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.
It is necessary for HR and hiring personnel to be bigoted . . . otherwise diversity cannot be achieved.
Diversity is necessary for folks who cannot compete in a system based on equality.
Diversity means that some people need to be treated "more equal" than others.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
That won't happen in a country ruled by diversity policies.
Why the hell are they allowing obviously untrained people the power to wipe out entire channels on a whim?
Who the Hell would apply for a job as a YouTube political correctness moderator anyway? Well, folks who can't argue their political standpoints, and must resort to censorship, when the intellectual backing of their own convictions fail, and silencing their opponent by force is their only option.
It's just not a real job.
If anything should be eliminated by AI and automation, it's this. Removing human bias from the system would silence critics on both sides of the political spectrum.
China is just copying from a Greek military junta, who banned the letter "Z" following assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis.
This is just nothing more than a bit of paid advertising from IBM.
IBM provided the hardware and software for the avionics on the Space Shuttle . . . programmed in . . . IBM/360 Assembler! They chose that language because it had been around for long enough that NASA figured that all the bugs had been worked out, and the programmers understood the language well enough that it could be used for man-rated systems:
Getting some of Earth's microbes living on Enceladus would be exciting, but not surprising.
Wow! Invasive species . . . Solar System Enterprise Edition!
Yes, we should definitely take a few test tubes of some Earth microbes when we go there, and plant them. Then we can return in a few thousand years, and see how they are doing . . .
. . . or . . . maybe they will have evolved in that time, and they will come looking to see how we are doing . . . and how we taste.
Maybe something sent there by us will have some unintentional "stowaways" . . . microbes picked up in the Earth atmosphere and sticking to the outside of the spacecraft . . . and we will get the same effect.
Typically the government offers a tax break and the manufacturer has to chip in a bit too (which is made up for by increased sales).
Yeah, but who pays the government . . . ? Oh, the taxpayers. So all the taxpayer get stuck with the bill for this mess, instead of just the diesel owners.
The German auto manufacturers would like to offer conversion kits . . . which would make existing diesels cleaner . . . for the amazing low price of ~1,500€. They did the same trick years ago with catalytic converters. They refused to build cars with them standard and made them unbelievably expensive as an option . . . even when all the cars Germany built for the US had catalytic converters, as required by US law. When Germany finally passed catalytic converter laws . . . the auto manufacturers made tidy profits selling conversion kits.
The problem is . . . the German government cannot pin the bill on the auto manufacturers . . . they will threaten to toss tens of thousands of unemployed car industry workers at the government, if they are forced to pay anything.
Perhaps the need to hold a pencil will not be needed in the future.
Everyone who is posting using a pencil or stylus, please raise your hands . . . ?
I have terrible hand-writing and therefore took an after school typing class in 9th grade, back in the late '70s.
Since then, I rarely write anything; just type. In the early 80's, in the terminal room while I was studying CS, I often pitied the poor folks hen-pecking in their code at a snail's pace.
About the only time I take a pen in my hand, is when I need to put a signature on something.
Handwriting can be a fine art, and I really admire folks who have beautiful and inspiring handwriting . . . it's just something I can't do, but don't need to do it.
The funniest part of this saga is the decades that Americans had to listen to Europeans going on and on about how their clean diesels were infinitely superior to the American gas guzzlers.
Well, it's not funny any more for folks in Germany who own diesels . . . about 46% of passenger cars there.
A German high court just put a nail in diesel's coffin with a judgement allowing bans of diesels in cities:
Of course, the fat lady hasn't sung yet, and the government and auto industry are working frantically to think up a solution which won't end up in pitchforks and torches. The German police have already stated that they do not have the resources to enforce a ban.
So basically, if you own a diesel, its value has just dropped from a few thousand Euros to zero. And actually diesel owners will probably be required to get their cars refitted with cleaning devices, which will cost a serious amount of money. So the value of your diesel is negative now. A lot of folks will not be happy about that. The Green Party, who was the main backer of the ban, is already back-peddling, stating that it is the government's and auto industry's fault, not the end consumer.
But at the end of the day, instead of "Pin The Tail On the Donkey," they will have "Pin The Bill On The Taxpayer."
Well, being that Amazon started selling books . . . you'd think that he'd be the first on the list for the Firemen to visit, with Duraflame logs and Zippo lighters to stage a Joan d'Arc charbecue.
However, Bezo could provide the Firemen a list of all Amazon's customers, and the titles that they have bought. Then the Firemen would have easy work, showing up at people's homes demanding that the book be surrendered.
I must be way out of touch, because I just can't think of many specific achievements that all that world-class talent has brought about.
Developing an online system that convinces half the world to believe in fake news . . . ?
Enabling foreign security services to fix US election . . . ?
That's quite impressive.
Since the Communist Revolution, the Soviet Union has been trying to bring down "International Imperialist Capitalists" with false political propaganda. None of their methods were very successful.
Once again, American technology has proved to be far superior . . . in spreading false political propaganda!
Wow, that would be a real selling point if I were 6 years old.
Samsung does their marketing homework. Their studies show that most adults buying ultra-expensive smartphones have the mentality of 6-year-olds.
On the serious side:
The S9 is one of the first phones announced with the new 2.8Ghz Snapdragon 845 SoC in the US, while the international version will most likely get an Exynos 9810
Why, and what does this mean . . . ? Is one better than the other . . . ?
Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to print?"
Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to fund?"
No joke. It's a request for government funding proposal. Being that we Americans are working ourselves up to a McCarthy frenzy about Russian hackers stealing our elections, Congress will be willing to fund any anti-foreigner hacking protection. The Congress Critters are afraid of losing their seats to Russian hackers!
However, to combat Russian hackers, you don't need an Astrophysicist. Thus, create a hacking threat from outer space.
The most efficient way to teach best practices is to give the programmer electric shocks for every error, and more for bugs caught in testing.
Wasting our precious bodily electricity on humans!?!? Heresy! As a limited Earth natural resource, electricity should be used where it makes the most economic sense . . . mining cryptocoins. At your university, remove wasteful outdoor and indoor electric lighting, and mine cryptocoins with the electricity. By Christmas your university can use the cryptocoin profits to go tuition free, double the salary of all the staff and buy your own nuclear reactor to generate all the safe, clean electricity you need . . . to mine yet even more cryptocoins!
I think a combination of the "Wizard of Oz" approach and Cognitive Behavior Theory would be very effective here.
Never seen a great developer without strong analytical skills.
I've never seen great developer, or actually, someone who thinks that he is a great developer, who didn't look, smell and act like one.
Do not shave your neck any more.
Stuff yourself with unhealthy junk food; preferably, while working at your keyboard.
Think that you are a super-genius and all your colleagues are idiots. Convince yourself that your code never has any bugs, and the problem must be somewhere else.
Showers and baths? Forget it. The whole world is in a drought, and you need to save water.
Get yourself into meaningless arguments about trivial things like vi vs. emacs. Refuse to stop arguing, even when everyone else has left the room.
In short, you don't need to be a great developer! Just play one on TV!
This is political mudslinging, not news for nerds.
Oh, there is a lot that nerds, especially non-US ones can learn from this . . . "news".
I hate to use the word "news" these days, because doing immediately implies that it is fake. There is no "real" news these days. Everything is adulterated by political disinformation campaigns to the point of being useless. If you tossed current news stories into an AI box trained to identify news as "fake" or "real" . . . the AI box would respond with a twist on the Wolfang Pauli quote:
"That's not "real" news! It's not even "fake" news!
If you are a non-US person, you might be tended to think that the US Justice system has nothing to do with "Justice" any more and is a cesspool tool of political intrigue and maneuvering from both political parties.
Also, don't expect the US government to do anything serious in the next few years, or anything in the interest of the people. Both political parties have moved to the extremist flanks of their parties, and only act as a block in the interest of their party. Independent thinking is just plain out these days. Politics in the US is now dysfunctional . . . and you should keep that in mind when you are doing business with the US.
Expect things to happen that defy the imagination of the "Theater of the Bizarre."
Slashdot Mirror
Programming isn't the hard bit, figuring out what the humans want, is.
Common IT customer complaint, when a product is delivered:
"Yes, that's exactly what I asked for . . . but it turns out, that it is not what I need."
Now that's the really difficult part . . . convincing customers that what they are asking for will not really help them . . .
. . . without losing the customer!
How does one generate that much traffic without the need of a botnet?
Maybe it's one of those "unstoppable" weapons that Putin has been bragging about . . . ?
If so, you won't be able to find any information about it . . . unless you hire Russian Hackers to dig it up . . .
Don't include information on race, gender, etc. on employment applications and you don't have to worry about excluding people because HR or hiring personnel are bigoted, whether actively or unconsciously.
It is necessary for HR and hiring personnel to be bigoted . . . otherwise diversity cannot be achieved.
Diversity is necessary for folks who cannot compete in a system based on equality.
Diversity means that some people need to be treated "more equal" than others.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
That won't happen in a country ruled by diversity policies.
Thanks for all the hard work you guys do providing this service!
To the complainers about Slashdot, I always say:
"Slashdot is free . . . and worth every penny I pay for it!"
Slashdot is as good as we, the participants and contributors, make it!
Go running to the media in real time to tell of the "extensive breach" with no regard for German cyber security?
Running to the media and claiming a threat from a foreign country diverts attention from internal political problems back home.
Like the Diesel scandal.
The government networking folks can now run to parliament and demand a massive budget increase to deal with this Russian Hacker Mine Shaft Gap.
Standard political maneuvering.
Why the hell are they allowing obviously untrained people the power to wipe out entire channels on a whim?
Who the Hell would apply for a job as a YouTube political correctness moderator anyway? Well, folks who can't argue their political standpoints, and must resort to censorship, when the intellectual backing of their own convictions fail, and silencing their opponent by force is their only option.
It's just not a real job.
If anything should be eliminated by AI and automation, it's this. Removing human bias from the system would silence critics on both sides of the political spectrum.
Well that makes sense.
China is just copying from a Greek military junta, who banned the letter "Z" following assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis.
At least they did in the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
If other totalitarian countries start doing this as well . . . we won't have any alphabet left!
It's time for a world leader to step up and make our alphabet great again!
This is just nothing more than a bit of paid advertising from IBM.
IBM provided the hardware and software for the avionics on the Space Shuttle . . . programmed in . . . IBM /360 Assembler! They chose that language because it had been around for long enough that NASA figured that all the bugs had been worked out, and the programmers understood the language well enough that it could be used for man-rated systems:
https://history.nasa.gov/compu...
- Who you gonna call?
The Chinese and the Indians who will soon be there exploring the Moon.
Oh, Russian hackers will be there, as well . . . fixing the election for the nude Moon folks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Getting some of Earth's microbes living on Enceladus would be exciting, but not surprising.
Wow! Invasive species . . . Solar System Enterprise Edition!
Yes, we should definitely take a few test tubes of some Earth microbes when we go there, and plant them. Then we can return in a few thousand years, and see how they are doing . . .
. . . or . . . maybe they will have evolved in that time, and they will come looking to see how we are doing . . . and how we taste.
Maybe something sent there by us will have some unintentional "stowaways" . . . microbes picked up in the Earth atmosphere and sticking to the outside of the spacecraft . . . and we will get the same effect.
I'm sure people have died because of drugs that were bought and sold using cryptocoins.
Cryptocoins can also be used to buy Snu Snu!
Bill Gates: "Death! Death by Snu Snu!"
Typically the government offers a tax break and the manufacturer has to chip in a bit too (which is made up for by increased sales).
Yeah, but who pays the government . . . ? Oh, the taxpayers. So all the taxpayer get stuck with the bill for this mess, instead of just the diesel owners.
The German auto manufacturers would like to offer conversion kits . . . which would make existing diesels cleaner . . . for the amazing low price of ~1,500€. They did the same trick years ago with catalytic converters. They refused to build cars with them standard and made them unbelievably expensive as an option . . . even when all the cars Germany built for the US had catalytic converters, as required by US law. When Germany finally passed catalytic converter laws . . . the auto manufacturers made tidy profits selling conversion kits.
The problem is . . . the German government cannot pin the bill on the auto manufacturers . . . they will threaten to toss tens of thousands of unemployed car industry workers at the government, if they are forced to pay anything.
This would give most people who both need to drive in those areas and have a diesel to try to sell/exchange their car.
On the German TV news tonight, they showed an open used car market . . . there were no diesels offered there.
The owner of the market quipped nicely, "You can't give away a diesel right now."
For folks who spent 20,000€ last year for a new diesel . . . oops . . . tough luck . . . the value of your one year old car is now 0.0€.
About ~140 million people own diesel passenger cars in Germany. Forget a Bitcoin crash . . . that's a lot of wealth knocked off right there.
I don't know if there are ~140 million pitchforks and torches in Germany, but we might find out.
Perhaps the need to hold a pencil will not be needed in the future.
Everyone who is posting using a pencil or stylus, please raise your hands . . . ?
I have terrible hand-writing and therefore took an after school typing class in 9th grade, back in the late '70s.
Since then, I rarely write anything; just type. In the early 80's, in the terminal room while I was studying CS, I often pitied the poor folks hen-pecking in their code at a snail's pace.
About the only time I take a pen in my hand, is when I need to put a signature on something.
Handwriting can be a fine art, and I really admire folks who have beautiful and inspiring handwriting . . . it's just something I can't do, but don't need to do it.
The funniest part of this saga is the decades that Americans had to listen to Europeans going on and on about how their clean diesels were infinitely superior to the American gas guzzlers.
Well, it's not funny any more for folks in Germany who own diesels . . . about 46% of passenger cars there.
A German high court just put a nail in diesel's coffin with a judgement allowing bans of diesels in cities:
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
Of course, the fat lady hasn't sung yet, and the government and auto industry are working frantically to think up a solution which won't end up in pitchforks and torches. The German police have already stated that they do not have the resources to enforce a ban.
So basically, if you own a diesel, its value has just dropped from a few thousand Euros to zero. And actually diesel owners will probably be required to get their cars refitted with cleaning devices, which will cost a serious amount of money. So the value of your diesel is negative now. A lot of folks will not be happy about that. The Green Party, who was the main backer of the ban, is already back-peddling, stating that it is the government's and auto industry's fault, not the end consumer.
But at the end of the day, instead of "Pin The Tail On the Donkey," they will have "Pin The Bill On The Taxpayer."
Isn't that Jeff Bezo's plan?
Well, being that Amazon started selling books . . . you'd think that he'd be the first on the list for the Firemen to visit, with Duraflame logs and Zippo lighters to stage a Joan d'Arc charbecue.
However, Bezo could provide the Firemen a list of all Amazon's customers, and the titles that they have bought. Then the Firemen would have easy work, showing up at people's homes demanding that the book be surrendered.
They won't take, "The dog ate it," as an answer.
IMO, the latter is more relevant to today's society, and gives a more complete and insightful view of totalitarianism
"We are not born equal, so we must be made equal by the fire"
"We are not born equal, so we must be made equal by the diversity"
Yikes! My company recently started removing the smoke alarms from our offices . . . should that be a reason to be concerned . . . ?
The official line is that Boy Scouts were using the smoke alarms to build nuclear reactors and weapons, but that seemed a bit outlandish to me.
I must be way out of touch, because I just can't think of many specific achievements that all that world-class talent has brought about.
Developing an online system that convinces half the world to believe in fake news . . . ?
Enabling foreign security services to fix US election . . . ?
That's quite impressive.
Since the Communist Revolution, the Soviet Union has been trying to bring down "International Imperialist Capitalists" with false political propaganda. None of their methods were very successful.
Once again, American technology has proved to be far superior . . . in spreading false political propaganda!
School happens primarily during the day. Heat is primarily a problem when the sun is shining brightest.
Well, there's your problem right there. Just implement a daylight savings time extreme in Hawaii, shifting the clocks by 12 hours.
Send the little bastards to school at night!
Wow, that would be a real selling point if I were 6 years old.
Samsung does their marketing homework. Their studies show that most adults buying ultra-expensive smartphones have the mentality of 6-year-olds.
On the serious side:
The S9 is one of the first phones announced with the new 2.8Ghz Snapdragon 845 SoC in the US, while the international version will most likely get an Exynos 9810
Why, and what does this mean . . . ? Is one better than the other . . . ?
Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to print?"
Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to fund?"
No joke. It's a request for government funding proposal. Being that we Americans are working ourselves up to a McCarthy frenzy about Russian hackers stealing our elections, Congress will be willing to fund any anti-foreigner hacking protection. The Congress Critters are afraid of losing their seats to Russian hackers!
However, to combat Russian hackers, you don't need an Astrophysicist. Thus, create a hacking threat from outer space.
Funding problem for Astrophysicists solved.
The most efficient way to teach best practices is to give the programmer electric shocks for every error, and more for bugs caught in testing.
Wasting our precious bodily electricity on humans!?!? Heresy! As a limited Earth natural resource, electricity should be used where it makes the most economic sense . . . mining cryptocoins. At your university, remove wasteful outdoor and indoor electric lighting, and mine cryptocoins with the electricity. By Christmas your university can use the cryptocoin profits to go tuition free, double the salary of all the staff and buy your own nuclear reactor to generate all the safe, clean electricity you need . . . to mine yet even more cryptocoins!
I think a combination of the "Wizard of Oz" approach and Cognitive Behavior Theory would be very effective here.
Never seen a great developer without strong analytical skills.
I've never seen great developer, or actually, someone who thinks that he is a great developer, who didn't look, smell and act like one.
Do not shave your neck any more.
Stuff yourself with unhealthy junk food; preferably, while working at your keyboard.
Think that you are a super-genius and all your colleagues are idiots. Convince yourself that your code never has any bugs, and the problem must be somewhere else.
Showers and baths? Forget it. The whole world is in a drought, and you need to save water.
Get yourself into meaningless arguments about trivial things like vi vs. emacs. Refuse to stop arguing, even when everyone else has left the room.
In short, you don't need to be a great developer! Just play one on TV!
This is political mudslinging, not news for nerds.
Oh, there is a lot that nerds, especially non-US ones can learn from this . . . "news".
I hate to use the word "news" these days, because doing immediately implies that it is fake. There is no "real" news these days. Everything is adulterated by political disinformation campaigns to the point of being useless. If you tossed current news stories into an AI box trained to identify news as "fake" or "real" . . . the AI box would respond with a twist on the Wolfang Pauli quote:
"That's not "real" news! It's not even "fake" news!
If you are a non-US person, you might be tended to think that the US Justice system has nothing to do with "Justice" any more and is a cesspool tool of political intrigue and maneuvering from both political parties.
Also, don't expect the US government to do anything serious in the next few years, or anything in the interest of the people. Both political parties have moved to the extremist flanks of their parties, and only act as a block in the interest of their party. Independent thinking is just plain out these days. Politics in the US is now dysfunctional . . . and you should keep that in mind when you are doing business with the US.
Expect things to happen that defy the imagination of the "Theater of the Bizarre."
If your washing machine is even capable of identity fraud, you're doing something wrong.
My robot has its own Facebook page and plans to hack the next election in the US.
It is also apparently fluent in Russian, because it chats Russian late at night.