Yeah, except it doesn't actually work that way. Here's what happens:
1. Board level manager's meeting. 2. [New person] is eager to prove themselves and suggests [bad idea] from [trade magazine]. 3. Nobody else in the meeting has had enough time to read something other than [trade magazine], and so believe [bad idea] is a good idea. 4. Vote passes unanimously. 5. Middle management, who has read something other than [trade magazine] tries to politely tell [new person] that [bad idea] won't work. 6. [new person] ignores cries of pain and suffering, stiffens their resolve to ram [bad idea] down organization's throat, backed by the full power of the board. 7. Middle management stalls as long as possible, warning everyone of the impending apocalypse. 7a. Except you and anyone on the lower rungs. 7b. Those who do find out, bail from the company like rats from a sinking ship. 8. Costs suddenly rise, due to a sudden vaccum of experienced workers and a drop in efficiency. The effort can no longer be stalled. 9. A week later, you're asked to fill out some forms and update the knowledge base. 10. You're so focused on your job, you think nothing of it. 10a. Alternate: Your manager is kind and says something to you. 11. Regardless, you're still let go before you can swim to another piece of floatsam. 12. Upper management cries victory -- everything costs less now! 13. Middle management develops a drinking habit, but says nothing. 14. The new people hired in [Country X] think everyone over here is a bunch of idiots and drunks.
A computer fed with a few hundred megabytes of personal data can now determine in minutes what most of us in the life know as soon as we see the person. I should be impressed, except I'm totally not. Don't worry about this ever becoming popular though -- sooner or later someone will feed the program a list of US senators and then magically the next day all traces of the program, its authors, and the results will be declared illegal and the arrests will begin -- effective last tuesday.
More seriously, the problem isn't that people may be able to infer a person's sexual orientation -- it's the fact that this society still refuses to label those who use this type of information to slander, attack, and in some cases kill, other people. Our transparent society has brought a lot of social issues right out in the open where everyone can see them. And we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the injustices perpetuated by one group onto another. This, fundamentally, is what the fight over privacy is about: It's not what we are (or are not) that matters, but rather the correlations between those facts and the social meanings and messages attached to them. The fight for privacy is really founded upon the belief that the average person is insecure, full of prejudice and bile, and is generally a manipulative bastard who'll stab you in the back given half a chance.
And I can't find any fault in that statement. Most people are, and thus... Privacy will remain an important thing to fight for so long as we have reason to fight amongst ourselves.
I wasn't fired because I didn't toot my horn. I got fired because I knew the system too well -- and when upper management was told about this, specifically about a distinct lack of guidance in their security policies and documentation, they canned me. The reason developers get fired is either for the same reason most people get fired -- namely that they piss off the wrong person and they find someone in power to make their dream come true (and someone else's nightmare to begin), -OR- they learn too much about the system and not enough about politics and get caught by surprise when they try to implement a change that is a political hotbed. My last job: In-house developer doing network/system administration, deployment, and integration tasks.
Very often, developing stuff (especially in-house) has conflicting political goals, which are distinct from the design goals. Each team wants a certain piece of the pie and wants assurances they are "indespensible". Well, the problem is that in every project people need to work together and so there is always some overlap or need for integration -- which is fought tooth and nail because once things are integrated and made redundant (as business should be) -- people stop being "indepensible". So those that are slightly more politically aware find ways to strategically delay the project or insert superfluous technical considerations. And should a really good developer see this and figure out a way to convince others (by the strength of his/her design argument) -- this person will very quickly find a surprise pink slip for some random reason.
Keeping your job as a developer is as dependent on your ability to design well as it is on your ability to know when to duck.
The first standard (Tier 1) would take effect January 1, 2011, and reduce energy consumption by average of 33 percent. The second measure (Tier 2) would take effect in 2013 and, in conjunction with Tier 1, reduce energy consumption by an average of 49 percent.
As has happened before, when the public utilities don't make as much profit because people are using less... The rates will go up. So conservation really doesn't help anyone's pocketbook -- if they're forced on you (like California is doing) you'll be paying twice: Once for the new super-special awesome conservation upgrade, and again in with the rate increase. The greenies don't care if it's uneconomical or completely screws the working class (by placing common household appliances and electronics out of reach due to rising costs), because they can be smugly confident they're "saving the planet" by doing so.
Actions like this harm the working poor, and ultimately provide no benefit to the general population in economic terms, save being able to wear a button saying "I helped save the whales."
I have a friend who was part of the closed beta for this game. Besides the game looking awesome, it was a frequent source of problems for the testers, who often couldn't get into the game, or register new characters, or in some cases the game just flat out refused to run, no errors. Apparently, NCSoft got enough of these complaints to drop it from the release version.
But don't feel bad, they aren't the only ones. I saved a certain major political party from disaster at a state fair this year. They'd left IE's autocomplete enabled on all the computers, which were helpfully offering the contact information of everyone who signed up for their newsletter or petition.
Whups! But really, it takes a person of unusually low intelligence to stop in the middle of robbing someone else's house to use their computer. Don't kids these days watch CSI? Or whatever the latest crime flick is?
This will have the same problem in twenty years on crops and pesticides that we're having in antibiotics today: It'll lose effectiveness over time. No matter how you cut it, sooner or later a living organism will find its own survival compels it to attempt to cross the barrier. And when it survives, it will pass its genes onto its progeny. Eventually there will be a gene that pops up where this "universal" stench impulse is suppressed, and it will populate wildly.
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed? And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
RADIATION! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake, Awake! In other news... everything is radioactive. Please hide under your desks.:\
Seriously, the biggest risk to his crop is from localized heating effect. It won't mutate, it'll just dry out. Same as the microwave he has in his kitchen. And at a couple hundred meters... It won't even register a fraction of a degree at peak output. The sun delivers more thermal energy.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind... We've dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. There are fewer and fewer gifted programs. Everyone's straight-jacketed into the same curriculum at the same pace, and should someone demonstrate superior intelligence they're practically punished for it because it might harm some other precious snowflake's self-esteem to know! Net result -- kids don't try as hard, so standards slip and slip and slip, to adjust to the new low point. Video games -- Seriously. You know, it used to be a treat to get a movie in class and it was read, read, read. It was all about reading. Nowadays it's all about learning via glowing rectangles.
"...my mental map of DC swapped north for west. I started getting more lost than ever as the two spatial concepts of DC did battle in my head."
And this is surprising how? If you're navigating by landmark and familiarity, you're probably going to be in for a shock when you suddenly move to a coordinate mapping system. This also shows that the creator of this device doesn't look up very often to get her bearings. Not that I'm surprised -- women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map. If I changed a street sign outside my apartment, my male friends probably wouldn't be able to find the place anymore. My female friends, on the other hand, would show up and likely never notice the sign was changed. Insert obligatory quip about evolution of the sexes, rebuttal about stereotypes, and witty retort here.:\
Also, while I'm sure this is quite fascinating to her, the rest of us will just buy one of those $5 compass globes and stick it in the car, and it'll be cheaper than the parts to build this thing.
It was news almost five years ago on Slashdot, but since then intelligent fasteners have been searching for a way to go mainstream. Regular tools won't work -- and as a bonus, they can remotely disassemble your car. Past due on that insurance premium? Zap. Thud. It's even worse when you consider that cars are engineered to fail after a certain number of miles -- certain japanese manufacturers (isuzu) are known to fall apart very quickly after certain mileage limits are reached. It's not enough that we are allowed to repair our own vehicles -- there needs to be standards on a vehicle's lifespan.
If we're all about this whole greenie thing now, wouldn't it make sense to start mandating vehicles that are renewable and not just the energy that powers them?
If his position is based on experience, then by definition it's not prejudice.
That's only one definition of prejudice. Another is: "Irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion". Prejudice has to come from somewhere, it doesn't spring from nothingness, therefore it must be based on prior experience. The test is not whether it's based on previous experience, but whether the opinion or belief formed from those experiences is a rational one. If I observe that every black person I've met is larger than me, then it's not prejudice to say "Black people are big!" It would be prejudice however to conclude that "black people are evil" because of this observation; Even if past experience has demonstrated a connection between a larger physical build and negative behavior. This is because the correlation is broken, and it's thus a logical fallacy. Prejudice is often created because the human mind is prone to seeing patterns and correlations where none exist.
I don't represent all of womankind here, dude. Getting two women to agree on anything is usually cause for concern. It's like finding neutrons in a superimposed state. It violates several laws of physics, and so is usually attributed to equipment malfunction.
Naked girls. Guys would flock to science if there wers lots of naked girls.
Meanwhile, women run from science because even in the most intellectual establishments, the people who run it are still little more than slathering ape-beasts who despite over twenty thousand years of evolution still think the penis is the center of the universe.
Slow news day, guys? I mean, seriously -- who is going to choose a browser based on how long it'll keep working in a laptop battery life test? And what's the control group for this test, anyway? In the real world, some guy decides he wants some ramen and suddenly my wifi connectivity goes to crap. What if it's really bright in the room and I have to turn the brightness up on the LCD? Well and truly, there's about a hundred things more important than which browser I'm using that affect battery life.
Now, I'm off to make some ramen and make my neighbor scream bloody murder as his high resolution download of some porn star stalls halfway through and he's stuck staring at an incomplete image for the next three minutes exactly. muwaaaaah....
It's become traditional on Slashdot that Apple products be proudly displayed on the front page without links, because most Apple products discussed on Slashdot don't really exist either. Didn't you get the memo?
Slashdot Mirror
That must be a nifty trick, to be able to tell what someone's sexual orientation is just by looking at them. How do you do that?
I look at them...
You also post on Slashdot, which would suggest you are more logical than 99% of women.
You're probably also more logical than 99% of men... since about the same percentage doesn't post on slashdot either. :P
Yeah, except it doesn't actually work that way. Here's what happens:
1. Board level manager's meeting.
2. [New person] is eager to prove themselves and suggests [bad idea] from [trade magazine].
3. Nobody else in the meeting has had enough time to read something other than [trade magazine], and so believe [bad idea] is a good idea.
4. Vote passes unanimously.
5. Middle management, who has read something other than [trade magazine] tries to politely tell [new person] that [bad idea] won't work.
6. [new person] ignores cries of pain and suffering, stiffens their resolve to ram [bad idea] down organization's throat, backed by the full power of the board.
7. Middle management stalls as long as possible, warning everyone of the impending apocalypse.
7a. Except you and anyone on the lower rungs.
7b. Those who do find out, bail from the company like rats from a sinking ship.
8. Costs suddenly rise, due to a sudden vaccum of experienced workers and a drop in efficiency. The effort can no longer be stalled.
9. A week later, you're asked to fill out some forms and update the knowledge base.
10. You're so focused on your job, you think nothing of it.
10a. Alternate: Your manager is kind and says something to you.
11. Regardless, you're still let go before you can swim to another piece of floatsam.
12. Upper management cries victory -- everything costs less now!
13. Middle management develops a drinking habit, but says nothing.
14. The new people hired in [Country X] think everyone over here is a bunch of idiots and drunks.
Ta-Da! The end.
A computer fed with a few hundred megabytes of personal data can now determine in minutes what most of us in the life know as soon as we see the person. I should be impressed, except I'm totally not. Don't worry about this ever becoming popular though -- sooner or later someone will feed the program a list of US senators and then magically the next day all traces of the program, its authors, and the results will be declared illegal and the arrests will begin -- effective last tuesday.
More seriously, the problem isn't that people may be able to infer a person's sexual orientation -- it's the fact that this society still refuses to label those who use this type of information to slander, attack, and in some cases kill, other people. Our transparent society has brought a lot of social issues right out in the open where everyone can see them. And we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the injustices perpetuated by one group onto another. This, fundamentally, is what the fight over privacy is about: It's not what we are (or are not) that matters, but rather the correlations between those facts and the social meanings and messages attached to them. The fight for privacy is really founded upon the belief that the average person is insecure, full of prejudice and bile, and is generally a manipulative bastard who'll stab you in the back given half a chance.
And I can't find any fault in that statement. Most people are, and thus... Privacy will remain an important thing to fight for so long as we have reason to fight amongst ourselves.
I wasn't fired because I didn't toot my horn. I got fired because I knew the system too well -- and when upper management was told about this, specifically about a distinct lack of guidance in their security policies and documentation, they canned me. The reason developers get fired is either for the same reason most people get fired -- namely that they piss off the wrong person and they find someone in power to make their dream come true (and someone else's nightmare to begin), -OR- they learn too much about the system and not enough about politics and get caught by surprise when they try to implement a change that is a political hotbed. My last job: In-house developer doing network/system administration, deployment, and integration tasks.
Very often, developing stuff (especially in-house) has conflicting political goals, which are distinct from the design goals. Each team wants a certain piece of the pie and wants assurances they are "indespensible". Well, the problem is that in every project people need to work together and so there is always some overlap or need for integration -- which is fought tooth and nail because once things are integrated and made redundant (as business should be) -- people stop being "indepensible". So those that are slightly more politically aware find ways to strategically delay the project or insert superfluous technical considerations. And should a really good developer see this and figure out a way to convince others (by the strength of his/her design argument) -- this person will very quickly find a surprise pink slip for some random reason.
Keeping your job as a developer is as dependent on your ability to design well as it is on your ability to know when to duck.
The first standard (Tier 1) would take effect January 1, 2011, and reduce energy consumption by average of 33 percent. The second measure (Tier 2) would take effect in 2013 and, in conjunction with Tier 1, reduce energy consumption by an average of 49 percent.
As has happened before, when the public utilities don't make as much profit because people are using less... The rates will go up. So conservation really doesn't help anyone's pocketbook -- if they're forced on you (like California is doing) you'll be paying twice: Once for the new super-special awesome conservation upgrade, and again in with the rate increase. The greenies don't care if it's uneconomical or completely screws the working class (by placing common household appliances and electronics out of reach due to rising costs), because they can be smugly confident they're "saving the planet" by doing so.
Actions like this harm the working poor, and ultimately provide no benefit to the general population in economic terms, save being able to wear a button saying "I helped save the whales."
Now if they promise not to 'include it' in future patches that would be swell. I might actually considering trying it.
Yeah, that really stopped people from buying World of Warcraft.
I have a friend who was part of the closed beta for this game. Besides the game looking awesome, it was a frequent source of problems for the testers, who often couldn't get into the game, or register new characters, or in some cases the game just flat out refused to run, no errors. Apparently, NCSoft got enough of these complaints to drop it from the release version.
But don't feel bad, they aren't the only ones. I saved a certain major political party from disaster at a state fair this year. They'd left IE's autocomplete enabled on all the computers, which were helpfully offering the contact information of everyone who signed up for their newsletter or petition.
Whups! But really, it takes a person of unusually low intelligence to stop in the middle of robbing someone else's house to use their computer. Don't kids these days watch CSI? Or whatever the latest crime flick is?
This will have the same problem in twenty years on crops and pesticides that we're having in antibiotics today: It'll lose effectiveness over time. No matter how you cut it, sooner or later a living organism will find its own survival compels it to attempt to cross the barrier. And when it survives, it will pass its genes onto its progeny. Eventually there will be a gene that pops up where this "universal" stench impulse is suppressed, and it will populate wildly.
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed? And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
Oops.
Keep it short, keep it simple. And don't stray off the topic. And you might want to have a handout of the key points.
RADIATION! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake, Awake! In other news... everything is radioactive. Please hide under your desks. :\
Seriously, the biggest risk to his crop is from localized heating effect. It won't mutate, it'll just dry out. Same as the microwave he has in his kitchen. And at a couple hundred meters... It won't even register a fraction of a degree at peak output. The sun delivers more thermal energy.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind... We've dumbed education down to the lowest common denominator. There are fewer and fewer gifted programs. Everyone's straight-jacketed into the same curriculum at the same pace, and should someone demonstrate superior intelligence they're practically punished for it because it might harm some other precious snowflake's self-esteem to know! Net result -- kids don't try as hard, so standards slip and slip and slip, to adjust to the new low point. Video games -- Seriously. You know, it used to be a treat to get a movie in class and it was read, read, read. It was all about reading. Nowadays it's all about learning via glowing rectangles.
Sad.
"...my mental map of DC swapped north for west. I started getting more lost than ever as the two spatial concepts of DC did battle in my head."
And this is surprising how? If you're navigating by landmark and familiarity, you're probably going to be in for a shock when you suddenly move to a coordinate mapping system. This also shows that the creator of this device doesn't look up very often to get her bearings. Not that I'm surprised -- women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map. If I changed a street sign outside my apartment, my male friends probably wouldn't be able to find the place anymore. My female friends, on the other hand, would show up and likely never notice the sign was changed. Insert obligatory quip about evolution of the sexes, rebuttal about stereotypes, and witty retort here. :\
Also, while I'm sure this is quite fascinating to her, the rest of us will just buy one of those $5 compass globes and stick it in the car, and it'll be cheaper than the parts to build this thing.
It was news almost five years ago on Slashdot, but since then intelligent fasteners have been searching for a way to go mainstream. Regular tools won't work -- and as a bonus, they can remotely disassemble your car. Past due on that insurance premium? Zap. Thud. It's even worse when you consider that cars are engineered to fail after a certain number of miles -- certain japanese manufacturers (isuzu) are known to fall apart very quickly after certain mileage limits are reached. It's not enough that we are allowed to repair our own vehicles -- there needs to be standards on a vehicle's lifespan.
If we're all about this whole greenie thing now, wouldn't it make sense to start mandating vehicles that are renewable and not just the energy that powers them?
Pfft! You are so wrong!
Cat fight. Rawr. ^_^
Picking up on the context of the discussion at hand isn't your long suit, I take it?
I'm about as good at it as you are at being tactful and diplomatic.
If his position is based on experience, then by definition it's not prejudice.
That's only one definition of prejudice. Another is: "Irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion". Prejudice has to come from somewhere, it doesn't spring from nothingness, therefore it must be based on prior experience. The test is not whether it's based on previous experience, but whether the opinion or belief formed from those experiences is a rational one. If I observe that every black person I've met is larger than me, then it's not prejudice to say "Black people are big!" It would be prejudice however to conclude that "black people are evil" because of this observation; Even if past experience has demonstrated a connection between a larger physical build and negative behavior. This is because the correlation is broken, and it's thus a logical fallacy. Prejudice is often created because the human mind is prone to seeing patterns and correlations where none exist.
The women agree, then.
I don't represent all of womankind here, dude. Getting two women to agree on anything is usually cause for concern. It's like finding neutrons in a superimposed state. It violates several laws of physics, and so is usually attributed to equipment malfunction.
Isn't Mono the KISSing disease? ;)
Naked girls. Guys would flock to science if there wers lots of naked girls.
Meanwhile, women run from science because even in the most intellectual establishments, the people who run it are still little more than slathering ape-beasts who despite over twenty thousand years of evolution still think the penis is the center of the universe.
Slow news day, guys? I mean, seriously -- who is going to choose a browser based on how long it'll keep working in a laptop battery life test? And what's the control group for this test, anyway? In the real world, some guy decides he wants some ramen and suddenly my wifi connectivity goes to crap. What if it's really bright in the room and I have to turn the brightness up on the LCD? Well and truly, there's about a hundred things more important than which browser I'm using that affect battery life.
Now, I'm off to make some ramen and make my neighbor scream bloody murder as his high resolution download of some porn star stalls halfway through and he's stuck staring at an incomplete image for the next three minutes exactly. muwaaaaah....
It's become traditional on Slashdot that Apple products be proudly displayed on the front page without links, because most Apple products discussed on Slashdot don't really exist either. Didn't you get the memo?
He accidentally created an obiwan error. Everybody knows that computers count in zero, so it should have been TODAY, day 255!
So first we had "Do no Evil" and now they're working to blind us all so we can "See No Evil" too. What next, voice recognition -- "Hear No Evil" ?