They should put them on a stick and roast them slowly instead. Crunchy marshmellows are awesome! But RIAA would probably be the idiot kid that sits there setting marshmallow after marshmallow on fire, and then later getting drunk and pissing on the fire to put it out. Boys. Grr. Argh. It stunk for hours...
How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal? Isn't this the same group that's for years been trying to track down who is downloading what and suing them? I mean, studies like this go to the honesty of the other person. And if people will lie about something as trivial as how many sexual partners they've had, what are the odds of people telling the truth here? Besides, if 95% of music downloads were illegal, that's a pretty strong argument that downloading music should be legalized, especially considering how pervasive it is and how ineffective enforcement has been to date.
Well, let's see, what other kinds of video games are there...
The Sims. Which made me believe that everyone has a diamond floating over their head that indicates how happy they are with life. Watch for red diamonds on bridge overpasses.
SimCity. Which firmly convinced me that every city will be attacked by Godzilla at least once should they decide to fight pollution by using nuclear power. Also, hurricane Katrina was due to someone misclicking the interface. Also, New Orleans could have been saved if they had built more FDs and PDs near the water front.
Doom. It taught me that green and red glowing tiles are bad to walk on. For this reason, there are some dance floors I will never go on. Also, if you kill someone, their corpse will disappear within a few minutes. This is why murder is so popular.
Leisure Suit Larry. Well, where do I start... Changing your gender is a simple matter of having sex with a dozen women and then stepping into a machine that makes a funny noise. Also, changing sex invariably makes you better looking.... But of course violence in video games is different... It's a unique case. All that other stuff you learn in video games (wouldn't it be nice if everyone you killed dropped gold and treasure?) doesn't stick. Nope. Only violence. Because it's special. Well, if you find someone arguing this position, shoot them in the head. And remember, it takes at least three shots to kill them. And they rarely drop anything useful.
Translating dense physics-speak is not my forte, but as I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong -- here goes. Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force. What that means is that while it might decrease over distance, the effect never truly becomes zero. I think these guys are saying that it does, in fact, become zero. That is, gravity, contrary to Einstein's relativity equations... is discrete, like a particle, and not all like a wave (that can continue forever). Is that about right?
1. Breathalyzers cease to be used. 2. The source code will be released and showed to have MAJOR flaws or an algorithm that is not scientific at all. 3. The source code will be suddenly patched and every system will be required to be updated. The "new" source code will be released. Prosecution rates plummet, for some "unknown" reason.
I'm pretty sure at this point, anyone peddling child porn is entirely doing it through encrypted networks and through isolated darknets even.
It's exchanged on IRC, primarily. And you wrongly assume these people are as technologically adept as we are. They aren't. They're ordinary people with an extraordinary mental flaw. Most of these people are busted and found with unencrypted drives, often not even a password to prevent access. The police show up at their door and either they're found desperately clawing at the hard drive (maybe throwing it in the toilet will destroy the evidence!) or give up with nary a whimper.
Apple is an organization that employs thousands. Jobs is one man. One. Uno. That's like saying if the President became sick, who runs the country? Well duh, the other 500+ members of congress. The other 50 states each with their own legislatures. The governors. And millions of others who have the word "Government" on their check every day. Apple is not run by Steve Jobs. It never was. Steve Jobs captained the ship. And as anyone will tell you, it takes more to run a ship than the captain.
Simply blocking the general public from hitting sites creates new opportunities for abuse of power, poor implementation, etc. and doesn't seem to actually do much to advance the effort to stop the exploitation of children. At best it forces it further underground.
Ordinarily, you'd be correct. Inexperienced criminals are caught early, leaving only experienced criminals. So methods of catching criminals become more sophisticated, and eventually the only players are experienced ones. It's logical. But some criminal misconduct is not rational. White collar crimes, theft, burglary, drug dealing -- these are often crimes committed by people who think rationally and consider their risks and exposures. But people driven by passion or emotion -- murder, rape, and assault, often do not consider their circumstances. They simply take the risk, not knowing what the risk actually is. And then there are crimes fueled by addiction. Child pornography is a crime fueled by an addiction, an emotive source. It offers no monentary or social status benefit. It's illogical to engage in, and the people doing so keep doing so regardless of risk. The recidivism(sp?) rate for this is so high it's almost pointless to attempt therapy of any kind. Almost (I still advocate it, but out of hope rather than reason).
Conducting fishing expeditions for this class of criminals will give results even if the methods remain crude and never evolve. I know this statement weakens my argument against such surveillance tactics. If the methods were wholly unsuccessful they would be abandoned. However, I'm more concerned with collateral damage. The methods are defensible. The consequences are not. Privacy is an intangible -- its violation often has no effect on the victim, provided the victim remains unaware of the intrusion. But irregularily, the intrusion becomes known to others outside of the group/individual who has violated the person(s) privacy and in these cases damage is done. Sometimes it is irrepairable. In the case of investigations of sexual misconduct, it is usually severe and irrepairable.
And a fundamental precipt(sp?) of our judicial system is that it provides a redress of a person's greviances against another, which includes the government. These investigations destroy lives and yet the government is never held accountable because privacy is an intangible with no assigned value. Therefore, it becomes source of continual damage to the social contract we have with the goverment -- namely that it protects and serves us. Damaging that social contract weakens the entire governmental construct because when people routinely mistrust the government is becomes increasingly ineffective and will counter with even more violent methods of enforcement and investigation which further damages its relationship with those it is supposed to serve. Eventually, this systemic failure, and subsequent loss of trust, leads people to become immoral or amoral, and a marked preference for vigilantism, gang behavior for protection, and a general disregard for the law. Which in the end harms everyone, both inside and outside the system.
I am neither for nor against such surveillance tactics, in and of themselves. But when the government is not held accountable for damaging the lives of people who are wronged -- both to the public at large and the individual(s) harmed, I cannot in good conscience support such actions and advocate actively resisting them.
Well, in the fine tradition of our founding fathers then, let's assemble publicly, choose representatives from amongst us, and then send them out internationally to work towards encrypting the network and locking it down, taking away the ability of our government to spy on us at the network level. You don't play well with others, and soon you'll have nobody to play with. Simple. Of course... who will bell the cat?
Approximately 23% of the world population is online now. There are approximately 6.7 billion people on the planet right now. So about 1.5 billion people. And let's say 5% of them are regularily active and have contribute 1 web page per month; and everybody else is a lurker and never contribute anything. That's 900 million web pages per year, or 246,564 per day. Now we know the growth is far higher than this, but let's humor ourselves with the low-ball estimate.
Now, let's also assume that someone is going to be looking at these websites. We'll say it takes 20 seconds for them to view and categorize a website for their black list. and let's assume they're slaved to their desk for the entire 8 hours, never blinking. That's 480 minutes of slaving, which gives us 1,440 reviews they can make per day. So to keep up with our low-ball estimate, they need 172 net slaves doing nothing but reviewing web pages. All day. Every day. And they will not stop until all the pr0n is found. Now... stop and realize the numbers are orders of magnitude higher. -_- Also realize that the internet is not the web. There are dozens if not hundreds of protocols to monitor, across many mediums -- cell phones, telecommunications, wifi, and good old fashioned sneaker-net.. e-mails, text messages, picture messages... the list goes on.
This, fundamentally, is the problem with large-scale surveillance of the population. It's too resource intensive. Even if you have algorithms that are 99.9% accurate in identifying "bad" material, with 900 million new web pages per year, that's 900,000 webpages that are incorrectly flagged -- 2,500 people's lives ruined by false accusation. Per day.
And just like sex offender registries and other draconian measures to keep someone who's been "touched" by the system in it forever, as soon as the technology exists to do the same thing to people on the internet... They too shall be endlessly recycled and chewed on by a faceless and uncaring system. And the justification shall be that it's okay to ruin a few innocent lives if it protects the rest of us from the big bad boogie men.
Here's my point, fundamentally. Let's say there are a 200,000 -- in Germany alone -- that are pedophiles. Out of about 8 million. And let's say that you have a method of detection where you run these people through it and 99.9% of the time, it gives the right result. What that means is for 8,000 people -- would guess wrong if you ran the entire population through it. What that means is your "99.9%" accurate system flags about 1 person in 20 as a bad guy when they're not. Of course, this assumes that 1 person per 40 is a pedophile. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's unreasonably high... So that means that the 1 per 20 is an optimistic case. Think about that. 1 in 20 people that the system flags is innocent. When the hysteria over the crime is such that the mere accusation is enough to destroy a person, is this a number we're comfortable with?
And if you're thinking it's "just" a black list.. Don't forget that your access attempts are logged. Just why were you trying to access a site we know to have child porn on it, Citizen?
In fact AC loses slightly more at a given voltage, up to a lot more for really long wires.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Line losses are based on current not voltage. And with AC you can convert current and voltage with a transformer with a very high Q. That's why AC (Tesla) beat DC (Edison) at the turn of the century for power distribution. Also, direct current generates more heat than alternating current. -_-
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. As complicated as politics are and as interconnected as this world is, there's bound to be things that are overlooked. Of course, if you or I were becoming president, we wouldn't make such mistakes, eh?
Please read the entire sentence before replying. -_- I was telling him in so many words to frack off, because English is not the native language. And I support multi-lingual resources. I think their implementation to date is full of suck, however.
On the face of it, it sounds like he's proposing a "trusted" infection vector. A way to distributed code intended to patch holes to systems that want it. The obvious problem with such a system is the consequences of it being compromised. Then it becomes a way to distribute malicious code much more effectively than the way bot-nets infect new hosts now.
You forget that the system is also leaking information about the traffic it is sending/receiving at the same time, and possibly internal state information (such as what applications are loaded, plugins, etc). That data in and of itself is valuable to an attacker, nevermind whether the vector can be protected or not... It opens up the possibility of discovering new vectors in ways maybe not possible remotely.
Detecting anomalies requires a baseline of what "normal" is. That means surrendering information about the type and nature of traffic being received by your computer (and possibly sent as well). It's a privacy problem that not many people will commit to. And businesses will be even more reluctant to surrender such information. That said, an aggregate of several hundred thousand firewall logs would be an asset to many organizations and individuals. For this reason, it will never be free... The moment someone realizes there is a monentary value in what they're doing, they will attempt to capitalize on it. So, effectually, what this project is asking you to do is give them your private, personal data, so they can turn a buck under the pretense of fighting those big bad evil hackers. Isn't the market already pretty crowded with the fear-mongers, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-anti-anti businesses?
Also, this is not a defensive product. A defense requires the ability to resist or avoid an attack. Nothing about this scheme suggests it would provide that to the end-user. It is more of a "zero day surveillance" system than anything. It's a digital cow bell. Moo, ding ding, moo. The only problem is the cow moves at the speed of light and can replicate a few thousand times a second (conservatively). Don't ask about the milk. x_x
I think you missed my point. It's that the so-called "accessibility" to these services is a patchwork of inconsistencies that fail to accomplish its main purpose -- which is providing services to all of its citizens. If they're going to be multi-lingual, they should make a proper go of it. As it is now, we all have to search the giant displays for the 10-point sized english text buried somewhere in with a few dozen other languages in a half dozen fonts at different sizes, weights... These posters look more like murals made out of letters than informational notices. I have also received letters before from them where it took me ten minutes to figure out what the point of the letter was because there were a dozen languages competing on the same page. -_- This is epic fail, whatever your native language.
And yes, I agree with you - you should learn to speak the native languages of this country. How good are you at Ojibwe?
So I can watch my government officials with inserted annoying advertisements, with crappy video that's blocky and looks like an angry fruit salad, and I can't save it to my own computer or give it to my friends because it would violate the TOS. Wow. There's a token gesture to government accessibility if I ever saw one.
It's almost as bad as the signs at the county service center, where they print in 13 languages "Warning! Big guy with gun go smack smack if past this point you go." Ah, but all the other signs are in english, spanish, and somali... And at the counters, you only get english and a card with a phone number on it that says "go somewhere else." God bless America -- land of the Infinite Queue, and home of the Rejection Letter.
When you're a real girl, and not just a girl in training, you'll have reason to complain!
O_o I suppose now isn't the best time to tell you that my nickname comes from the fact that I have been raised by lesbians and have been told that it would be a good idea to "try acting like a girl." Not that it should matter, prick.
Perhaps it is better to allow you to learn for yourself than have someone tell you everything. Knowledge and Understanding are two seperate things.
I don't see them espousing that attitude towards each other. If I ask where I can find some code examples for, say, a WMI script that does hardware inventory, I get asked why I need it, or told that someone else already did it, or a million other things than giving me what I asked for. A week later, I sent one of my male friends over, and he got it no problem, no questions asked. Men don't ask other men why they need a tool often, but when a woman asks for a tool, it's always "What for?" It's really #$@! irritating.
Incidentally, I'd treat you exactly the same way if you were a Man, the sexism is your perception, not the reality of the situation.
Just because you experience sexism as a female in IT, doesn't mean you have to adopt the same attitudes towards your male counterparts and perpetuate the cycle.
I was making an observation about their behavior, not judging them for it. x_x My attitude is that I need to get my work done, and it'd be helpful to that end if they'd treat me the same as their male coworkers. I don't treat men and women differently when it comes to work, except maybe when it comes to the small talk.
Slashdot Mirror
Fighting piracy is like punching marshmallows.
They should put them on a stick and roast them slowly instead. Crunchy marshmellows are awesome! But RIAA would probably be the idiot kid that sits there setting marshmallow after marshmallow on fire, and then later getting drunk and pissing on the fire to put it out. Boys. Grr. Argh. It stunk for hours...
If it were sex, it would be males who were more concerned with immersion, and females more concerned with competence.
Yes, girls know there's more than just knowing how to use the joystick to playing the game...
How can they be sure 95% of them are illegal? Isn't this the same group that's for years been trying to track down who is downloading what and suing them? I mean, studies like this go to the honesty of the other person. And if people will lie about something as trivial as how many sexual partners they've had, what are the odds of people telling the truth here? Besides, if 95% of music downloads were illegal, that's a pretty strong argument that downloading music should be legalized, especially considering how pervasive it is and how ineffective enforcement has been to date.
There are three kinds of lies...
Well, let's see, what other kinds of video games are there...
The Sims. Which made me believe that everyone has a diamond floating over their head that indicates how happy they are with life. Watch for red diamonds on bridge overpasses.
SimCity. Which firmly convinced me that every city will be attacked by Godzilla at least once should they decide to fight pollution by using nuclear power. Also, hurricane Katrina was due to someone misclicking the interface. Also, New Orleans could have been saved if they had built more FDs and PDs near the water front.
Doom. It taught me that green and red glowing tiles are bad to walk on. For this reason, there are some dance floors I will never go on. Also, if you kill someone, their corpse will disappear within a few minutes. This is why murder is so popular.
Leisure Suit Larry. Well, where do I start... Changing your gender is a simple matter of having sex with a dozen women and then stepping into a machine that makes a funny noise. Also, changing sex invariably makes you better looking. ...
But of course violence in video games is different... It's a unique case. All that other stuff you learn in video games (wouldn't it be nice if everyone you killed dropped gold and treasure?) doesn't stick. Nope. Only violence. Because it's special. Well, if you find someone arguing this position, shoot them in the head. And remember, it takes at least three shots to kill them. And they rarely drop anything useful.
Has this guy never seen snow? Or fog? Or rain? Does he live in a desert? Two words: Atmospheric absorption.
Translating dense physics-speak is not my forte, but as I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong -- here goes. Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force. What that means is that while it might decrease over distance, the effect never truly becomes zero. I think these guys are saying that it does, in fact, become zero. That is, gravity, contrary to Einstein's relativity equations... is discrete, like a particle, and not all like a wave (that can continue forever). Is that about right?
I will bet money on one of three outcomes:
1. Breathalyzers cease to be used.
2. The source code will be released and showed to have MAJOR flaws or an algorithm that is not scientific at all.
3. The source code will be suddenly patched and every system will be required to be updated. The "new" source code will be released. Prosecution rates plummet, for some "unknown" reason.
I'm pretty sure at this point, anyone peddling child porn is entirely doing it through encrypted networks and through isolated darknets even.
It's exchanged on IRC, primarily. And you wrongly assume these people are as technologically adept as we are. They aren't. They're ordinary people with an extraordinary mental flaw. Most of these people are busted and found with unencrypted drives, often not even a password to prevent access. The police show up at their door and either they're found desperately clawing at the hard drive (maybe throwing it in the toilet will destroy the evidence!) or give up with nary a whimper.
Apple is an organization that employs thousands. Jobs is one man. One. Uno. That's like saying if the President became sick, who runs the country? Well duh, the other 500+ members of congress. The other 50 states each with their own legislatures. The governors. And millions of others who have the word "Government" on their check every day. Apple is not run by Steve Jobs. It never was. Steve Jobs captained the ship. And as anyone will tell you, it takes more to run a ship than the captain.
Simply blocking the general public from hitting sites creates new opportunities for abuse of power, poor implementation, etc. and doesn't seem to actually do much to advance the effort to stop the exploitation of children. At best it forces it further underground.
Ordinarily, you'd be correct. Inexperienced criminals are caught early, leaving only experienced criminals. So methods of catching criminals become more sophisticated, and eventually the only players are experienced ones. It's logical. But some criminal misconduct is not rational. White collar crimes, theft, burglary, drug dealing -- these are often crimes committed by people who think rationally and consider their risks and exposures. But people driven by passion or emotion -- murder, rape, and assault, often do not consider their circumstances. They simply take the risk, not knowing what the risk actually is. And then there are crimes fueled by addiction. Child pornography is a crime fueled by an addiction, an emotive source. It offers no monentary or social status benefit. It's illogical to engage in, and the people doing so keep doing so regardless of risk. The recidivism(sp?) rate for this is so high it's almost pointless to attempt therapy of any kind. Almost (I still advocate it, but out of hope rather than reason).
Conducting fishing expeditions for this class of criminals will give results even if the methods remain crude and never evolve. I know this statement weakens my argument against such surveillance tactics. If the methods were wholly unsuccessful they would be abandoned. However, I'm more concerned with collateral damage. The methods are defensible. The consequences are not. Privacy is an intangible -- its violation often has no effect on the victim, provided the victim remains unaware of the intrusion. But irregularily, the intrusion becomes known to others outside of the group/individual who has violated the person(s) privacy and in these cases damage is done. Sometimes it is irrepairable. In the case of investigations of sexual misconduct, it is usually severe and irrepairable.
And a fundamental precipt(sp?) of our judicial system is that it provides a redress of a person's greviances against another, which includes the government. These investigations destroy lives and yet the government is never held accountable because privacy is an intangible with no assigned value. Therefore, it becomes source of continual damage to the social contract we have with the goverment -- namely that it protects and serves us. Damaging that social contract weakens the entire governmental construct because when people routinely mistrust the government is becomes increasingly ineffective and will counter with even more violent methods of enforcement and investigation which further damages its relationship with those it is supposed to serve. Eventually, this systemic failure, and subsequent loss of trust, leads people to become immoral or amoral, and a marked preference for vigilantism, gang behavior for protection, and a general disregard for the law. Which in the end harms everyone, both inside and outside the system.
I am neither for nor against such surveillance tactics, in and of themselves. But when the government is not held accountable for damaging the lives of people who are wronged -- both to the public at large and the individual(s) harmed, I cannot in good conscience support such actions and advocate actively resisting them.
Well, in the fine tradition of our founding fathers then, let's assemble publicly, choose representatives from amongst us, and then send them out internationally to work towards encrypting the network and locking it down, taking away the ability of our government to spy on us at the network level. You don't play well with others, and soon you'll have nobody to play with. Simple. Of course... who will bell the cat?
Well, let's do the math...
Approximately 23% of the world population is online now. There are approximately 6.7 billion people on the planet right now. So about 1.5 billion people. And let's say 5% of them are regularily active and have contribute 1 web page per month; and everybody else is a lurker and never contribute anything. That's 900 million web pages per year, or 246,564 per day. Now we know the growth is far higher than this, but let's humor ourselves with the low-ball estimate.
Now, let's also assume that someone is going to be looking at these websites. We'll say it takes 20 seconds for them to view and categorize a website for their black list. and let's assume they're slaved to their desk for the entire 8 hours, never blinking. That's 480 minutes of slaving, which gives us 1,440 reviews they can make per day. So to keep up with our low-ball estimate, they need 172 net slaves doing nothing but reviewing web pages. All day. Every day. And they will not stop until all the pr0n is found. Now... stop and realize the numbers are orders of magnitude higher. -_- Also realize that the internet is not the web. There are dozens if not hundreds of protocols to monitor, across many mediums -- cell phones, telecommunications, wifi, and good old fashioned sneaker-net.. e-mails, text messages, picture messages... the list goes on.
This, fundamentally, is the problem with large-scale surveillance of the population. It's too resource intensive. Even if you have algorithms that are 99.9% accurate in identifying "bad" material, with 900 million new web pages per year, that's 900,000 webpages that are incorrectly flagged -- 2,500 people's lives ruined by false accusation. Per day.
And just like sex offender registries and other draconian measures to keep someone who's been "touched" by the system in it forever, as soon as the technology exists to do the same thing to people on the internet... They too shall be endlessly recycled and chewed on by a faceless and uncaring system. And the justification shall be that it's okay to ruin a few innocent lives if it protects the rest of us from the big bad boogie men.
Here's my point, fundamentally. Let's say there are a 200,000 -- in Germany alone -- that are pedophiles. Out of about 8 million. And let's say that you have a method of detection where you run these people through it and 99.9% of the time, it gives the right result. What that means is for 8,000 people -- would guess wrong if you ran the entire population through it. What that means is your "99.9%" accurate system flags about 1 person in 20 as a bad guy when they're not. Of course, this assumes that 1 person per 40 is a pedophile. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's unreasonably high... So that means that the 1 per 20 is an optimistic case. Think about that. 1 in 20 people that the system flags is innocent. When the hysteria over the crime is such that the mere accusation is enough to destroy a person, is this a number we're comfortable with?
And if you're thinking it's "just" a black list.. Don't forget that your access attempts are logged. Just why were you trying to access a site we know to have child porn on it, Citizen?
And with his last breath, he stabs at thee for all these horrible one-liners.
In fact AC loses slightly more at a given voltage, up to a lot more for really long wires.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Line losses are based on current not voltage. And with AC you can convert current and voltage with a transformer with a very high Q. That's why AC (Tesla) beat DC (Edison) at the turn of the century for power distribution. Also, direct current generates more heat than alternating current. -_-
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. As complicated as politics are and as interconnected as this world is, there's bound to be things that are overlooked. Of course, if you or I were becoming president, we wouldn't make such mistakes, eh?
Please read the entire sentence before replying. -_- I was telling him in so many words to frack off, because English is not the native language. And I support multi-lingual resources. I think their implementation to date is full of suck, however.
On the face of it, it sounds like he's proposing a "trusted" infection vector. A way to distributed code intended to patch holes to systems that want it. The obvious problem with such a system is the consequences of it being compromised. Then it becomes a way to distribute malicious code much more effectively than the way bot-nets infect new hosts now.
You forget that the system is also leaking information about the traffic it is sending/receiving at the same time, and possibly internal state information (such as what applications are loaded, plugins, etc). That data in and of itself is valuable to an attacker, nevermind whether the vector can be protected or not... It opens up the possibility of discovering new vectors in ways maybe not possible remotely.
Detecting anomalies requires a baseline of what "normal" is. That means surrendering information about the type and nature of traffic being received by your computer (and possibly sent as well). It's a privacy problem that not many people will commit to. And businesses will be even more reluctant to surrender such information. That said, an aggregate of several hundred thousand firewall logs would be an asset to many organizations and individuals. For this reason, it will never be free... The moment someone realizes there is a monentary value in what they're doing, they will attempt to capitalize on it. So, effectually, what this project is asking you to do is give them your private, personal data, so they can turn a buck under the pretense of fighting those big bad evil hackers. Isn't the market already pretty crowded with the fear-mongers, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-anti-anti businesses?
Also, this is not a defensive product. A defense requires the ability to resist or avoid an attack. Nothing about this scheme suggests it would provide that to the end-user. It is more of a "zero day surveillance" system than anything. It's a digital cow bell. Moo, ding ding, moo. The only problem is the cow moves at the speed of light and can replicate a few thousand times a second (conservatively). Don't ask about the milk. x_x
I think you missed my point. It's that the so-called "accessibility" to these services is a patchwork of inconsistencies that fail to accomplish its main purpose -- which is providing services to all of its citizens. If they're going to be multi-lingual, they should make a proper go of it. As it is now, we all have to search the giant displays for the 10-point sized english text buried somewhere in with a few dozen other languages in a half dozen fonts at different sizes, weights... These posters look more like murals made out of letters than informational notices. I have also received letters before from them where it took me ten minutes to figure out what the point of the letter was because there were a dozen languages competing on the same page. -_- This is epic fail, whatever your native language.
And yes, I agree with you - you should learn to speak the native languages of this country. How good are you at Ojibwe?
So I can watch my government officials with inserted annoying advertisements, with crappy video that's blocky and looks like an angry fruit salad, and I can't save it to my own computer or give it to my friends because it would violate the TOS. Wow. There's a token gesture to government accessibility if I ever saw one.
It's almost as bad as the signs at the county service center, where they print in 13 languages "Warning! Big guy with gun go smack smack if past this point you go." Ah, but all the other signs are in english, spanish, and somali... And at the counters, you only get english and a card with a phone number on it that says "go somewhere else." God bless America -- land of the Infinite Queue, and home of the Rejection Letter.
When you're a real girl, and not just a girl in training, you'll have reason to complain!
O_o I suppose now isn't the best time to tell you that my nickname comes from the fact that I have been raised by lesbians and have been told that it would be a good idea to "try acting like a girl." Not that it should matter, prick.
What *short* word even exists that encompasses both fanboys and fangirls? Nobody will have heard of it!!!
Fans.
Perhaps it is better to allow you to learn for yourself than have someone tell you everything. Knowledge and Understanding are two seperate things.
I don't see them espousing that attitude towards each other. If I ask where I can find some code examples for, say, a WMI script that does hardware inventory, I get asked why I need it, or told that someone else already did it, or a million other things than giving me what I asked for. A week later, I sent one of my male friends over, and he got it no problem, no questions asked. Men don't ask other men why they need a tool often, but when a woman asks for a tool, it's always "What for?" It's really #$@! irritating.
Incidentally, I'd treat you exactly the same way if you were a Man, the sexism is your perception, not the reality of the situation.
I wish they could clone you.
Just because you experience sexism as a female in IT, doesn't mean you have to adopt the same attitudes towards your male counterparts and perpetuate the cycle.
I was making an observation about their behavior, not judging them for it. x_x My attitude is that I need to get my work done, and it'd be helpful to that end if they'd treat me the same as their male coworkers. I don't treat men and women differently when it comes to work, except maybe when it comes to the small talk.
People who don't like fangirl stories (what happened to fanboys?) have no place on Slashdot!
Oh sorry. I'll disappear into a black hole of male-dominated language now.