I have a low 5 digit user number and I'm pretty sure I signed up for Slashdot at some point in the 1990s and I don't remember it being user number based unless that was a very short period before I signed up.
I think Slashdot's moderation scheme is part of what helps it and the inline threading of comments, which is very USENET-like.
My guess is everybody assumes flying cars will be VTOL craft and not fixed wing and will rely on rotary surfaces for lift and thrust. You would think that in order to be "wide spread" they would need to be VTOL to avoid the need for runways, etc.
I would guess the gimmicks will be super short ranges, small payloads (2 adults), based on some kind of electric fan propulsion with swappable battery packs. Like everything else, the big wait is probably less the aeronautics than the means to power it.
I think the states are handcuffed by Congress' ability to regulate interstate commerce. States can't charge tariffs on imports from other states.
I honestly don't know how California was ever able to get away with its own emissions standards in the 1970s when up against the Big 3 automakers other than the obvious smog problems in LA making it clear something had to be done.
States have pretty good options for regulating pollution outputs but they're also often up against the economic realities of the cost of energy as a major factor in their local business economics, and the fact that a lot of power plants are owned by national companies. Force closed a big coal plant without anything to replace its baseload? Sure, but now you've tripled the cost of electricity and it won't be long before local businesses close or relocate because they aren't profitable at the new rates.
I never know how much of the "solar/wind is growing!!!11" hype to actually believe, but it's probably likely that the economics of it really are starting to make sense and the only way change will really happen is when the economics of it work.
Maybe that's what Android needs, a hypervisor, and what we know now as Android the operating system could just run as a VM. All the physical device drivers could be abstracted as virtual devices and supported in the OS with open source virtual device drivers.
This would at least make the OS itself easier to update. The hypervisor would probably need updating as well, but I'd wager less often than the actual OS and without the burden of physical device drivers to worry about it could happen more often.
I don't think that the "believe women" idea means "conduct a proper investigation along the lines of general due process". I think it actually means women's accusations should be taken as incontrovertible fact and sufficient to obtain convictions. Too much of the rhetoric surrounding this idea is filled with supporting arguments that "false accusations are very few" and "reporting is traumatic" and other arguments which attempt to bolster the idea that a woman wouldn't bring an accusation if it wasn't true, so they should be treated as true and not require corroboration.
I think the police have done a poor job handling rape cases, but how much of this is fatigue from poor quality accusations (those made days/weeks later where there is no rape kit evidence to collect, etc)? How much is having enough legal exposure to know that an accusation isn't enough to actually obtain a court conviction?
I think police departments could make their sexual assault units more friendly to women making accusations -- I think a lot of the time it's not the lack of prosecutable charges, but the coarse and cynical treatment women get that's a big part of the problem. But it won't change the reality that accusing someone of sexual assault and obtaining a conviction requires more than just an accusation.
I'd like to see the #MeToo version of "To Kill a Mockingbird".
In the #MeToo version, Mayella Ewell's allegations of rape against Tom Robinson are taken at face value not because she's white and he's black, but because women never lie about rape.
Atticus Finch still attempts a valiant defense, but the jury believes Mayella Ewell because a woman is always to be believed, and Jim Thompson is convicted and hanged.
Atticus Finch is run out of town not for crossing the race line for justice, but because he attempted to discredit a woman's own sense of trauma.
And the entire story is written as a memoir by Scout, who denounced her father after the trial and went away to Smith College where she became a leading feminist literature professor.
Some of this is consumer driven -- people have little patience, and even less of it for expensive items they find confusing but necessary to own.
But I wonder how much of their unrealistic expectation is driven by unrealistic burdens placed on them? Eg, my widget is broken and I need my widget (which of course I am required to provide to do my job) to work. When my widget is broken, I can't work and my boss and my customers get pissed I am not helping them.
I think people generally are super-stressed anymore by the 24x7x365 world and the margin for error/downtime is so close to zero that any problem resolution that isn't instant is seen as insufficient.
That's an unrealistic expectation, but it's not driven by their own personal needs, it's the nature of the environment that pushes it. And it turns into a huge feedback loop that just results in everyone thinking everything needs to work 100% of the time and that any fixes will be immediate.
Trump's public confrontation with China may be stupid, but my assumption is he lacks the mental horsepower to actually decide what specific sanctions/tariffs should be imposed in this little dustup.
My guess is the actual technical details are the brainchild of people who have a deeper understanding of the Chinese economy and its vulnerabilities and they are more measured and strategic than simply slapping tariffs on stuff because it says "made in China". The people coming with specific tariffs have likely done their homework and min-maxed the tariffs to minimize harm to US interests and maximize the pain China feels.
It's also possible that even with good analytical insight and strategy it may be compromised by political considerations -- corporate supporters Trump doesn't want to alienate getting an exception, for example, but this is different than simply overall bad punitive strategy.
We've been hearing for years (decades?) now about how the Chinese economy has a bunch of systemic vulnerabilities and that lots of their positive economic data is flat-out fake or pumped up so bad it might as well be fiction. My guess would be the tariffs are designed to aggravate these systemic problems in addition to trying to hobble specific industries that might be too competitive.
The parent poster is literally arguing for his right to be exploited.
All manner of our economy is built around someone figuring something out and getting paid for it regularly without supplying any additional goods, services or labor.
Patents are granted, rents are paid, royalties are paid, licenses are extended, etc. Most technologies generally that produce greater results are priced based on extracting some percentage of the efficiency savings from the buyer.
If I sell a new machine that can dig 10 holes in a day and it replaces a machine that can only dig 2 holes a day, I expect that hole-diggers will make more money because they can dig more holes. I will price my machine -- regardless of what it costs to make the machine -- partly based on the fact that hole-diggers are now making more profits.
Work and doing your fair share is part of what keeps society running.
The first guy who figured out how to put a male and female animal into a pen and get more animals without running around through the forest hunting more food must have REALLY pissed off the rest of the tribe. I mean, why does this guy get to eat regularly without EVER spending days on the hunt?
Companies don't pay you for results, they pay you because your effort is worth more to them then what they are paying you for.
Bwahaha. So nobody ever gets fired for bad results?
This just sounds like the company wanting it both ways, wanting the results *and* the employee to somehow be toiling for them, as if his labor misery was a product unto itself.
As a thought experiment, imagine a company hires an employee to fill a job. By some kind of magic, the employee can do their job without any actual effort exerted -- the mere presence of the employee causes the work to get done even though the employee seems to perform no actual labor, they just need to be present. Does the company fire the employee because they don't "work"?
I can't escape the idea that SO MANY respondents in this thread have some weird, Calvinistic idea about jobs needing to require some labor misery associated with them in order for the employee's "work" status to be justified.
If some super genius takes a job and can do the job they are assigned with far less effort than the typical employee for that job, why punish them? I mean, maybe promote them or try to give them a bigger job to gain more benefit from their genius, anything else just seems to be punishing them for not being as slow and ineffective as the average employee.
I can't think of a place where you couldn't sit and look at the environment and see where things could be improved
That's all well and good when you have the ability to do something about them. The problem usually is that you don't have unlimited rights/authority to just fix random stuff. It also supposes you know enough about the (tech, business process, etc) to do something constructive about them.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw some obviously broken technology/process and said "shit, just do it this way" and then once I dove in realized there was way more going on and that the broken way was some kind of best compromise given a bunch of impossible to change elements. There's a lot of conceit involved in thinking you can improve everything that appears to need improvement.
I once had the pleasure(?) of a job where I could knock back some problem to a fairly well solved level, and then move on to other stuff that required some honing/tuning, ad nauseum. Often improving A implied improving B and then improving C suggested further improvements to A, it kind of never ended. At times it got frustrating, like you just never will have the bandwidth to get it all done.
But I've also been in places where B and C needed obvious improvement but they were controlled by other people who were unwilling or uninterested in changing, and trying to force the issue was just more political hassle than it was ever worth.
I'm less bothered by the lack of a default paper manual, but I am bothered by things that don't really appear to have any kind of documentation at all, paper or electronic. Or if they have documentation, it's like paper thin (that's a pun) and doesn't cover most of the product or only a subset of features.
You're expected to just grok the design and figure it out, or google it somehow and find someone else who did figure it out and felt like sharing.
I feel like the world gets more and more technical but the actual documentation for it gets less and less. More complexity and less information.
I don't think the grading itself is biased, but I do think that female teachers like to throw their female students these "girl projects" that are definitely skewed to female-oriented skill sets.
Maybe this means most education tasks suffer from a male bias, but we're talking classes like Social Students and English where it's reading, writing, class discussion, fairly neutral things that ought not have much gender bias.
for some mind numbing reason we act like the right wing are not in charge of this country, even though they control every branch of every government in the country.
I know what you mean, but there's a whole class of left wing people in senior managerial roles, in addition to the legal and other professional fields.
I have two good friends (a couple), one works as a business consultant and one has senior job with a healthcare company. They both of MBAs, live in an upscale suburb in a house with an in-ground swimming pool. And they are both liberal as hell.
I think it's super ironic to sit in their in-ground pool with them, drinking top shelf liquor, and listen to them talk about how great the Democrats/Hillary/Bernie are. They are not bullshitting, either, they really believe it.
I mean, they are not "in control" like some CEO or something, but they are the kind of people who can call politicians and get answers and their money == influence at some level, yet the hew to serious far-left ideas and causes despite a lifestyle that it definitely not left wing.
This makes me wonder what would happen if there were no rules about fraudulent claims.
Wouldn't that result in basically all claims being thought of as fraudulent until they were proven otherwise? Companies with a track record of consistently telling the truth over the long haul might gain some credibility, but everyone else is the liar that they are now.
The idea that companies are honest now because they skate on the edges of the rules is laughable.
If my rules merely suck, but everybody agrees I own the business and my rules are legal, then where is the politics? There isn't any.
That's just it, nobody agrees your rules are legal. Since we have to refer to the law to establish the legitimacy of your rules, now we're back to political in some sense.
Hell, establishing that you own your business may be a matter of SEC regulation regarding stock ownership or a question of contract law.
There are some devs who are perfectly decent human beings who simply don't want political agendas pushed through software development code of conducts. Is that so unreasonable?
It strikes me that any code of conduct sufficiently well defined to be useful will carry the biases and values of those who craft the code of conduct. Those biases and values can certainly be judged to be "political agendas" by people opposed to them.
I'm probably mis-paraphrasing it, but there's some kind of statement about "all laws are political" because they arise from a political process. Some laws, like those prohibiting murder, seem apolitical but my guess is this is just because murder is widely accepted as unacceptable.
My guess is a code of conduct made up of purely shared values which have wide agreement would be as free as possible of agendas, but it would probably also not be very useful since it would only cover small amounts of conduct on which there was wide agreement.
I bought a Volvo with blindspot warnings about 10 years ago. I've never found it helpful mostly because I spent 25 or so years driving cars without blindspot avoidance. I've basically ingrained blindspot checking into my driving behavior and retraining myself to rely on the technology and drop manual checks seems hard, and by itself it doesn't add much to manual blindspot checking.
It could also be a function of the implementation. Mine uses orange lights in the car near the region where you look at side mirrors. Despite being more or less in your field of vision, they're not easy to "see". My wife's 2015 Acura uses an audible system with dash display (combined with the turn signal being turned on? I don't drive it enough) but the audible alert seems more beneficial than needing visual indicators. I've also driven rentals with the alerts embedded in the side mirrors which makes it hard to avoid.
Overall though, if you've learned to drive safely and deal with blind spots manually a new technology really doesn't appear to add much value and can be a distraction.
Collision avoidance has been great, though, I'm pretty sure it's saved me once or twice. Distance sensing cruise control I think would benefit all drivers and might even be useful as an automatic function because it maintains a constant speed and constant distance.
I can't help but wonder if part of the success of unions was union leaders willing to play dirty themselves.
Unions often seem portrayed in history texts as performing a Ghandi/MLK like non-violent protests; pickets, sit-downs, etc, as if that's what swayed management at many companies.
I wonder if what really swayed management was getting their delivery fleet firebombed while they had their workers locked out or their scabs beat to a pulp.
Minneapolis had a huge trucker's strike in the 1930s. The union side decided nothing moved, so they started stopping and hijacking trucks trying to break the strike. They fought company goons and the police with axe handles. Even though strikers got fired on, the violence against police/management forces got extreme enough that they finally had a to call out the National Guard and the Governor ended up forcing a compromise that was basically a union organizing victory, breaking the anti-union cartel.
The union only succeeded to the extent they were willing to use some kind of force to achieve their goals. It seems like many turning points in labor relations hinged on how willing the union backers were literally willing to meet force with force, even if they technically didn't win any specific street battle. There's a point at which the political system is only so willing to engage in small-scale urban warfare for the benefit of the capitalists.
Up through middle school we would get project assignments from non-art teachers that involved what amounted to an arts and crafts project (eg, a history assignment that was a diorama about Lincoln or something).
My son always got bad grades on those projects despite having a B+ or an A in the class generally because art wasn't his thing, and the grading on the project was biased towards its artistic content. I would inevitably go in to gripe about the grade he got and I would see the high-scoring projects were nearly all by girls, many of whom seem to be into "coloring".
And nearly all these projects were assigned by female teachers. Their responses were really frustrating, a lot of bullshit about the importance of presentation quality of submitted work, etc. "What about their actual knowledge of the subject?" and the teachers would kind of blanch and not want to say anymore.
My take is there is some kind of low-level bias going on here, the teachers see the girls being less interested in the subject matter and toss them an easy one to boost their grades. Last year we only had two, and my *wife* actually did the artistic part of the work herself on one of them -- still only a C+!! My wife was super pissed and thought that it was a definite sign that the grade was being issued based on gender, not on content, because from a production value perspective it was like business-meeting quality.
This year during the fall "curriculum night" I actually asked all the teachers how many "coloring assignments" there would be. Most didn't understand and I explained, "You know, those assignments where we do something artistic that has nothing to do with the content of the curriculum and is judged on artistic merit". To a person, all the female teachers looked pissed that I asked that. Totally busted.
Google and all the other web-tracking companies seem to do so much tracking.
I'm imagining a big argument against better web privacy is fundamentally economics -- tracking, etc, makes business so much more efficient that eliminating it would essentially wind up raising prices as marketers would wind up back in the old days of educated guesses that their ads or messaging was directed at the right people.
My question is -- if you're a marketer, is all this new intelligence and tracking actually making marketing/selling better for the people doing the marketing and selling? Do they have any data to show its better?
My hunch is "not really" and most of the complaining about enhanced privacy will be driven by people collecting/selling this information who are now out a source of revenue or forced to try to sell a much less useful product. I would also expect some kind of complaining by buyers of this information, maybe not because they really know the information makes them more effective but because they just think it does.
It also makes me wonder if tracking-type info is a kind of market in false goods -- lots of money being spent and made trading the information, but its not really useful. It persists because the market is so huge and generates so much profit, but if at the end of the day it went away the only actual loss would be the economic exchange associated with buying and selling information.
Slashdot Mirror
When was it based just on user numbers?
I have a low 5 digit user number and I'm pretty sure I signed up for Slashdot at some point in the 1990s and I don't remember it being user number based unless that was a very short period before I signed up.
I think Slashdot's moderation scheme is part of what helps it and the inline threading of comments, which is very USENET-like.
My guess is everybody assumes flying cars will be VTOL craft and not fixed wing and will rely on rotary surfaces for lift and thrust. You would think that in order to be "wide spread" they would need to be VTOL to avoid the need for runways, etc.
I would guess the gimmicks will be super short ranges, small payloads (2 adults), based on some kind of electric fan propulsion with swappable battery packs. Like everything else, the big wait is probably less the aeronautics than the means to power it.
I think the states are handcuffed by Congress' ability to regulate interstate commerce. States can't charge tariffs on imports from other states.
I honestly don't know how California was ever able to get away with its own emissions standards in the 1970s when up against the Big 3 automakers other than the obvious smog problems in LA making it clear something had to be done.
States have pretty good options for regulating pollution outputs but they're also often up against the economic realities of the cost of energy as a major factor in their local business economics, and the fact that a lot of power plants are owned by national companies. Force closed a big coal plant without anything to replace its baseload? Sure, but now you've tripled the cost of electricity and it won't be long before local businesses close or relocate because they aren't profitable at the new rates.
I never know how much of the "solar/wind is growing!!!11" hype to actually believe, but it's probably likely that the economics of it really are starting to make sense and the only way change will really happen is when the economics of it work.
Maybe that's what Android needs, a hypervisor, and what we know now as Android the operating system could just run as a VM. All the physical device drivers could be abstracted as virtual devices and supported in the OS with open source virtual device drivers.
This would at least make the OS itself easier to update. The hypervisor would probably need updating as well, but I'd wager less often than the actual OS and without the burden of physical device drivers to worry about it could happen more often.
I don't think that the "believe women" idea means "conduct a proper investigation along the lines of general due process". I think it actually means women's accusations should be taken as incontrovertible fact and sufficient to obtain convictions. Too much of the rhetoric surrounding this idea is filled with supporting arguments that "false accusations are very few" and "reporting is traumatic" and other arguments which attempt to bolster the idea that a woman wouldn't bring an accusation if it wasn't true, so they should be treated as true and not require corroboration.
I think the police have done a poor job handling rape cases, but how much of this is fatigue from poor quality accusations (those made days/weeks later where there is no rape kit evidence to collect, etc)? How much is having enough legal exposure to know that an accusation isn't enough to actually obtain a court conviction?
I think police departments could make their sexual assault units more friendly to women making accusations -- I think a lot of the time it's not the lack of prosecutable charges, but the coarse and cynical treatment women get that's a big part of the problem. But it won't change the reality that accusing someone of sexual assault and obtaining a conviction requires more than just an accusation.
I'd like to see the #MeToo version of "To Kill a Mockingbird".
In the #MeToo version, Mayella Ewell's allegations of rape against Tom Robinson are taken at face value not because she's white and he's black, but because women never lie about rape.
Atticus Finch still attempts a valiant defense, but the jury believes Mayella Ewell because a woman is always to be believed, and Jim Thompson is convicted and hanged.
Atticus Finch is run out of town not for crossing the race line for justice, but because he attempted to discredit a woman's own sense of trauma.
And the entire story is written as a memoir by Scout, who denounced her father after the trial and went away to Smith College where she became a leading feminist literature professor.
Some of this is consumer driven -- people have little patience, and even less of it for expensive items they find confusing but necessary to own.
But I wonder how much of their unrealistic expectation is driven by unrealistic burdens placed on them? Eg, my widget is broken and I need my widget (which of course I am required to provide to do my job) to work. When my widget is broken, I can't work and my boss and my customers get pissed I am not helping them.
I think people generally are super-stressed anymore by the 24x7x365 world and the margin for error/downtime is so close to zero that any problem resolution that isn't instant is seen as insufficient.
That's an unrealistic expectation, but it's not driven by their own personal needs, it's the nature of the environment that pushes it. And it turns into a huge feedback loop that just results in everyone thinking everything needs to work 100% of the time and that any fixes will be immediate.
Trump's public confrontation with China may be stupid, but my assumption is he lacks the mental horsepower to actually decide what specific sanctions/tariffs should be imposed in this little dustup.
My guess is the actual technical details are the brainchild of people who have a deeper understanding of the Chinese economy and its vulnerabilities and they are more measured and strategic than simply slapping tariffs on stuff because it says "made in China". The people coming with specific tariffs have likely done their homework and min-maxed the tariffs to minimize harm to US interests and maximize the pain China feels.
It's also possible that even with good analytical insight and strategy it may be compromised by political considerations -- corporate supporters Trump doesn't want to alienate getting an exception, for example, but this is different than simply overall bad punitive strategy.
We've been hearing for years (decades?) now about how the Chinese economy has a bunch of systemic vulnerabilities and that lots of their positive economic data is flat-out fake or pumped up so bad it might as well be fiction. My guess would be the tariffs are designed to aggravate these systemic problems in addition to trying to hobble specific industries that might be too competitive.
The parent poster is literally arguing for his right to be exploited.
All manner of our economy is built around someone figuring something out and getting paid for it regularly without supplying any additional goods, services or labor.
Patents are granted, rents are paid, royalties are paid, licenses are extended, etc. Most technologies generally that produce greater results are priced based on extracting some percentage of the efficiency savings from the buyer.
If I sell a new machine that can dig 10 holes in a day and it replaces a machine that can only dig 2 holes a day, I expect that hole-diggers will make more money because they can dig more holes. I will price my machine -- regardless of what it costs to make the machine -- partly based on the fact that hole-diggers are now making more profits.
Work and doing your fair share is part of what keeps society running.
The first guy who figured out how to put a male and female animal into a pen and get more animals without running around through the forest hunting more food must have REALLY pissed off the rest of the tribe. I mean, why does this guy get to eat regularly without EVER spending days on the hunt?
Companies don't pay you for results, they pay you because your effort is worth more to them then what they are paying you for.
Bwahaha. So nobody ever gets fired for bad results?
This just sounds like the company wanting it both ways, wanting the results *and* the employee to somehow be toiling for them, as if his labor misery was a product unto itself.
As a thought experiment, imagine a company hires an employee to fill a job. By some kind of magic, the employee can do their job without any actual effort exerted -- the mere presence of the employee causes the work to get done even though the employee seems to perform no actual labor, they just need to be present. Does the company fire the employee because they don't "work"?
I can't escape the idea that SO MANY respondents in this thread have some weird, Calvinistic idea about jobs needing to require some labor misery associated with them in order for the employee's "work" status to be justified.
If some super genius takes a job and can do the job they are assigned with far less effort than the typical employee for that job, why punish them? I mean, maybe promote them or try to give them a bigger job to gain more benefit from their genius, anything else just seems to be punishing them for not being as slow and ineffective as the average employee.
I can't think of a place where you couldn't sit and look at the environment and see where things could be improved
That's all well and good when you have the ability to do something about them. The problem usually is that you don't have unlimited rights/authority to just fix random stuff. It also supposes you know enough about the (tech, business process, etc) to do something constructive about them.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw some obviously broken technology/process and said "shit, just do it this way" and then once I dove in realized there was way more going on and that the broken way was some kind of best compromise given a bunch of impossible to change elements. There's a lot of conceit involved in thinking you can improve everything that appears to need improvement.
I once had the pleasure(?) of a job where I could knock back some problem to a fairly well solved level, and then move on to other stuff that required some honing/tuning, ad nauseum. Often improving A implied improving B and then improving C suggested further improvements to A, it kind of never ended. At times it got frustrating, like you just never will have the bandwidth to get it all done.
But I've also been in places where B and C needed obvious improvement but they were controlled by other people who were unwilling or uninterested in changing, and trying to force the issue was just more political hassle than it was ever worth.
For what it's worth, I'll bet Louis Farrakhan or David Duke would be fascinating (say it in Spock's voice) to talk to.
You don't have to actually believe whatever bullshit they spout, but listening to them might actually be at least entertaining.
I'm less bothered by the lack of a default paper manual, but I am bothered by things that don't really appear to have any kind of documentation at all, paper or electronic. Or if they have documentation, it's like paper thin (that's a pun) and doesn't cover most of the product or only a subset of features.
You're expected to just grok the design and figure it out, or google it somehow and find someone else who did figure it out and felt like sharing.
I feel like the world gets more and more technical but the actual documentation for it gets less and less. More complexity and less information.
Why not just a dual boot mode? Enter in passcode 1 and you get boot region 1 which can be a generic install with a few downloaded apps for cosmetics.
Passcode 2 gets you the other boot region.
Bonus points for some cheesy option that prevents boot region 2 from loading at all for some time window or number of reboots.
I don't think the grading itself is biased, but I do think that female teachers like to throw their female students these "girl projects" that are definitely skewed to female-oriented skill sets.
Maybe this means most education tasks suffer from a male bias, but we're talking classes like Social Students and English where it's reading, writing, class discussion, fairly neutral things that ought not have much gender bias.
for some mind numbing reason we act like the right wing are not in charge of this country, even though they control every branch of every government in the country.
I know what you mean, but there's a whole class of left wing people in senior managerial roles, in addition to the legal and other professional fields.
I have two good friends (a couple), one works as a business consultant and one has senior job with a healthcare company. They both of MBAs, live in an upscale suburb in a house with an in-ground swimming pool. And they are both liberal as hell.
I think it's super ironic to sit in their in-ground pool with them, drinking top shelf liquor, and listen to them talk about how great the Democrats/Hillary/Bernie are. They are not bullshitting, either, they really believe it.
I mean, they are not "in control" like some CEO or something, but they are the kind of people who can call politicians and get answers and their money == influence at some level, yet the hew to serious far-left ideas and causes despite a lifestyle that it definitely not left wing.
This makes me wonder what would happen if there were no rules about fraudulent claims.
Wouldn't that result in basically all claims being thought of as fraudulent until they were proven otherwise? Companies with a track record of consistently telling the truth over the long haul might gain some credibility, but everyone else is the liar that they are now.
The idea that companies are honest now because they skate on the edges of the rules is laughable.
If my rules merely suck, but everybody agrees I own the business and my rules are legal, then where is the politics? There isn't any.
That's just it, nobody agrees your rules are legal. Since we have to refer to the law to establish the legitimacy of your rules, now we're back to political in some sense.
Hell, establishing that you own your business may be a matter of SEC regulation regarding stock ownership or a question of contract law.
There are some devs who are perfectly decent human beings who simply don't want political agendas pushed through software development code of conducts. Is that so unreasonable?
It strikes me that any code of conduct sufficiently well defined to be useful will carry the biases and values of those who craft the code of conduct. Those biases and values can certainly be judged to be "political agendas" by people opposed to them.
I'm probably mis-paraphrasing it, but there's some kind of statement about "all laws are political" because they arise from a political process. Some laws, like those prohibiting murder, seem apolitical but my guess is this is just because murder is widely accepted as unacceptable.
My guess is a code of conduct made up of purely shared values which have wide agreement would be as free as possible of agendas, but it would probably also not be very useful since it would only cover small amounts of conduct on which there was wide agreement.
I bought a Volvo with blindspot warnings about 10 years ago. I've never found it helpful mostly because I spent 25 or so years driving cars without blindspot avoidance. I've basically ingrained blindspot checking into my driving behavior and retraining myself to rely on the technology and drop manual checks seems hard, and by itself it doesn't add much to manual blindspot checking.
It could also be a function of the implementation. Mine uses orange lights in the car near the region where you look at side mirrors. Despite being more or less in your field of vision, they're not easy to "see". My wife's 2015 Acura uses an audible system with dash display (combined with the turn signal being turned on? I don't drive it enough) but the audible alert seems more beneficial than needing visual indicators. I've also driven rentals with the alerts embedded in the side mirrors which makes it hard to avoid.
Overall though, if you've learned to drive safely and deal with blind spots manually a new technology really doesn't appear to add much value and can be a distraction.
Collision avoidance has been great, though, I'm pretty sure it's saved me once or twice. Distance sensing cruise control I think would benefit all drivers and might even be useful as an automatic function because it maintains a constant speed and constant distance.
I can't help but wonder if part of the success of unions was union leaders willing to play dirty themselves.
Unions often seem portrayed in history texts as performing a Ghandi/MLK like non-violent protests; pickets, sit-downs, etc, as if that's what swayed management at many companies.
I wonder if what really swayed management was getting their delivery fleet firebombed while they had their workers locked out or their scabs beat to a pulp.
Minneapolis had a huge trucker's strike in the 1930s. The union side decided nothing moved, so they started stopping and hijacking trucks trying to break the strike. They fought company goons and the police with axe handles. Even though strikers got fired on, the violence against police/management forces got extreme enough that they finally had a to call out the National Guard and the Governor ended up forcing a compromise that was basically a union organizing victory, breaking the anti-union cartel.
The union only succeeded to the extent they were willing to use some kind of force to achieve their goals. It seems like many turning points in labor relations hinged on how willing the union backers were literally willing to meet force with force, even if they technically didn't win any specific street battle. There's a point at which the political system is only so willing to engage in small-scale urban warfare for the benefit of the capitalists.
Modern hypervisors can do copy on write memory sharing between VMs.
I've been running a POC for VMware's Horizon View VDI system and with 10 test users logged in we see something like ~30 GB memory shared.
IMHO, the problem Microsoft never managed to get right was user profiles. They're too clunky, which is why you seldom see roaming profiles in use.
You laugh, but we complain about this a lot.
Up through middle school we would get project assignments from non-art teachers that involved what amounted to an arts and crafts project (eg, a history assignment that was a diorama about Lincoln or something).
My son always got bad grades on those projects despite having a B+ or an A in the class generally because art wasn't his thing, and the grading on the project was biased towards its artistic content. I would inevitably go in to gripe about the grade he got and I would see the high-scoring projects were nearly all by girls, many of whom seem to be into "coloring".
And nearly all these projects were assigned by female teachers. Their responses were really frustrating, a lot of bullshit about the importance of presentation quality of submitted work, etc. "What about their actual knowledge of the subject?" and the teachers would kind of blanch and not want to say anymore.
My take is there is some kind of low-level bias going on here, the teachers see the girls being less interested in the subject matter and toss them an easy one to boost their grades. Last year we only had two, and my *wife* actually did the artistic part of the work herself on one of them -- still only a C+!! My wife was super pissed and thought that it was a definite sign that the grade was being issued based on gender, not on content, because from a production value perspective it was like business-meeting quality.
This year during the fall "curriculum night" I actually asked all the teachers how many "coloring assignments" there would be. Most didn't understand and I explained, "You know, those assignments where we do something artistic that has nothing to do with the content of the curriculum and is judged on artistic merit". To a person, all the female teachers looked pissed that I asked that. Totally busted.
Google and all the other web-tracking companies seem to do so much tracking.
I'm imagining a big argument against better web privacy is fundamentally economics -- tracking, etc, makes business so much more efficient that eliminating it would essentially wind up raising prices as marketers would wind up back in the old days of educated guesses that their ads or messaging was directed at the right people.
My question is -- if you're a marketer, is all this new intelligence and tracking actually making marketing/selling better for the people doing the marketing and selling? Do they have any data to show its better?
My hunch is "not really" and most of the complaining about enhanced privacy will be driven by people collecting/selling this information who are now out a source of revenue or forced to try to sell a much less useful product. I would also expect some kind of complaining by buyers of this information, maybe not because they really know the information makes them more effective but because they just think it does.
It also makes me wonder if tracking-type info is a kind of market in false goods -- lots of money being spent and made trading the information, but its not really useful. It persists because the market is so huge and generates so much profit, but if at the end of the day it went away the only actual loss would be the economic exchange associated with buying and selling information.