The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that
It's not the policy that does that. It's people friending their real-life friends, family and coworkers that makes them civil. They don't want to be seen as keyboard warriors, bullies and social misfits when real-life people are watching. Facebook wants you to friend people you know in real life, and not form yet another anonymous forum for arguing and trolling.
Facebook doesn't exist to serve you. Get over yourself.
Oops, hit the wrong button. Meant to add this...
Facebook isn't the government and isn't the law. And they aren't obligated to provide you with anything. Until the government starts requiring Facebook accounts, you have no rights to anything they provide.
Facebook is a poor choice for communicating around a common interest, or for getting support from a group. There are no facebook communities that compare to the better web forums, and it has nothing to do with anonymity. The interface itself is just not conducive to group discussions. Everything is short-term, hit-or-miss reach, and even large groups have small participation. Facebook isn't useful for carrying on a meaningful dialog.
People act differently when they are not accountable for what they say. You know that from reading every online forum ever. My facebook feed to positively civil compared to every anonymous forum.
Ideally you'd be able to use your real-world name, whether it's your legal name or not, but how can facebook tell the difference between a name you made up for facebook and one you use professionally or personally? Just how hard do you expect them to work to accommodate every keyboard warrior?
If you pick a realistic name and act like a real person, facebook will not be able to tell it's not your real name, and they have no interest in disallowing you. But you will have few friends, because you will not have a ready-made real-life network, so you will probably seek the company of other people who are using fake names, gathering around common interests. But some of them will use obviously made-up names, and they will fight because they aren't accountable, and someone will rat you all out.
This isn't facebook's fault, or their problem to solve. They don't want you turning their service into a duplicate of every other keyboard warrior antisocial forum on the internet. It's not in their best interest to be used as a tool for keyboard warriors and social misfits. Keyboard warriors and social misfits ruin the experience for "normal" people, and facebook is earning money serving "normal" people.
The lesson: If you've chosen a realistic name and want to be treated like a real person, then act like it, and watch who you keep company with. Don't piss off keyboard warriors and facebook won't know, doesn't need to know, and doesn't care that it's not your legal name.
Blogger or other well-known pseudonym? Create a facebook page rather than a personal profile. Be a facebook "like" or "follow" rather than a "friend".
Geeks want to discard any system that is not perfect for everyone, including edge cases and trouble makers. It's not realistic. If Facebook's rules don't work for you, then don't use it. They don't exist to provide a forum for you. They exist to make money, and they do so by providing social networking for real-life people, for people who want that.
Disclaimer: my slashdot name is not my real name, and I can't use it on facebook. I'm also a social misfit and generally pretty unsuccessful at social networking. That's not facebook's fault or problem.
I love how they say that Mercury switches can detonate explosives, as if any other switch can't.
A mercury switch operates on gravity. Tilt a package (like, say, pick it up carelessly, or rotate it to face the label up to read who sent it) to complete the circuit.
So, mercury switches are more interesting to law enforcement than other types. He was into experimenting with chemicals. He was caught trespassing to acquire mercury switches. Of course he was interesting to law enforcement.
Facebook is a place where most of the people you encounter have a real-world persona that pretty much matches their online persona, so if you take care to know the people you friend, it cuts out a lot of bad behavior. You have the opportunity, though you can also screw it up with poor choices of friends, to have a community that avoids much of the trouble of random corners of the internet. People are *much* better behaved when their real-world friends and acquaintances can see them.
This is useful. It doesn't serve every purpose, and it isn't intended to. It isn't for everyone, and that's okay. It discriminates against people who would otherwise behave behind a pseudonym, so it's not perfect. Nothing is.
A place without pseudonyms is useful, even if it isn't universal.
Disclaimer: My slashdot name is a pseudonym. My facebook name isn't.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them:
Sounds like what really happened was they gave you an opportunity to say something interesting about yourself and demonstrate some camaraderie and some love for the field, and you instead bored them with unnecessary details. They may have viewed that as a failure to communicate clearly. It's a problem many programmers have. They give impressive-sounding non-answers.
I don't know about that. Millennials by and large seem to be better informed, well, maybe not 'better', but more likely to know about things since they tend to be a lot more integrated with online communities. They are also more likely than older generations to have some (if light) knowledge of the technologies involved since they have gone more of their life exposed to them.
You've grown up too fond of the internet.
The "older generations" are perhaps too trusting of authority and media. They are perhaps too uncritical. They are perhaps too paranoid and prejudiced.
"Millennials" are perhaps too trusting of their friends, even those they don't really know much about. They are perhaps too easily manipulated with flattery and camaraderie. They are perhaps too subject to group think and naivete.
Neither, as a whole, is particularly well-informed.
I chose to do my first programming class when I was 16. The students were virtually all male. Nobody who signed up for that course had the slightest idea about how to program, let alone what programming culture was like. So you want me to believe that all the girls in my grade went out to different jobs, experienced a culture of misogny and then decided not to enroll in programming because of that?
I can tell you why most of the males were in my class and that's because we were all the kids who would sit around at lunch and talk about computers or videogames.
You were 16 at a time when "we were all the kids who would sit around at lunch and talk about computers or videogames". You are not old enough to remember a time when there were not enough kids talking about computers or video games for there to be a group of them chatting over lunch. You are not old enough to remember a time before there was a programmer/gamer culture. For you, it's always been that way, and it's always been a boy's thing. It's no surprise there were no girls in your group.
Kids don't talk about accounting or engineering or nursing or law over lunch. Not that I know of, anyway. They didn't used to talk about computers, either. It wasn't until the 80's that computers became a mainstream entertainment medium. It wasn't until the 90's that programming was common among high-school aged kids. And in the 90's the internet turned any discussion of computers or video games into a boy's thing.
Prior to that women could show up to a college (or high school) programming class on equal footing. Since then, they've learned that programming is a boy's thing. If they think they're going to buck that trend all they have to do is show up at a place like slashdot (or a gaming website) to be discouraged.
An interesting statistic that never gets mentioned by the "Men's Rights Activists" who like to talk about how women aren't suited for programming is that up until the late 1980s, half of the people graduating from Computer Science programs were women.
I got into the field in the early 80's, when there were a lot more women than there are now. At my first job, half the developers were women.
I blame the internet. I'm not kidding. Online forums have empowered the brogrammer culture. It's great that there is now a forum for interacting socially on a grand scale, but there's also an opportunity and an excuse for not developing socially.
Today's employers don't know how bad they have it. They don't know how unproductive today's developers are, chasing after self-congratulatory complexity rather than doing real work. On the upside, there's real opportunity for people of any gender to be heroes, going against the grain of the culture. In organizations run by adults, it's not difficult to be seen as a standout performer.
If you're surrounded by people just like yourself, of course you don't think there's a problem. But a monoculture may not be the most efficient way of getting things done. You may not think there's a problem, and your organization may not know any better because they've never seen any different, but you are almost certainly less efficient (and less profitable, less satisfied, less secure) for being so un-diverse.
SJWs have spent decades telling women they need "special help" to become engineers and programmers. We can't overcome that by being "welcoming" because they chose a different path before college.
If you think you are not involved before college you may be mistaken. Discouraging women has more to do with the culture of programming than with SJWs, and that culture exists everywhere a young woman might go to talk with programmers, including here. How it got that way is not your fault, specifically, but clearly you aren't interested in being "welcoming", which perpetuates the problem.
Staring at code all day isn't for everyone, just like working with babies all day would drive me mad
So, while the car was out of his sight for the first incident, some evil government agency placed a tracker, and used it to track him to...a "Circumvention Tech Festival"? An advertised event, at a physical venue, with sponsors and a website. They needed a tracker to find people who went to this event. I see.
"I found code that already does this" sounds like you're a better problem solver. It's self-congratulatory nonsense. If the result is very complex, you congratulate yourself even more, for being able to do complex things, rather than punching yourself in the head like you should, for making things more difficult than they need to be.
If you found code that really does make your life easier, that's great. It hardly ever happens.
I have a partially-sighted (legally blind) friend who hates touch displays with a firey passion. What she wants most in life is an MP3 player / book reader with a large capacity and tactile controls, which has a clear voice for reading, and which can be loaded from an interface that is not accessibility-hostile (like iTunes) and which will allow her to use content she already has or can get from the public domain.
The main negative is....ebooks... Publishers want to gouge people for having the text of a book read to them, and would rather screw over blind people than permit Apple to read the text of ebooks for no additional charge. Some publishers have some kind of workaround for blind people, so they don't come across as complete douchebags, but the workarounds also tend to be a hassle.
post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.
So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.
The internet happened. Online venues (like slashdot) became places where self-selection happens. Being mostly male to begin with, that's the direction online forums went. More and more pure. This is where people exploring an interest in technology go, and learn it's a field where it's acceptable to say the kind of shit that gets up-moderated here. Fewer women enter the field. Online forums become more pure. Rinse and repeat.
Looks like Apple has built in detection from IOS 5
So, the iPhone he says unhelpfully didn't tell him there was a rogue tower...was actually aware of the rogue tower, and therefore not compromised? That it would have warned him if he tried to communicate through it, and has therefore already, for years, been doing the same thing his secure phone does? You mean someone who is selling a secure phone is making up a use case for it?
So, a magazine website would rather you visit their local version, to serve you better targeted ads, or local interest stories, or load leveling, or prices in local currency, or subscription services on the same continent, or maybe even to serve you better with faster access, and this is some American scheme to abuse you? Did it ever occur to you that an Australian company (or a German one, or...) wanting to create content unique to multiple continents might do the same thing? Or do you actually think URL redirection is a uniquely American thing, indicating a character flaw of an entire nation?
It's not *necessary* to use URL redirection to accomplish any of these things, but the dork who implemented it is no smarter than your average slashdotter, and just like how they create crappy interfaces, incomprehensible documentation (if any at all), code that is way more complex than it needs to be, or just simply can't solve the problem they were given, maybe...just maybe...they didn't anticipate your desire to not be given localized content, or that you'd take offense at their solution.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that
It's not the policy that does that. It's people friending their real-life friends, family and coworkers that makes them civil. They don't want to be seen as keyboard warriors, bullies and social misfits when real-life people are watching. Facebook wants you to friend people you know in real life, and not form yet another anonymous forum for arguing and trolling.
What a load of entitled, selfish bullshit.
Facebook doesn't exist to serve you. Get over yourself.
Oops, hit the wrong button. Meant to add this...
Facebook isn't the government and isn't the law. And they aren't obligated to provide you with anything. Until the government starts requiring Facebook accounts, you have no rights to anything they provide.
What a load of entitled, selfish bullshit.
Facebook doesn't exist to serve you. Get over yourself.
Facebook is a poor choice for communicating around a common interest, or for getting support from a group. There are no facebook communities that compare to the better web forums, and it has nothing to do with anonymity. The interface itself is just not conducive to group discussions. Everything is short-term, hit-or-miss reach, and even large groups have small participation. Facebook isn't useful for carrying on a meaningful dialog.
People act differently when they are not accountable for what they say. You know that from reading every online forum ever. My facebook feed to positively civil compared to every anonymous forum.
Ideally you'd be able to use your real-world name, whether it's your legal name or not, but how can facebook tell the difference between a name you made up for facebook and one you use professionally or personally? Just how hard do you expect them to work to accommodate every keyboard warrior?
If you pick a realistic name and act like a real person, facebook will not be able to tell it's not your real name, and they have no interest in disallowing you. But you will have few friends, because you will not have a ready-made real-life network, so you will probably seek the company of other people who are using fake names, gathering around common interests. But some of them will use obviously made-up names, and they will fight because they aren't accountable, and someone will rat you all out.
This isn't facebook's fault, or their problem to solve. They don't want you turning their service into a duplicate of every other keyboard warrior antisocial forum on the internet. It's not in their best interest to be used as a tool for keyboard warriors and social misfits. Keyboard warriors and social misfits ruin the experience for "normal" people, and facebook is earning money serving "normal" people.
The lesson: If you've chosen a realistic name and want to be treated like a real person, then act like it, and watch who you keep company with. Don't piss off keyboard warriors and facebook won't know, doesn't need to know, and doesn't care that it's not your legal name.
Blogger or other well-known pseudonym? Create a facebook page rather than a personal profile. Be a facebook "like" or "follow" rather than a "friend".
Geeks want to discard any system that is not perfect for everyone, including edge cases and trouble makers. It's not realistic. If Facebook's rules don't work for you, then don't use it. They don't exist to provide a forum for you. They exist to make money, and they do so by providing social networking for real-life people, for people who want that.
Disclaimer: my slashdot name is not my real name, and I can't use it on facebook. I'm also a social misfit and generally pretty unsuccessful at social networking. That's not facebook's fault or problem.
Most of it is self-inflicted. In fact, most of it is eagerly, self-congratulatorily self-inflicted.
I love how they say that Mercury switches can detonate explosives, as if any other switch can't.
A mercury switch operates on gravity. Tilt a package (like, say, pick it up carelessly, or rotate it to face the label up to read who sent it) to complete the circuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, mercury switches are more interesting to law enforcement than other types. He was into experimenting with chemicals. He was caught trespassing to acquire mercury switches. Of course he was interesting to law enforcement.
Facebook is a place where most of the people you encounter have a real-world persona that pretty much matches their online persona, so if you take care to know the people you friend, it cuts out a lot of bad behavior. You have the opportunity, though you can also screw it up with poor choices of friends, to have a community that avoids much of the trouble of random corners of the internet. People are *much* better behaved when their real-world friends and acquaintances can see them.
This is useful. It doesn't serve every purpose, and it isn't intended to. It isn't for everyone, and that's okay. It discriminates against people who would otherwise behave behind a pseudonym, so it's not perfect. Nothing is.
A place without pseudonyms is useful, even if it isn't universal.
Disclaimer: My slashdot name is a pseudonym. My facebook name isn't.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them:
Sounds like what really happened was they gave you an opportunity to say something interesting about yourself and demonstrate some camaraderie and some love for the field, and you instead bored them with unnecessary details. They may have viewed that as a failure to communicate clearly. It's a problem many programmers have. They give impressive-sounding non-answers.
I don't know about that. Millennials by and large seem to be better informed, well, maybe not 'better', but more likely to know about things since they tend to be a lot more integrated with online communities. They are also more likely than older generations to have some (if light) knowledge of the technologies involved since they have gone more of their life exposed to them.
You've grown up too fond of the internet.
The "older generations" are perhaps too trusting of authority and media. They are perhaps too uncritical. They are perhaps too paranoid and prejudiced.
"Millennials" are perhaps too trusting of their friends, even those they don't really know much about. They are perhaps too easily manipulated with flattery and camaraderie. They are perhaps too subject to group think and naivete.
Neither, as a whole, is particularly well-informed.
Someone always drags [the Franklin quote] out in any discussion like this as if its some kind of killer quote that nullifies any further discussion.
And someone always moderates it up, as if it's new and interesting and not at all cliche.
I chose to do my first programming class when I was 16. The students were virtually all male. Nobody who signed up for that course had the slightest idea about how to program, let alone what programming culture was like. So you want me to believe that all the girls in my grade went out to different jobs, experienced a culture of misogny and then decided not to enroll in programming because of that?
I can tell you why most of the males were in my class and that's because we were all the kids who would sit around at lunch and talk about computers or videogames.
You were 16 at a time when "we were all the kids who would sit around at lunch and talk about computers or videogames". You are not old enough to remember a time when there were not enough kids talking about computers or video games for there to be a group of them chatting over lunch. You are not old enough to remember a time before there was a programmer/gamer culture. For you, it's always been that way, and it's always been a boy's thing. It's no surprise there were no girls in your group.
Kids don't talk about accounting or engineering or nursing or law over lunch. Not that I know of, anyway. They didn't used to talk about computers, either. It wasn't until the 80's that computers became a mainstream entertainment medium. It wasn't until the 90's that programming was common among high-school aged kids. And in the 90's the internet turned any discussion of computers or video games into a boy's thing.
Prior to that women could show up to a college (or high school) programming class on equal footing. Since then, they've learned that programming is a boy's thing. If they think they're going to buck that trend all they have to do is show up at a place like slashdot (or a gaming website) to be discouraged.
An interesting statistic that never gets mentioned by the "Men's Rights Activists" who like to talk about how women aren't suited for programming is that up until the late 1980s, half of the people graduating from Computer Science programs were women.
I got into the field in the early 80's, when there were a lot more women than there are now. At my first job, half the developers were women.
I blame the internet. I'm not kidding. Online forums have empowered the brogrammer culture. It's great that there is now a forum for interacting socially on a grand scale, but there's also an opportunity and an excuse for not developing socially.
Today's employers don't know how bad they have it. They don't know how unproductive today's developers are, chasing after self-congratulatory complexity rather than doing real work. On the upside, there's real opportunity for people of any gender to be heroes, going against the grain of the culture. In organizations run by adults, it's not difficult to be seen as a standout performer.
As to whether there is a "problem"...
If you're surrounded by people just like yourself, of course you don't think there's a problem. But a monoculture may not be the most efficient way of getting things done. You may not think there's a problem, and your organization may not know any better because they've never seen any different, but you are almost certainly less efficient (and less profitable, less satisfied, less secure) for being so un-diverse.
SJWs have spent decades telling women they need "special help" to become engineers and programmers. We can't overcome that by being "welcoming" because they chose a different path before college.
If you think you are not involved before college you may be mistaken. Discouraging women has more to do with the culture of programming than with SJWs, and that culture exists everywhere a young woman might go to talk with programmers, including here. How it got that way is not your fault, specifically, but clearly you aren't interested in being "welcoming", which perpetuates the problem.
Staring at code all day isn't for everyone, just like working with babies all day would drive me mad
Yeah, like that.
So, while the car was out of his sight for the first incident, some evil government agency placed a tracker, and used it to track him to...a "Circumvention Tech Festival"? An advertised event, at a physical venue, with sponsors and a website. They needed a tracker to find people who went to this event. I see.
Or a publicity stunt by the "activist"
"I found code that already does this" sounds like you're a better problem solver. It's self-congratulatory nonsense. If the result is very complex, you congratulate yourself even more, for being able to do complex things, rather than punching yourself in the head like you should, for making things more difficult than they need to be.
If you found code that really does make your life easier, that's great. It hardly ever happens.
I have a partially-sighted (legally blind) friend who hates touch displays with a firey passion. What she wants most in life is an MP3 player / book reader with a large capacity and tactile controls, which has a clear voice for reading, and which can be loaded from an interface that is not accessibility-hostile (like iTunes) and which will allow her to use content she already has or can get from the public domain.
The main negative is....ebooks... Publishers want to gouge people for having the text of a book read to them, and would rather screw over blind people than permit Apple to read the text of ebooks for no additional charge. Some publishers have some kind of workaround for blind people, so they don't come across as complete douchebags, but the workarounds also tend to be a hassle.
This. Very much, this.
post-1990 - something goes completely wacky in the industry and women are driven out of computing in large numbers; younger women don't even enter the field.
So, since you seem to be a younger dude perhaps you could explain exactly what it is that happened 1990-2000 that made the field so undesirable to women.
The internet happened. Online venues (like slashdot) became places where self-selection happens. Being mostly male to begin with, that's the direction online forums went. More and more pure. This is where people exploring an interest in technology go, and learn it's a field where it's acceptable to say the kind of shit that gets up-moderated here. Fewer women enter the field. Online forums become more pure. Rinse and repeat.
Looks like Apple has built in detection from IOS 5
So, the iPhone he says unhelpfully didn't tell him there was a rogue tower...was actually aware of the rogue tower, and therefore not compromised? That it would have warned him if he tried to communicate through it, and has therefore already, for years, been doing the same thing his secure phone does? You mean someone who is selling a secure phone is making up a use case for it?
You don't say.
So, a magazine website would rather you visit their local version, to serve you better targeted ads, or local interest stories, or load leveling, or prices in local currency, or subscription services on the same continent, or maybe even to serve you better with faster access, and this is some American scheme to abuse you? Did it ever occur to you that an Australian company (or a German one, or...) wanting to create content unique to multiple continents might do the same thing? Or do you actually think URL redirection is a uniquely American thing, indicating a character flaw of an entire nation?
It's not *necessary* to use URL redirection to accomplish any of these things, but the dork who implemented it is no smarter than your average slashdotter, and just like how they create crappy interfaces, incomprehensible documentation (if any at all), code that is way more complex than it needs to be, or just simply can't solve the problem they were given, maybe...just maybe...they didn't anticipate your desire to not be given localized content, or that you'd take offense at their solution.
If you are so smart perhaps you can explain why 98% of the internet has an IQ in the 150-170 range.
Because they take viral IQ quizzes meant to flatter, so you'll share them.
On second thought, this sounds like a made-up story.