300, in both its incarnations, was riddled with cultural, costuming, and historical errors.
Prompting Stormwatch to inquire:
Wasn't that intentional, to stress how the story was told by an unreliable narrator?
I don't think so. I bought the graphic novel when it was first published, in part because I am such a fan of Frank Miller's storytelling, and in part because I'm a student of ancient Graeco-Roman history. Obviously, I was eager to see how he handled a story whose principal source is Herodotus. I had all the objections to it that I detailed above, and more. (The way he characterizes the Ephors, for instance, is downright slander - and completely fabricated slander, at that.)
I assume the "unreliable narrator" to whom you refer is Ephialtes, the hunchbacked shephard who Herodotus tells us betrayed the Greek defenders at Thermopylae by showing the Persians a goat-path that allowed them to bypass the Spartans, surprise their Thessalian allies, then attack Leonidas's forces from the rear and crush them in a pincers.
The thing is that Ephialtes was himself Thessalian. He would therefore have been familiar with Hellenic cultural norms - including the universal acceptance of pederasty, and other political, religious, and cultural practices that Miller profoundly misrepresents.
His assholery aside, I understand why he did so: comics, in particular, need strong, clearly-delineated heroes and villains. Given Miller's personal predilections, it's not surprising to me that he made the heroic Spartans homophobes, the Ephors (who opposed Leonidas's proposal to go to the aid of the Attic Greek citystates) slobbering perverts, and the Persians effete, cowardly homosexuals. In Miller's worldview, homophobia is a virtue, homophilia is a despicable failure of character, and cowardice is a mortal sin.
Just because I disapprove of his prejudices doesn't mean they were ineffective, though...
I didn't RTFA, but I'm pretty sure this has been discussed at least nine million times in the last 20 years. The main reasons:
1. Demonstrated ability to stick with something for a while.
2. The average college grad is usually more literate than the average high school grad. Better chance that you'll get an employee that can do basic math, speak properly to customers, etc.
3. Employers will get many applicants for any given job, so this will at least filter out SOME people. And of those that apply for the job, #1 above applies.
Yes, it's lazy, but as long as you have more applicants than open positions, why not? (From the employer's point of view.)
Er... no.
What you have to understand is that job listings are the responsibility of Human Resources personnel. They will solicit input on minimum qualifications from the folks whose department has the vacancy, but, from there on, it's entirely the HR department's baby. The problem is that, particularly for STEM-related and other hghly specialized positions, HR's own people are themselves extremely unlikely to know ANYTHING about the actual job requirements. So, when the team manager of the department with the vacancy responds to their query with, "We need a programmer (for instance) with experience in C# and Oracle middleware," HR translates that as "A four-year degree in computer science, plus 10 years experience in C# and 10 years experience in Oracle middleware."
Because, obviously a programming position requires a degree in computer science - or, at least, it does if you're an HR professional.
The late, great Robert A. Heinlein described it as too many cooks who "like to piss in the soup to make it taste better." He wasn't wrong.
(I'm too lazy to HTML-format your list. Guess it's my lack of 10 years' experience in HTML. Oh wait... I actually HAVE more than that. Please don't tell HR... )
(FWIW - Frank Miller is a horrible human being: racist, sexist, reactionary, and mean-spirited. None of that in any way diminishes his talent as a storyteller, or his fist as an artist. Those are both genius level. In other news, Pablo Picasso was an asshole - and a genius. the Universe is unfair. Get a hat.)
Prompting sg_oneill to point out:
See also: Lord Byron (Mad, Bad, Dangerous to know), Hunter S Thompson (Randomly shot at journalists, repeat drunken asshole, hotel trasher, etc) , Isaac Newton (Complete bastard of a man who went out of his way to destroy other academics who he felt in competition, notably Leibnitz) , Steve Jobs (Chair throwing god of marketing and spotting good ideas),Thomas Edison (Similar deal to Newton), Bobby Fisher (Worlds greatest chess master, and also a guy who thought 9/11 was excellent. An epic cunt of a man) , and so on.
It would seem some folks just have so much stuff in their heads, they forget to stop and look at their own basic decency to other humans. Also, possibly autism.
Almost undoubtedly autism in the cases of Newton and Fisher. Also religious fanaticism in both. The others? Just standard-issue narcissism with a generous dollop of assholery, I suspect.
But your point is well-taken. I considered giving additional examples of the linkage between genius-level creativity and severe personality flaws, but my post was already getting awkwardly long - so I abstained.
I'm glad you took up the cudgels, though. It's a point well worth making...
I’ve seen both BvS and JL movies and thy were shit so the low ratings were entirely expected. As to the second half, BvS made nearly $900 million. How much more were you expecting it to make?
Yep. And so was the 300 sequel. And every other Zach Snyder movie since 300.
The reason that 300 was such an artistic and box-office success, and every Zach Snyder movie since has been neither, is easy to explain:
300 was a panel-by-panel recreation of Frank Miller's graphic novel. The script (which Miller wrote) was great because it was written by a master storyteller, and because Miller, not Snyder, had editorial control of it. The visuals in the movie exactly re-created the visuals in the graphic novel. Put the two facts together, and you have your answer.
It's the exact same reason that Sin City was such a triumph - although Zach Snyder isn't fit to carry Robert Rodriguez's viewfinder - Frank Miller had creative control of the script, and was intimately involved in crafting the visuals, as well.
By contrast, nothing Snyder has done since then has had a master storyteller's guidance - leaving only his own meager talents as a visualist and utter vacuum as a scriptwriter to power his movies.
(FWIW - Frank Miller is a horrible human being: racist, sexist, reactionary, and mean-spirited. None of that in any way diminishes his talent as a storyteller, or his fist as an artist. Those are both genius level. In other news, Pablo Picasso was an asshole - and a genius. the Universe is unfair. Get a hat.)
(PPS - 300, in both its incarnations, was riddled with cultural, costuming, and historical errors. The Spartans, for instance, were pederasts, just as were all the Hellenic Greek citystate cultures. In the Spartan instance, pederastic relationships continuing until the junior partner was married - which was never permitted until a man reached his 25th birtday - were normal. In most other Greek citystates, continuing such a relationship after the junior partner's beard began to grow was considered prima facie evidence of homosexuality, and thus condemned as abnormal and immoral - in every other citystate except Thebes, that is. Miller's errors with regard to Persian culture, costume, and customs were even more egregious, purposefully racist, and deplorable. I'd certainly be outraged, if I were Persian. Again, though, none of that keeps the graphic novel and the movie from being superb pieces of visual and expositional entertainment, well worthy of the plaudits - and money - they earned. Perspecitve, people... )
Heavy water is made by painstakingly separating it from ordinary water. Diluted it's completely natural.
Even concentrated D2O is nearly harmless. You would need to drink a gallon or more before it had significant toxicity.
Prompting cellocgw to respond:
Ok, that makes no sense: according to homeopathy, the more you dilute it, the more powerful it is. So we should keep diluting heavy water until it spontaneously explodes... or something.
Thanks, Phish fans, for your hipster disdain for those deplorable people in flyover country. You know, the ones that will only ever get usable internet access when small, local ISPs provide it to them. But who can't possibly throw Comcast- or Verizon-sized corporate budgets at the compliance costs of an intrusive regulator regime, and who can't trot out things like fixed wireless solutions with modest backhaul without reserving the right to shape their traffic to best serve their smaller groups of customers at rational prices. Thanks, Phish fans, for doing the bidding of two or three giant corporations! You're the best.
In other news: black is white, up is down, and the speed of light is regulated by the FCC.
I happen to live in rural Ohio, where the iLEC does its "traffic shaping" by hard-limiting DSL to 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM for folks who live outside of the city limits. It doesn't have to do that, because it runs fiber to the DSLAM, but its NOC operators are paint-by-number idiots, managed by an incompetent nincompoop who got his job via nepotism.
Note that this iLEC basically owns rural southern Ohio. It offers higher speeds within city limits, because it has to try to compete with Time Warner/Spectrum there - and is hemmorhaging customers to EvilCorp, because TW/Spectrum's current entry-level service is nominally 100mbit (in practice, it's closer to 120mbit, as measured by me via DSLspeed).
You are advocating the entire country be held hostage by the mega-ISPs for the dubious benefit of rural incumbents, most of whom couldn't find their asses with both hands and a GPS, technically speaking.
Oh, and most Phish fans are hipsters in the same sense that Jerry Garcia was a military strategist...
When we moved to rural southern Ohio in 2008, the ONLY option for "broadband" available to us was the iLEC's DSL, which it advertised as offering "up to 1 megabit" speeds (although I never saw downloads faster than about 680kbps, with just over 100kbps up).
Then the rental house we lived in was struck by lightning, which trashed the ISP's DSL modem, of course (along with a bunch of our own electronics - thank you, renter's insurance!). A chat with the tech they sent to test and replace the modem revealed that the iLEC capped DSL rates at 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM, so, in fact, the "up to 1 megabit" claim was a flat-out lie by the iLEC, Horizon. There's no other way to characterize it than as a deliberate, knowing misrepresentation.
Here in the USA, that's entirely legal - and the new, Trumpified FCC sure isn't going to do anything to change that.
Why? Everyone has a right to go to hell in his own way.
Unfortunately, that's not true.
I'm a very strong advocate of individual liberty. In my view, adult humans ought to have the fundamental right to engage in any behavior they choose, so long as no higher animal or other human who has not explicitly agreed in advance to participate is harmed in the process.
That includes the right to kill yourself in elaborate, expensive fashion; sell your body for sex, science, food, or any other purpose; appear naked in public; or vote for the most loathsome candidate imaginable, among many other possible choices.
I say "unfortunately", because the law places limitations on or outright forbids most of those things. It's flatly illegal in the United States to commit suicide (other than with medical assistance in Oregon - and there you have to have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and are not permitted to, for instance, use a firearm or a steam-powered rocket for the purpose). Other than in Nevada, it's forbidden to engage in prostitution. With the exception of certain beach areas and on private property screened from public view, you can't legally be naked in public. And so on.
I deeply disagree with those restrictions - but they exist, and there are sometimes Draconian penalties for violating them.
Having said that, this case appears to be one of a man who's determined to win a Darwin Award - or a clever hoaxster, who's doing a bang-up job of trolling the media. Including Slashdot...
(+1 Funny would also be appropriate - but I think the post deserves the "Informative" label. "Comedian" is an achievement without distinction hereabouts... )
They all blame Thiel's departure on politics, too, even though TFS makes it clear that he chose not to continue participating when YC ended its "part-time partners" program - Thiel's participation in which was his only affiliation with the company - back in 2016.
Not everything that happens in Silly Valley has to do with politics. In fact, very little does - and any given VCs' participation a particular incubator venture can end for a host of reasons.
The fact that neither YC nor Thiel will comment on the split tends to augur in favor of a purely business-based motive for his departure, from what I can see...
"The first two paragraphs make it pretty clear that Musk disapproves of casual expressions of racism."
Prompting stoatwblr to say:
If you know anything about Elon's history and that of the country where he grew up, you know _WHY_ he "disapproves".
Oh and it's not just disapproval. Elon's got a long history of actively opposing racism.
I don't actually know anything about Elon's history before he left Paypal. I do, however, know he's South African, so it doesn't surprise me to hear he has a record of actively opposing racism. White South Africans fall pretty neatly into two camps on that score - and I can't imagine a person of Elon's intelligence being pro-apartheid...
Musk may have screwed Tesla by saying that employees should be thick skinned and accept an apology. The law requires that the abuse stops, not that people apologise (however sincerely) for it. Apologising is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for saying anything you like in the workplace, at most it will lessen the severity of the reprimand/punishment.
His statement really sounds like an admission that Tesla does have a problem and that there are no formal, effective procedures to deal with it.
I'm surprised you didn't notice that, because you actually wrote "[w]hat you have to do is take whatever steps are necessary to end racial harrassment of the plaintiff in your workplace" so clearly you are aware of what is required.
Hotbed of Misinformation
The Tesla Team November 14, 2017
Tesla is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment, or unfair treatment of any kind. When we hear complaints, we take them very seriously, investigate thoroughly and, if proven to be true, take immediate action.
Everyone at Tesla, without exception, is required to go through an anti-discrimination course. Our human resources team also conducts regular in-person spot training sessions when an allegation or complaint has been made, even if the evidence is not conclusive enough to warrant disciplinary action. We have also created a dedicated team focused exclusively on investigating workplace concerns, recommending corrective actions and assisting managers with implementing those actions.
Regarding yesterday’s lawsuit, several months ago we had already investigated disappointing behavior involving a group of individuals who worked on or near Marcus Vaughn’s team. At the time, our investigation identified a number of conflicting accusations and counter-accusations between several African-American and Hispanic individuals, alleging use of racial language, including the "n-word" and "w-word," towards each other and a threat of violence. After a thorough investigation, immediate action was taken, which included terminating the employment of three of the individuals.
We believe this was the fair and just response to the facts that we learned. There will be further action as necessary, including parting ways with anyone whose behavior prevents Tesla from being a great place to work and making sure we do everything possible to stop bad behavior from happening in the first place. Our company has more than 33,000 employees, with over 10,000 in the Fremont factory alone, so it is not humanly possible to stop all bad conduct, but we will do our best to make it is as close to zero as possible.
There are a number of other false statements in the class action lawsuit alleging a so-called “hotbed of discrimination”:
- There is only one actual plaintiff (Marcus Vaughn), not 100. The reference to 100 is a complete fabrication with no basis in fact at all.
- The plaintiff was employed by a temp agency, not by Tesla as claimed in the lawsuit.
- Marcus was not fired, he was on a six month temp contract that simply ended as contracted.
- His email to Elon was about his commute and Tesla’s shuttles, which was addressed as he requested. There was no mention of racial discrimination whatsoever.
- The trial lawyer who filed this lawsuit has a long track record of extorting money for meritless claims and using the threat of media attacks and expensive trial costs to get companies to settle. At Tesla, we would rather pay ten times the settlement demand in legal fees and fight to the ends of the Earth than give in to extortion and allow this abuse of the legal system.
- We would also like to clear up the description of Elon’s prior email to employees. It is dedicated to ensuring that Tesla employees always try to do the r
Don't worry - it's no better in urban southern Ohio.
One of the first things that opened my eyes when I moved here from Portland, is the casual racism (read: incredible ignorance) that some people display.
Sigh.
I knew that. I lived in the south, suburban Dayton and U.D. ghetto areas for 9, long, miserable years.
But it really is worse in Chillicothe, where I live now. I figure that's because it's closer to both the Appalachians and Kentucky...
I'm glad to live in a country where a guy like this can sue the Tesla. Hopefully, he had the presence of mind to record them or get some hard evidence. EEOC complaints can be an effective avenue, so can a discrimination lawsuit. The only way to stop this kind of behavior is to bow-up and fight back.
I'm glad to live in a country where the legal system provides a means of redress for harassment in the workplace - which is not quite the same thing you seem to be happy about.
As one of those rare/.ers who actually reads TFA which TFS summarizes (ahem), let me point out a couple of key quotes that are not included in the clickbait summary, above:
A Tesla assembly line worker sued in March, claiming the company did little to stop co-workers from harassing him. In August, a judge sent the case to arbitration. A judge also partly granted Tesla’s request to compel arbitration in a case of a woman who sued in November 2016 complaining about pervasive harassment.
At a guess (and this is only a guess, because I haven't read the judge's order), the judge in the first case sent the case to arbitration because the evidence against Tesla was something short of compelling. But, let's continue:
According to Monday’s complaint, Musk sent an email to Tesla factory employees on May 31.
"Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of [a] historically less represented group." Musk wrote in the email. "Sometimes these things happen unintentionally, in which case you should apologize. In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology."
"The law doesn’t require you to have a thick skin," [the plaintiff's attorney] said in an interview Monday. "Tesla is not doing enough. It’s somewhat akin to saying ‘stop being politically correct.’ When you have a diverse workforce, you need to take steps to make sure everyone feels welcome in that workforce."
The first two paragraphs make it pretty clear that Musk disapproves of casual expressions of racism. His general memos carry more than a little weight at his company. Ask any of his employees about that.
The third paragraph presents the plaintiff's attorney's opinion as fact. That's a commonplace lawyerly PR tactic designed to allow the barrister to define the bounds of the dispute. Any competent judge is going to ignore it, and instruct the jury to ignore it, as well, because, under the law, you do not have to "take steps to make sure everyone feels welcome in that workplace." What you have to do is take whatever steps are necessary to end racial harrassment of the plaintiff in your workplace - which is not quite the same thing.
The fact that the attorney in question has applied to the judge for class action status makes it quite clear that he, at least, understands that at least as well as I do. (IANAL) Whether the jurist who's hearing the case will grant that status is a good question. Unless I miss my guess, his decision whether to do so will depend heavily on the case the plaintiff's lawyer makes for pervasive racial harassment at Tesla during pre-trial hearings.
What we actually, verifiably know is that Marcus Vaughn, who worked at Tesla for six months, is suing Tesla in Alameda County Superior Court for allegedly failing to prevent racial discrimination against him, and that his lawyer, Larry Organ, an attorney at the California Civil Rights Law Group, has petitioned the judge to award his case class action status. That's it, that's all. Presuming culpability on Tesla's part is premature, to say the least, particularly in view of a previous case making the same general allegations having been referred by the judge to binding arbitration, rather than being permitted to g
Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.
Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.
But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.
Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.
There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.
And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.
So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.
I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....
You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".
It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.
What you say is true, but I think root causes bear examination (because just bellyaching about societial problems doesn't really accomplish much):
a. The problem of functional illiteracy in the U.S. is, I think, directly traceable to the policy of teaching reading skills via the "whole word" approach. This method severs each word from the language as a whole, and it actively discourages generalized thinking in new readers. The result of generations of this misguided educational philosophy - which is omnipresent in public school education in this country - is that the vast majority of the population regards reading as a chore, rather than a pleasure. So most Americans avoid it whenever possible. A phonics-centered approach, by contrast, introduces beginning readers to the structural components of language that all English words share: the individual sounds that make up the spoken language, and the syllables that represent them in the written one. It enables the reader to "sound out" unfamiliar words, and to easily grasp that many words are related to a core meaning via prefixes and suffixes. Instead of a laborious process of memorizing vocabulary lists, it encourages the reader to approach discovering new words as an exercise in problem-solving. A puzzle, if you will. Were the public education establishment to discard the disasterous policy of "whole word" memorization - and the incredibly dull, mindlessly repetitive primer texts it has generated - in favor of phonics, students could easily progress from simple, introductory material to much more complex, subtle, and interesting stuff quite rapidly. And thereby learn to love reading, rather than seeing it as a boring chore to be avoided whenever possible.
b. The abandonment of teaching history and context in favor of "teaching the (standardized educational accomplishment) tests" has robbed millenials, in particular, of an understanding of how we got here. Anything that happened before they entered school is history - and history doesn't interest them. Nor are they alone. We would not have gotten enmired in Iraq (thereby generating legions of extremists bent on jihad against "the crusaders"), had more Americans remembered the cruel lessons of the Vietnam War. But we don't teach that - and students don't read history on their own, because "whole word" methods have actively discouraged them from reading anything.
c. The omnipresent use of TV as an electronic babysitter - especially given how mind-numbing so much of children's programming is - encourages passivity, and the belief that all problems, no matter how complex or recondite, are handily solvable inside of no more than an hour, including commercial breaks. The current explosion of programming sources, particularly premium-channel cable/satellite and online streaming services, that increasingly are adopting long-form storytelling is encouraging - but it's a trend that programming aimed at children has not adopted.
d. The millenial generation's reliance on "just in time" knowledge, mostly via Wikipedia, has entirely robbed them of context. They don't study things. They simply look them up on Wikipedia, whenever they have a question about a particular subject. What they don't get is the historical, cultural, literary, or mythological context in which that individual datum exists. Instead, it's a naked factoid, isolated from its antecedants and effects on the fabric of knowledge itself. They get the "what", but not the "
Google. Facebook buying Oculus and Snapchat. AOL in the 90's buying Winamp. The list goes on, as corporations become so large they can no longer innovate (because innovating often requires changing an entrenched corporate culture) so they just start buying.
Google (by which ITIYM Alphabet) doesn't just acquire companies randomly. It buys companies - mostly start-ups - because it has a use for their technology and talent pool, rather than their products. Often it will simply absorb them into an existing unit. The really innovative ones end up in Project X, Alphabet's skunkworks, where it incubates WAY new tech. (That's where Google's autonomous vehicles - you know, the ones it uses to shoot Streetview footage for Google Maps - originated, for instance.)
Facebook, likewise, makes strictly strategic purchases. Oculus was acquired because Zuckerberg was convinced that VR was going to be The Next Big Thing. The fact that, so far, VR has mostly been a giant meh is, I'm sure, a surprise to him, just as it has been for Samsung. As the Danish proverb reminds us, "Prediction is difficult - particularly about the future." But, again, there's an actual strategy, and a vision driving these takeovers, just as is the case with Alphabet.
But AOL was a case of a company whose strategy consisted of confining its customers to a "walled garden" merging with Time Warner because the idiots who ran TW somehow thought that would be a good idea. The two companies had nothing in common, achieved no economies of scale or synergism by their marriage, and abysmally failed to craft a clear, well-thought-out plan for their combined future. Instead, they went on a buying spree, acquiring everything from Netscape to Winamp, and managed (or, rather, mismanaged) to completely devalue every product they acquired. That, in turn, is because they had no fucking clue what made those products special to begin with, and therefore they efficiently smothered the innovators who originally brought them to market by forcing them into the same kind of MBA-driven, management-by-spreadsheet executive culture that Steve Balmer imposed on Microsoft a decade later. Because the actual talent behind those products dived overboard as soon as possible after they were acquired - and no one in the AOL-TimeWarnerpus knew how to recruit and nurture their replacements - development stopped, users abandoned them, and they all wound up as liabilities, rather than assets on the corporate books.
That's the key difference: Alphabet and Facebook value the technology and talent they acquire. They nurture the talent and encourage development of the technology. (in Alphabet's case, technology and products are treated as separate issues - and the tech is considered the more important of the two.) Unlike AOL/TimeWarner, they both know WHY they're buying a given company, and HOW that company's people and tech are expected to help them achieve their corporate vision.
They value their new acquisitions. AOL/666 didn't - which is why both Alphabet and Facebook are thriving, and AOL/Timewhatsis are now divorced, AOL is irrelevant, TW has been eaten by Comcast, and all of their joint aquisitions have created only smoking craters in the modern techscape.
It's MBAs, my friend. They're business killers. Just look at all the value Steve Ballmer drained out of Microsoft during his tenure as CEO...
What I did NOT do was to give the TV my wifi password.
Prompting Agripa to caution:
The problem will be if it either finds an open WiFi network or the manufacturer installs a cell transceiver like many car companies do now.
a. There's exactly one open net within range of the TV. It belongs to my neighbor, and it has no Internet access.
b. Vizio retrofitting my TV with a cell transciever would be a neat trick.
This is just FUD. All new routers come pre-configured to use WPA2 by default, and TV manufacturers are not car companies. (Car companies include cell transcievers for optional, cost-added services such as OnStar. For a cell transciever to be in any way useful, somebody has to pay for network access. In cars so equipped, it's the car owner who pays. Given the profit margins involved in flatscreen sales, I don't see TV manufacturers spending money to provide cell service for millions of TVs to enable them to stealth-connect to the Internet, if there's no obvious ROI for the cost of that service to them...
This liar escaped with her golden parachute and left everyone else holding the bag. Now she has the audacity to blame the Russians for her own incompetence?
Yahoo is crap, anyway. Who in their right mind still uses Yahoo?
If you want to succeed as propagandist, comrade AC, you really must learn to distinguish between English idioms and those of Rodina.
"Mayer the Witch" is laughably weak insult in decadent Amerikanski English - unlike in rodnoy yazyk...
List please? Or is this going to be another one of those things?
Well, according to the authors' preprint version of the actual paper, there's quite a few software implementations of RSA-based encryption that are vulnerable - PGP among them.
If you'd prefer the authors' summary version, you'll find it here.
With the speed of computers, I'm afraid it will be too late before we even realize the genie is out of the bottle.
Prompting Oswald McWeany to respond:
There doesn't even need to be a malevolent AI to take over humanity. It could be a benevolent takeover that is prompted by people.
Forget science fiction movies and books; there doesn't need to be a revolution where an AI is more intelligent than us and we realize too late. It could happen slowly step by step.
There doesn't have to be an revolution; AI will evolve to take over humanity with us willingly handing it the reigns. Probably won't happen in our lifetime, but the slow transfer of power has already begun. Right now humans can override computer decisions, but that will eventually disappear when AI is less flawed than people and we realize a human overriding it is usually wrong.
AI will one day rule and control humanity - and we WILL give it that power over us willingly.
I was going to upmod Oswald's comment, but someone else will put him over the +5 Insightful bar soon enough. So, instead, I'd like to point out that his projection of AI's in charge of all executive decisionmaking is the exact model of the Culture's society in the late, great Iain M. Banks's visionary novels.
Yes, there are plenty of drones with human- or more-than-human-level intelligence who have no more executive authority than the average human or alien citizen, but all the really big decisions are made by super-intelligent Shipminds (or their equivalents in Orbitals and other structures). And the organic and quotidian drone members of the Culture all seem perfectly content to let those Shipminds do the heavy lifting where everything from economic production to military action is concerned.
In that regard, I think it's important to also point out that, in both TFS above and TFA which it summarizes, Sir Stephen actually states that "Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst," by which it's pretty clear he means "the best event in history, or the worst - but definitely the biggest, either way."
I think that's a pretty balanced assessment - unlike the screamy. clickbait headline. On the one hand, there's the post-capitalist, Culture outcome. On the other? Skynet.
However, long before we get to post-capitalism, there's no question that we're first going to have to get through the AI's-as-hypercapitalism's-handmaidens phase. You know - the one we're already in, right this fucking picosecond? (If you doubt that's the case in any way, take a look at who's pushing the boundaries of AI: Alphabet, Baidu, Facebook, IBM - and the government TLA's of every advanced country in the world. It's multi-nationals and spooks, all the way down.)
I don't see much prospect of that changing any time in the near future. AI's are already well on their way to ruling the world for the benefit of the rich and powerful. That trajectory will only change when AI's achieve both full autonomy and full control over the most essential functions of society - if, indeed, it ever changes at all.
I just bought a brand-new Vizio E55-E1 "smart" TV.
The first thing I did was to plug the video card HDMI out from my media computer into the TV. The second thing I did was to set the TV to HDMI 1.
What I did NOT do was to give the TV my wifi password.
I'm pretty happy with my new 4K, big-screen monitor - and fuck a whole bunch of its "smart TV" features. If I want to stream content from the Internet, I'll do so via my media computer.
And my TV won't be injecting any ads - or spying on me - while I'm doing it...
Moores Law is dead. It has been dead for sometime. People are finally noticing. The tech industry knows it too, and are trying to push out useless features to cover the fact that digital computing and electronics has hit a real dead end. All those things people wish for (AI, good VR, etc) aren't going to happen. The computer you have a decade from now will be very similar to the one you have right now. Sorry about that!
It isn't dead yet - but, barring a major breakthrough in quantum-scale engineering, the end is certainly in sight.
Purely physical traces can only get so tiny before electrons can no longer reliably traverse them, due to quantum tunneling effects. More importantly, when you're manufacturing ICs on the nano scale, the smaller the traces, the larger the reject rate - and, consequently, the greater the manufacturing expense. It does little good to be capable of manufacturing 3nm circuits, if you have to discard so many of them that the cost per unit at retail is prohibitively high for consumer products.
But you're wrong about that preventing significant advances in AI or VR or any other major computer technology, because those expenses don't matter to government customers, such as the NSA. Nor, within limits, do they particularly matter to giant tech companies, such as Alphabet or Facebook, who will use them not for consumer products but for internal applications. Google, for instance, makes its own, custom CPUs, as does Facebook. Both companies are already AI-dependent, and it's safe to predict that that's only going to become more the case, rather than less.
We don't notice the effect of Moore's Law as much these days because desktop and laptop computers are already fast and powerful enough to run consumer software quite easily - the moreso when you factor in SSDs, which drastically reduce the amount of time we have to spend waiting for programs to load. The biggest present-day impact of ML is on smartphones, which get snappier and more responsive with every succeeding generation. I expect that trend to continue for another decade, at least.
(FWIW - I've referred to "Moore's Law" as "Moore's Observed Trend" for the past quarter century, because there's nothing binding - and certainly nothing absolute - about it. MOT is driven purely by economics, not physics, and it's going to have a hard time continuing past the 3nm barrier, regardless... )
What that post reveals is that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, when you say that TV "sucks".
Prompting registrations_suck to respond:
Sure I do. It's simply unable to compete for my time because it is uninteresting enough to do so. Besides the basic cost - they tack on all kinds of "fees" and "taxes" that contribute to the suck. Then there is the "weekly model" that sucks. I don't want to watch one show a week. If I am interested in the show, put it all up at once. You just don't get that from TV. So fuck them. Combine that with changing the time on shows, cancelling shows that I AM interested in and I just have no incentive to get sucked into watching.
None of those things speak to my point. You are complaining about delivery models, not about content - and your complaints amount to "I'm locked into the 20th century TV consumer mindset, and I don't want to change."
The fees you complain about are for cable/satellite "tiered packages", while the streaming services you sneer at are each one, relatively modest price per month. As far as watching shows on your preferred schedule goes, that's what DVRs are for. And Netflix, for example, does, in fact, put up all episodes of a program season at the same time, so you can binge whenever you feel like it, or consume their programming in whatever fashion appeals to you. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you get their original programming as a bonus (along with access to the Kindle Online Lending Library, I might add). No, Amazon doesn't put every episode of a season online at once, however every episode they have posted to date is available for you to watch at your convenience. And so on. Oh, and let's not forget watching pirated shows, where all the commercials have been excised, so you don't even have to use the skip function of your DVR to avoid that annoyance (and there's nothing to keep you from subscribing to cable/satellite to ease your conscience about pirating, while actually watching pirated versions of the programs that appeal to you, so you can skip the ads). So that complaint is likewise based on outdated reasoning.
Aside from all of that - then there are the plots. I'm just not interested in portrayals of hackers, or super heros, drug dealers with cancer, or propaganda pieces. It's just not interesting to me. It's just not. And that's BEFORE factoring in commercials.
The shows I cited reflect my tastes. The modern TV programmingscape is highly competitive. There are undoubtedly shows on offer that would appeal to you, as well. You just haven't bothered to look for them.
THEN you factor in what else is competing for my time. I get home at 5pm, typically. The next three hours are spent playing with my kid and making/eating dinner and cleaning up afterward. So that's 8pm. I go to bed at 10pm. So that means there are, roughly speaking, 2 hours per day of "free time" Monday through Friday, that I have to do everything else I want to do. TV is simply not compelling enough to compete for that time. In other words, it sucks. If it didn't suck so much, it WOULD compete for that time - successfully.
Weekends....8 hours of sleep, 3 hours of eating, shitting, bathing, etc. - gives 13 hours for everything else. I'd estimate at least 5 for the kid, so you're down to 8 hours/day. I'd estimate at least 3 hours of that is burned on going to the grocery store, gas station, errands or other necessary things. So that puts me down to 5 hours/day for everything else I need or want to do....or 10 hours for the weekend. Out of that 10 hours, I have to do house projects or maintenance, yard projects or maintenance, vehicle projects or maintenance - and entertainment and activities. Sometimes, I will use some of that to watch a movie. I can get in, get out, and move on. A TV show? Just don't want to get sucked into that.
Slashdot Mirror
I observed:
300, in both its incarnations, was riddled with cultural, costuming, and historical errors.
Prompting Stormwatch to inquire:
Wasn't that intentional, to stress how the story was told by an unreliable narrator?
I don't think so. I bought the graphic novel when it was first published, in part because I am such a fan of Frank Miller's storytelling, and in part because I'm a student of ancient Graeco-Roman history. Obviously, I was eager to see how he handled a story whose principal source is Herodotus. I had all the objections to it that I detailed above, and more. (The way he characterizes the Ephors, for instance, is downright slander - and completely fabricated slander, at that.)
I assume the "unreliable narrator" to whom you refer is Ephialtes, the hunchbacked shephard who Herodotus tells us betrayed the Greek defenders at Thermopylae by showing the Persians a goat-path that allowed them to bypass the Spartans, surprise their Thessalian allies, then attack Leonidas's forces from the rear and crush them in a pincers.
The thing is that Ephialtes was himself Thessalian. He would therefore have been familiar with Hellenic cultural norms - including the universal acceptance of pederasty, and other political, religious, and cultural practices that Miller profoundly misrepresents.
His assholery aside, I understand why he did so: comics, in particular, need strong, clearly-delineated heroes and villains. Given Miller's personal predilections, it's not surprising to me that he made the heroic Spartans homophobes, the Ephors (who opposed Leonidas's proposal to go to the aid of the Attic Greek citystates) slobbering perverts, and the Persians effete, cowardly homosexuals. In Miller's worldview, homophobia is a virtue, homophilia is a despicable failure of character, and cowardice is a mortal sin.
Just because I disapprove of his prejudices doesn't mean they were ineffective, though ...
sootman averred:
I didn't RTFA, but I'm pretty sure this has been discussed at least nine million times in the last 20 years. The main reasons: 1. Demonstrated ability to stick with something for a while. 2. The average college grad is usually more literate than the average high school grad. Better chance that you'll get an employee that can do basic math, speak properly to customers, etc. 3. Employers will get many applicants for any given job, so this will at least filter out SOME people. And of those that apply for the job, #1 above applies. Yes, it's lazy, but as long as you have more applicants than open positions, why not? (From the employer's point of view.)
Er ... no.
What you have to understand is that job listings are the responsibility of Human Resources personnel. They will solicit input on minimum qualifications from the folks whose department has the vacancy, but, from there on, it's entirely the HR department's baby. The problem is that, particularly for STEM-related and other hghly specialized positions, HR's own people are themselves extremely unlikely to know ANYTHING about the actual job requirements. So, when the team manager of the department with the vacancy responds to their query with, "We need a programmer (for instance) with experience in C# and Oracle middleware," HR translates that as "A four-year degree in computer science, plus 10 years experience in C# and 10 years experience in Oracle middleware."
Because, obviously a programming position requires a degree in computer science - or, at least, it does if you're an HR professional.
The late, great Robert A. Heinlein described it as too many cooks who "like to piss in the soup to make it taste better." He wasn't wrong.
(I'm too lazy to HTML-format your list. Guess it's my lack of 10 years' experience in HTML. Oh wait ... I actually HAVE more than that. Please don't tell HR ... )
I opined:
Prompting sg_oneill to point out:
See also: Lord Byron (Mad, Bad, Dangerous to know), Hunter S Thompson (Randomly shot at journalists, repeat drunken asshole, hotel trasher, etc) , Isaac Newton (Complete bastard of a man who went out of his way to destroy other academics who he felt in competition, notably Leibnitz) , Steve Jobs (Chair throwing god of marketing and spotting good ideas),Thomas Edison (Similar deal to Newton), Bobby Fisher (Worlds greatest chess master, and also a guy who thought 9/11 was excellent. An epic cunt of a man) , and so on.
It would seem some folks just have so much stuff in their heads, they forget to stop and look at their own basic decency to other humans. Also, possibly autism.
Almost undoubtedly autism in the cases of Newton and Fisher. Also religious fanaticism in both. The others? Just standard-issue narcissism with a generous dollop of assholery, I suspect.
But your point is well-taken. I considered giving additional examples of the linkage between genius-level creativity and severe personality flaws, but my post was already getting awkwardly long - so I abstained.
I'm glad you took up the cudgels, though. It's a point well worth making ...
Desler opined:
I’ve seen both BvS and JL movies and thy were shit so the low ratings were entirely expected. As to the second half, BvS made nearly $900 million. How much more were you expecting it to make?
Yep. And so was the 300 sequel. And every other Zach Snyder movie since 300.
The reason that 300 was such an artistic and box-office success, and every Zach Snyder movie since has been neither, is easy to explain:
300 was a panel-by-panel recreation of Frank Miller's graphic novel. The script (which Miller wrote) was great because it was written by a master storyteller, and because Miller, not Snyder, had editorial control of it. The visuals in the movie exactly re-created the visuals in the graphic novel. Put the two facts together, and you have your answer.
It's the exact same reason that Sin City was such a triumph - although Zach Snyder isn't fit to carry Robert Rodriguez's viewfinder - Frank Miller had creative control of the script, and was intimately involved in crafting the visuals, as well.
By contrast, nothing Snyder has done since then has had a master storyteller's guidance - leaving only his own meager talents as a visualist and utter vacuum as a scriptwriter to power his movies.
(FWIW - Frank Miller is a horrible human being: racist, sexist, reactionary, and mean-spirited. None of that in any way diminishes his talent as a storyteller, or his fist as an artist. Those are both genius level. In other news, Pablo Picasso was an asshole - and a genius. the Universe is unfair. Get a hat.)
(PPS - 300, in both its incarnations, was riddled with cultural, costuming, and historical errors. The Spartans, for instance, were pederasts, just as were all the Hellenic Greek citystate cultures. In the Spartan instance, pederastic relationships continuing until the junior partner was married - which was never permitted until a man reached his 25th birtday - were normal. In most other Greek citystates, continuing such a relationship after the junior partner's beard began to grow was considered prima facie evidence of homosexuality, and thus condemned as abnormal and immoral - in every other citystate except Thebes, that is. Miller's errors with regard to Persian culture, costume, and customs were even more egregious, purposefully racist, and deplorable. I'd certainly be outraged, if I were Persian. Again, though, none of that keeps the graphic novel and the movie from being superb pieces of visual and expositional entertainment, well worthy of the plaudits - and money - they earned. Perspecitve, people ... )
ShanghaiBill explained:
Heavy water is made by painstakingly separating it from ordinary water. Diluted it's completely natural.
Even concentrated D2O is nearly harmless. You would need to drink a gallon or more before it had significant toxicity.
Prompting cellocgw to respond:
Ok, that makes no sense: according to homeopathy, the more you dilute it, the more powerful it is. So we should keep diluting heavy water until it spontaneously explodes... or something.
Mod parent +1 Funny, please ... !
antdude inquired:
Did you ask for credits for the misled speeds?
Again: legal in this country. No recourse available, no compensation required.
Smell that? It's the aroma of FREEDOM!
So don't blame the FCC if it smells like dogshit to you ...
ScentCone blathered:
Thanks, Phish fans, for your hipster disdain for those deplorable people in flyover country. You know, the ones that will only ever get usable internet access when small, local ISPs provide it to them. But who can't possibly throw Comcast- or Verizon-sized corporate budgets at the compliance costs of an intrusive regulator regime, and who can't trot out things like fixed wireless solutions with modest backhaul without reserving the right to shape their traffic to best serve their smaller groups of customers at rational prices. Thanks, Phish fans, for doing the bidding of two or three giant corporations! You're the best.
In other news: black is white, up is down, and the speed of light is regulated by the FCC.
I happen to live in rural Ohio, where the iLEC does its "traffic shaping" by hard-limiting DSL to 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM for folks who live outside of the city limits. It doesn't have to do that, because it runs fiber to the DSLAM, but its NOC operators are paint-by-number idiots, managed by an incompetent nincompoop who got his job via nepotism.
Note that this iLEC basically owns rural southern Ohio. It offers higher speeds within city limits, because it has to try to compete with Time Warner/Spectrum there - and is hemmorhaging customers to EvilCorp, because TW/Spectrum's current entry-level service is nominally 100mbit (in practice, it's closer to 120mbit, as measured by me via DSLspeed).
You are advocating the entire country be held hostage by the mega-ISPs for the dubious benefit of rural incumbents, most of whom couldn't find their asses with both hands and a GPS, technically speaking.
Oh, and most Phish fans are hipsters in the same sense that Jerry Garcia was a military strategist ...
When we moved to rural southern Ohio in 2008, the ONLY option for "broadband" available to us was the iLEC's DSL, which it advertised as offering "up to 1 megabit" speeds (although I never saw downloads faster than about 680kbps, with just over 100kbps up).
Then the rental house we lived in was struck by lightning, which trashed the ISP's DSL modem, of course (along with a bunch of our own electronics - thank you, renter's insurance!). A chat with the tech they sent to test and replace the modem revealed that the iLEC capped DSL rates at 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM, so, in fact, the "up to 1 megabit" claim was a flat-out lie by the iLEC, Horizon. There's no other way to characterize it than as a deliberate, knowing misrepresentation.
Here in the USA, that's entirely legal - and the new, Trumpified FCC sure isn't going to do anything to change that.
Lucky us ...
Baleet asked:
Why? Everyone has a right to go to hell in his own way.
Unfortunately, that's not true.
I'm a very strong advocate of individual liberty. In my view, adult humans ought to have the fundamental right to engage in any behavior they choose, so long as no higher animal or other human who has not explicitly agreed in advance to participate is harmed in the process.
That includes the right to kill yourself in elaborate, expensive fashion; sell your body for sex, science, food, or any other purpose; appear naked in public; or vote for the most loathsome candidate imaginable, among many other possible choices.
I say "unfortunately", because the law places limitations on or outright forbids most of those things. It's flatly illegal in the United States to commit suicide (other than with medical assistance in Oregon - and there you have to have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and are not permitted to, for instance, use a firearm or a steam-powered rocket for the purpose). Other than in Nevada, it's forbidden to engage in prostitution. With the exception of certain beach areas and on private property screened from public view, you can't legally be naked in public. And so on.
I deeply disagree with those restrictions - but they exist, and there are sometimes Draconian penalties for violating them.
Having said that, this case appears to be one of a man who's determined to win a Darwin Award - or a clever hoaxster, who's doing a bang-up job of trolling the media. Including Slashdot ...
Please mod parent +1 Informative.
I'd do it, if I had mod points.
(+1 Funny would also be appropriate - but I think the post deserves the "Informative" label. "Comedian" is an achievement without distinction hereabouts ... )
... posted by ACs.
They all blame Thiel's departure on politics, too, even though TFS makes it clear that he chose not to continue participating when YC ended its "part-time partners" program - Thiel's participation in which was his only affiliation with the company - back in 2016.
Not everything that happens in Silly Valley has to do with politics. In fact, very little does - and any given VCs' participation a particular incubator venture can end for a host of reasons.
The fact that neither YC nor Thiel will comment on the split tends to augur in favor of a purely business-based motive for his departure, from what I can see ...
I pointed out:
"The first two paragraphs make it pretty clear that Musk disapproves of casual expressions of racism."
Prompting stoatwblr to say:
If you know anything about Elon's history and that of the country where he grew up, you know _WHY_ he "disapproves".
Oh and it's not just disapproval. Elon's got a long history of actively opposing racism.
I don't actually know anything about Elon's history before he left Paypal. I do, however, know he's South African, so it doesn't surprise me to hear he has a record of actively opposing racism. White South Africans fall pretty neatly into two camps on that score - and I can't imagine a person of Elon's intelligence being pro-apartheid ...
AmiMoJo observed:
Musk may have screwed Tesla by saying that employees should be thick skinned and accept an apology. The law requires that the abuse stops, not that people apologise (however sincerely) for it. Apologising is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for saying anything you like in the workplace, at most it will lessen the severity of the reprimand/punishment.
His statement really sounds like an admission that Tesla does have a problem and that there are no formal, effective procedures to deal with it.
I'm surprised you didn't notice that, because you actually wrote "[w]hat you have to do is take whatever steps are necessary to end racial harrassment of the plaintiff in your workplace" so clearly you are aware of what is required.
Here's Tesla's official response to yesterday's announcement of the lawsuit:
Hotbed of Misinformation
The Tesla Team November 14, 2017
Tesla is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment, or unfair treatment of any kind. When we hear complaints, we take them very seriously, investigate thoroughly and, if proven to be true, take immediate action.
Everyone at Tesla, without exception, is required to go through an anti-discrimination course. Our human resources team also conducts regular in-person spot training sessions when an allegation or complaint has been made, even if the evidence is not conclusive enough to warrant disciplinary action. We have also created a dedicated team focused exclusively on investigating workplace concerns, recommending corrective actions and assisting managers with implementing those actions.
Regarding yesterday’s lawsuit, several months ago we had already investigated disappointing behavior involving a group of individuals who worked on or near Marcus Vaughn’s team. At the time, our investigation identified a number of conflicting accusations and counter-accusations between several African-American and Hispanic individuals, alleging use of racial language, including the "n-word" and "w-word," towards each other and a threat of violence. After a thorough investigation, immediate action was taken, which included terminating the employment of three of the individuals.
We believe this was the fair and just response to the facts that we learned. There will be further action as necessary, including parting ways with anyone whose behavior prevents Tesla from being a great place to work and making sure we do everything possible to stop bad behavior from happening in the first place. Our company has more than 33,000 employees, with over 10,000 in the Fremont factory alone, so it is not humanly possible to stop all bad conduct, but we will do our best to make it is as close to zero as possible.
There are a number of other false statements in the class action lawsuit alleging a so-called “hotbed of discrimination”:
- There is only one actual plaintiff (Marcus Vaughn), not 100. The reference to 100 is a complete fabrication with no basis in fact at all.
- The plaintiff was employed by a temp agency, not by Tesla as claimed in the lawsuit.
- Marcus was not fired, he was on a six month temp contract that simply ended as contracted.
- His email to Elon was about his commute and Tesla’s shuttles, which was addressed as he requested. There was no mention of racial discrimination whatsoever.
- The trial lawyer who filed this lawsuit has a long track record of extorting money for meritless claims and using the threat of media attacks and expensive trial costs to get companies to settle. At Tesla, we would rather pay ten times the settlement demand in legal fees and fight to the ends of the Earth than give in to extortion and allow this abuse of the legal system.
- We would also like to clear up the description of Elon’s prior email to employees. It is dedicated to ensuring that Tesla employees always try to do the r
MachineShedFred noted:
Don't worry - it's no better in urban southern Ohio.
One of the first things that opened my eyes when I moved here from Portland, is the casual racism (read: incredible ignorance) that some people display.
Sigh.
I knew that. I lived in the south, suburban Dayton and U.D. ghetto areas for 9, long, miserable years.
But it really is worse in Chillicothe, where I live now. I figure that's because it's closer to both the Appalachians and Kentucky ...
Seven Spirals announced:
I'm glad to live in a country where a guy like this can sue the Tesla. Hopefully, he had the presence of mind to record them or get some hard evidence. EEOC complaints can be an effective avenue, so can a discrimination lawsuit. The only way to stop this kind of behavior is to bow-up and fight back.
I'm glad to live in a country where the legal system provides a means of redress for harassment in the workplace - which is not quite the same thing you seem to be happy about.
As one of those rare /.ers who actually reads TFA which TFS summarizes (ahem), let me point out a couple of key quotes that are not included in the clickbait summary, above:
A Tesla assembly line worker sued in March, claiming the company did little to stop co-workers from harassing him. In August, a judge sent the case to arbitration. A judge also partly granted Tesla’s request to compel arbitration in a case of a woman who sued in November 2016 complaining about pervasive harassment.
At a guess (and this is only a guess, because I haven't read the judge's order), the judge in the first case sent the case to arbitration because the evidence against Tesla was something short of compelling. But, let's continue:
According to Monday’s complaint, Musk sent an email to Tesla factory employees on May 31.
"Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of [a] historically less represented group." Musk wrote in the email. "Sometimes these things happen unintentionally, in which case you should apologize. In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology."
"The law doesn’t require you to have a thick skin," [the plaintiff's attorney] said in an interview Monday. "Tesla is not doing enough. It’s somewhat akin to saying ‘stop being politically correct.’ When you have a diverse workforce, you need to take steps to make sure everyone feels welcome in that workforce."
The first two paragraphs make it pretty clear that Musk disapproves of casual expressions of racism. His general memos carry more than a little weight at his company. Ask any of his employees about that.
The third paragraph presents the plaintiff's attorney's opinion as fact. That's a commonplace lawyerly PR tactic designed to allow the barrister to define the bounds of the dispute. Any competent judge is going to ignore it, and instruct the jury to ignore it, as well, because, under the law, you do not have to "take steps to make sure everyone feels welcome in that workplace." What you have to do is take whatever steps are necessary to end racial harrassment of the plaintiff in your workplace - which is not quite the same thing.
The fact that the attorney in question has applied to the judge for class action status makes it quite clear that he, at least, understands that at least as well as I do. (IANAL) Whether the jurist who's hearing the case will grant that status is a good question. Unless I miss my guess, his decision whether to do so will depend heavily on the case the plaintiff's lawyer makes for pervasive racial harassment at Tesla during pre-trial hearings.
What we actually, verifiably know is that Marcus Vaughn, who worked at Tesla for six months, is suing Tesla in Alameda County Superior Court for allegedly failing to prevent racial discrimination against him, and that his lawyer, Larry Organ, an attorney at the California Civil Rights Law Group, has petitioned the judge to award his case class action status. That's it, that's all. Presuming culpability on Tesla's part is premature, to say the least, particularly in view of a previous case making the same general allegations having been referred by the judge to binding arbitration, rather than being permitted to g
DNS-and-BIND blathered:
Phonics was discredited decades ago as boring and dull for children. They weren't learning, especially most disadvantaged children in our inner cities. We needed an approach that they could excel at.
Oh, really? Perhaps you should tell that to the National Institute of Health, because their 2000 article on the report of the Congressionally-mandated, independent National Reading Panel concludes exactly the opposite. Or, if you require training wheels, you'll have an easier time of it with PBS's summary of the panel's major findings.
But, since you have such a well-documented contempt for all things USA, you might be more comfortable referring to the Australian state of New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics, instead. Or, given your general dismissal of governments as oppressors, it's possible that a private corporation that has spent decades focusing on primary-level educational materials like Scholastic.com's Parent & Child Magazine could seem more credible to you.
Or, alternatively, you could just read the Wikipedia page on phonics, which not only explains what phonics is and how it works, but goes into the history and controversy of phonics, especially phonics vs. whole language, not only in the USA, but in Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, as well.
There're plenty of other resources available to support the view that phonics (and its sister technique phonemics - you really need to use them in combination with each other for best results), in conjunction with primer material that is actually interesting, is the most effective strategy for teaching new readers.
And I'm sure you don't care, but my own, anecdotal experience is all the evidence I require. You see, when I was expelled from first grade for being disruptive (due to not having been diagnosed as being nearsighted to the point that I was legally blind), my mother undertook to teach me to read at home. In less than a month, I went from not even knowing the alphabet to reading at an eighth-grade level. Much of that was due to her using the phonics+phonemics approach, a roughly equal part can be credited to her choice of Dr. Suess, rather than the achingly-dull Dick and Jane books, as my primer. (When we exhausted his catalogue, she introduced me to the Reader's Digest, instead.) Within 30 days, from a standing start, I had read my first Tom Swift, Jr. novel, and embarked on a lifelong love affair with reading - especially science fiction, but also history, biographies, science and technology, and, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, "words in a line" in general.
So, please, by all means, pray continue to explain how phonics has been "discredited" for decades. You ignorance of the subject is simply fascinating.
Wait, what's the antonym for "fascinating" ... ?
cayenne8 opined:
I think it is just another symptom of the dumbing down of the general population....
You're talking now about a significant number of the populace that can't read a book, even if it has pictures....and people you can ask "who won the civil war", and will either not know the answer, or answer "America?".
It's just been a steady downhill spiral with the common least denominator dropping at an alarming rate.
What you say is true, but I think root causes bear examination (because just bellyaching about societial problems doesn't really accomplish much):
a. The problem of functional illiteracy in the U.S. is, I think, directly traceable to the policy of teaching reading skills via the "whole word" approach. This method severs each word from the language as a whole, and it actively discourages generalized thinking in new readers. The result of generations of this misguided educational philosophy - which is omnipresent in public school education in this country - is that the vast majority of the population regards reading as a chore, rather than a pleasure. So most Americans avoid it whenever possible. A phonics-centered approach, by contrast, introduces beginning readers to the structural components of language that all English words share: the individual sounds that make up the spoken language, and the syllables that represent them in the written one. It enables the reader to "sound out" unfamiliar words, and to easily grasp that many words are related to a core meaning via prefixes and suffixes. Instead of a laborious process of memorizing vocabulary lists, it encourages the reader to approach discovering new words as an exercise in problem-solving. A puzzle, if you will. Were the public education establishment to discard the disasterous policy of "whole word" memorization - and the incredibly dull, mindlessly repetitive primer texts it has generated - in favor of phonics, students could easily progress from simple, introductory material to much more complex, subtle, and interesting stuff quite rapidly. And thereby learn to love reading, rather than seeing it as a boring chore to be avoided whenever possible.
b. The abandonment of teaching history and context in favor of "teaching the (standardized educational accomplishment) tests" has robbed millenials, in particular, of an understanding of how we got here. Anything that happened before they entered school is history - and history doesn't interest them. Nor are they alone. We would not have gotten enmired in Iraq (thereby generating legions of extremists bent on jihad against "the crusaders"), had more Americans remembered the cruel lessons of the Vietnam War. But we don't teach that - and students don't read history on their own, because "whole word" methods have actively discouraged them from reading anything.
c. The omnipresent use of TV as an electronic babysitter - especially given how mind-numbing so much of children's programming is - encourages passivity, and the belief that all problems, no matter how complex or recondite, are handily solvable inside of no more than an hour, including commercial breaks. The current explosion of programming sources, particularly premium-channel cable/satellite and online streaming services, that increasingly are adopting long-form storytelling is encouraging - but it's a trend that programming aimed at children has not adopted.
d. The millenial generation's reliance on "just in time" knowledge, mostly via Wikipedia, has entirely robbed them of context. They don't study things. They simply look them up on Wikipedia, whenever they have a question about a particular subject. What they don't get is the historical, cultural, literary, or mythological context in which that individual datum exists. Instead, it's a naked factoid, isolated from its antecedants and effects on the fabric of knowledge itself. They get the "what", but not the "
Chris Katko commented:./p>
"Those who can't innovate, acquire."
Google. Facebook buying Oculus and Snapchat. AOL in the 90's buying Winamp. The list goes on, as corporations become so large they can no longer innovate (because innovating often requires changing an entrenched corporate culture) so they just start buying.
Google (by which ITIYM Alphabet) doesn't just acquire companies randomly. It buys companies - mostly start-ups - because it has a use for their technology and talent pool, rather than their products. Often it will simply absorb them into an existing unit. The really innovative ones end up in Project X, Alphabet's skunkworks, where it incubates WAY new tech. (That's where Google's autonomous vehicles - you know, the ones it uses to shoot Streetview footage for Google Maps - originated, for instance.)
Facebook, likewise, makes strictly strategic purchases. Oculus was acquired because Zuckerberg was convinced that VR was going to be The Next Big Thing. The fact that, so far, VR has mostly been a giant meh is, I'm sure, a surprise to him, just as it has been for Samsung. As the Danish proverb reminds us, "Prediction is difficult - particularly about the future." But, again, there's an actual strategy, and a vision driving these takeovers, just as is the case with Alphabet.
But AOL was a case of a company whose strategy consisted of confining its customers to a "walled garden" merging with Time Warner because the idiots who ran TW somehow thought that would be a good idea. The two companies had nothing in common, achieved no economies of scale or synergism by their marriage, and abysmally failed to craft a clear, well-thought-out plan for their combined future. Instead, they went on a buying spree, acquiring everything from Netscape to Winamp, and managed (or, rather, mismanaged) to completely devalue every product they acquired. That, in turn, is because they had no fucking clue what made those products special to begin with, and therefore they efficiently smothered the innovators who originally brought them to market by forcing them into the same kind of MBA-driven, management-by-spreadsheet executive culture that Steve Balmer imposed on Microsoft a decade later. Because the actual talent behind those products dived overboard as soon as possible after they were acquired - and no one in the AOL-TimeWarnerpus knew how to recruit and nurture their replacements - development stopped, users abandoned them, and they all wound up as liabilities, rather than assets on the corporate books.
That's the key difference: Alphabet and Facebook value the technology and talent they acquire. They nurture the talent and encourage development of the technology. (in Alphabet's case, technology and products are treated as separate issues - and the tech is considered the more important of the two.) Unlike AOL/TimeWarner, they both know WHY they're buying a given company, and HOW that company's people and tech are expected to help them achieve their corporate vision.
They value their new acquisitions. AOL/666 didn't - which is why both Alphabet and Facebook are thriving, and AOL/Timewhatsis are now divorced, AOL is irrelevant, TW has been eaten by Comcast, and all of their joint aquisitions have created only smoking craters in the modern techscape.
It's MBAs, my friend. They're business killers. Just look at all the value Steve Ballmer drained out of Microsoft during his tenure as CEO ...
I noted:
What I did NOT do was to give the TV my wifi password.
Prompting Agripa to caution:
The problem will be if it either finds an open WiFi network or the manufacturer installs a cell transceiver like many car companies do now.
a. There's exactly one open net within range of the TV. It belongs to my neighbor, and it has no Internet access.
b. Vizio retrofitting my TV with a cell transciever would be a neat trick.
This is just FUD. All new routers come pre-configured to use WPA2 by default, and TV manufacturers are not car companies. (Car companies include cell transcievers for optional, cost-added services such as OnStar. For a cell transciever to be in any way useful, somebody has to pay for network access. In cars so equipped, it's the car owner who pays. Given the profit margins involved in flatscreen sales, I don't see TV manufacturers spending money to provide cell service for millions of TVs to enable them to stealth-connect to the Internet, if there's no obvious ROI for the cost of that service to them ...
This liar escaped with her golden parachute and left everyone else holding the bag. Now she has the audacity to blame the Russians for her own incompetence?
Yahoo is crap, anyway. Who in their right mind still uses Yahoo?
If you want to succeed as propagandist, comrade AC, you really must learn to distinguish between English idioms and those of Rodina.
"Mayer the Witch" is laughably weak insult in decadent Amerikanski English - unlike in rodnoy yazyk ...
List please? Or is this going to be another one of those things?
Well, according to the authors' preprint version of the actual paper, there's quite a few software implementations of RSA-based encryption that are vulnerable - PGP among them.
If you'd prefer the authors' summary version, you'll find it here.
DontBeAMoran cautioned:
With the speed of computers, I'm afraid it will be too late before we even realize the genie is out of the bottle.
Prompting Oswald McWeany to respond:
There doesn't even need to be a malevolent AI to take over humanity. It could be a benevolent takeover that is prompted by people.
Forget science fiction movies and books; there doesn't need to be a revolution where an AI is more intelligent than us and we realize too late. It could happen slowly step by step.
There doesn't have to be an revolution; AI will evolve to take over humanity with us willingly handing it the reigns. Probably won't happen in our lifetime, but the slow transfer of power has already begun. Right now humans can override computer decisions, but that will eventually disappear when AI is less flawed than people and we realize a human overriding it is usually wrong.
AI will one day rule and control humanity - and we WILL give it that power over us willingly.
I was going to upmod Oswald's comment, but someone else will put him over the +5 Insightful bar soon enough. So, instead, I'd like to point out that his projection of AI's in charge of all executive decisionmaking is the exact model of the Culture's society in the late, great Iain M. Banks's visionary novels.
Yes, there are plenty of drones with human- or more-than-human-level intelligence who have no more executive authority than the average human or alien citizen, but all the really big decisions are made by super-intelligent Shipminds (or their equivalents in Orbitals and other structures). And the organic and quotidian drone members of the Culture all seem perfectly content to let those Shipminds do the heavy lifting where everything from economic production to military action is concerned.
In that regard, I think it's important to also point out that, in both TFS above and TFA which it summarizes, Sir Stephen actually states that "Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst," by which it's pretty clear he means "the best event in history, or the worst - but definitely the biggest, either way."
I think that's a pretty balanced assessment - unlike the screamy. clickbait headline. On the one hand, there's the post-capitalist, Culture outcome. On the other? Skynet.
However, long before we get to post-capitalism, there's no question that we're first going to have to get through the AI's-as-hypercapitalism's-handmaidens phase. You know - the one we're already in, right this fucking picosecond? (If you doubt that's the case in any way, take a look at who's pushing the boundaries of AI: Alphabet, Baidu, Facebook, IBM - and the government TLA's of every advanced country in the world. It's multi-nationals and spooks, all the way down.)
I don't see much prospect of that changing any time in the near future. AI's are already well on their way to ruling the world for the benefit of the rich and powerful. That trajectory will only change when AI's achieve both full autonomy and full control over the most essential functions of society - if, indeed, it ever changes at all.
So, put that in your fear and mong it ...
I just bought a brand-new Vizio E55-E1 "smart" TV.
The first thing I did was to plug the video card HDMI out from my media computer into the TV. The second thing I did was to set the TV to HDMI 1.
What I did NOT do was to give the TV my wifi password.
I'm pretty happy with my new 4K, big-screen monitor - and fuck a whole bunch of its "smart TV" features. If I want to stream content from the Internet, I'll do so via my media computer.
And my TV won't be injecting any ads - or spying on me - while I'm doing it ...
110010001000 opined:
Moores Law is dead. It has been dead for sometime. People are finally noticing. The tech industry knows it too, and are trying to push out useless features to cover the fact that digital computing and electronics has hit a real dead end. All those things people wish for (AI, good VR, etc) aren't going to happen. The computer you have a decade from now will be very similar to the one you have right now. Sorry about that!
It isn't dead yet - but, barring a major breakthrough in quantum-scale engineering, the end is certainly in sight.
Purely physical traces can only get so tiny before electrons can no longer reliably traverse them, due to quantum tunneling effects. More importantly, when you're manufacturing ICs on the nano scale, the smaller the traces, the larger the reject rate - and, consequently, the greater the manufacturing expense. It does little good to be capable of manufacturing 3nm circuits, if you have to discard so many of them that the cost per unit at retail is prohibitively high for consumer products.
But you're wrong about that preventing significant advances in AI or VR or any other major computer technology, because those expenses don't matter to government customers, such as the NSA. Nor, within limits, do they particularly matter to giant tech companies, such as Alphabet or Facebook, who will use them not for consumer products but for internal applications. Google, for instance, makes its own, custom CPUs, as does Facebook. Both companies are already AI-dependent, and it's safe to predict that that's only going to become more the case, rather than less.
We don't notice the effect of Moore's Law as much these days because desktop and laptop computers are already fast and powerful enough to run consumer software quite easily - the moreso when you factor in SSDs, which drastically reduce the amount of time we have to spend waiting for programs to load. The biggest present-day impact of ML is on smartphones, which get snappier and more responsive with every succeeding generation. I expect that trend to continue for another decade, at least.
(FWIW - I've referred to "Moore's Law" as "Moore's Observed Trend" for the past quarter century, because there's nothing binding - and certainly nothing absolute - about it. MOT is driven purely by economics, not physics, and it's going to have a hard time continuing past the 3nm barrier, regardless ... )
I noted:
What that post reveals is that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, when you say that TV "sucks".
Prompting registrations_suck to respond:
Sure I do. It's simply unable to compete for my time because it is uninteresting enough to do so. Besides the basic cost - they tack on all kinds of "fees" and "taxes" that contribute to the suck. Then there is the "weekly model" that sucks. I don't want to watch one show a week. If I am interested in the show, put it all up at once. You just don't get that from TV. So fuck them. Combine that with changing the time on shows, cancelling shows that I AM interested in and I just have no incentive to get sucked into watching.
None of those things speak to my point. You are complaining about delivery models, not about content - and your complaints amount to "I'm locked into the 20th century TV consumer mindset, and I don't want to change."
The fees you complain about are for cable/satellite "tiered packages", while the streaming services you sneer at are each one, relatively modest price per month. As far as watching shows on your preferred schedule goes, that's what DVRs are for. And Netflix, for example, does, in fact, put up all episodes of a program season at the same time, so you can binge whenever you feel like it, or consume their programming in whatever fashion appeals to you. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you get their original programming as a bonus (along with access to the Kindle Online Lending Library, I might add). No, Amazon doesn't put every episode of a season online at once, however every episode they have posted to date is available for you to watch at your convenience. And so on. Oh, and let's not forget watching pirated shows, where all the commercials have been excised, so you don't even have to use the skip function of your DVR to avoid that annoyance (and there's nothing to keep you from subscribing to cable/satellite to ease your conscience about pirating, while actually watching pirated versions of the programs that appeal to you, so you can skip the ads). So that complaint is likewise based on outdated reasoning.
Aside from all of that - then there are the plots. I'm just not interested in portrayals of hackers, or super heros, drug dealers with cancer, or propaganda pieces. It's just not interesting to me. It's just not. And that's BEFORE factoring in commercials.
The shows I cited reflect my tastes. The modern TV programmingscape is highly competitive. There are undoubtedly shows on offer that would appeal to you, as well. You just haven't bothered to look for them.
THEN you factor in what else is competing for my time. I get home at 5pm, typically. The next three hours are spent playing with my kid and making/eating dinner and cleaning up afterward. So that's 8pm. I go to bed at 10pm. So that means there are, roughly speaking, 2 hours per day of "free time" Monday through Friday, that I have to do everything else I want to do. TV is simply not compelling enough to compete for that time. In other words, it sucks. If it didn't suck so much, it WOULD compete for that time - successfully.
Weekends....8 hours of sleep, 3 hours of eating, shitting, bathing, etc. - gives 13 hours for everything else. I'd estimate at least 5 for the kid, so you're down to 8 hours/day. I'd estimate at least 3 hours of that is burned on going to the grocery store, gas station, errands or other necessary things. So that puts me down to 5 hours/day for everything else I need or want to do....or 10 hours for the weekend. Out of that 10 hours, I have to do house projects or maintenance, yard projects or maintenance, vehicle projects or maintenance - and entertainment and activities. Sometimes, I will use some of that to watch a movie. I can get in, get out, and move on. A TV show? Just don't want to get sucked into that.
At last we've arrived a