Oh, one more comment: If Uber is just up-pricing to cover risk, they should be doing it in a more straightforward way. They should do it by adding a simple percentage onto the best estimate of the expected best route. They can then tune that percentage so that they consistently break even or come out a little ahead. They could, and should, IMO, show both prices and let the customer choose.
evidence that your pricing models are not as transparent and honest as you led people to believe
I'm not sure that's the case. This upfront price is a fixed price and fixed prices carry risk, and it's perfectly reasonable -- indeed, necessary! -- to offset risk with some upside. I guess the question is what happens if the driver runs into unexpected delays or detours, and the actual fare is higher. If Uber eats the loss in that case, then it's a perfectly reasonable business model. The driver gets paid the same as if the rider hadn't opted for the up-front price (except that perhaps they have a rider when they wouldn't otherwise), the rider gets to make the decision based on a known price rather than an estimated range, and if all goes well Uber may make a little more money in exchange for the risk they take.
"The way I read it is that it would cut down on incoming revenue to YouTube: "
It also cuts down the overhead of accounting for the money streams on small channels, so they're probably doing it because it's a net win.
I don't see how it's more difficult to account for money streams on small channels anyway, but that's clearly not what's going on here because small channels (less than 10K views) will have no revenue to account, not for the channel owner or for YouTube, because ads will simply be disabled.
I suspect this may also be part of a larger plan to make it easier for YouTube to tag channels with content labels, so they can allow advertisers to pick what kinds of videos they want their ads shown next to. That's a dramatically tougher problem if they have to try to categorize the long tail. By simply not showing ads on the long tail, I'd guess they reduce the number of channels they have to tag correctly by 99% or so. It also means that YouTube doesn't need to tag channels when they first get created.
I think your criticism is partially ill-informed and partially premature.
The ill-informed part is that this isn't just about PewDiePie. That was just the beginning. YouTube's initial response was minor, but then major advertisers started noticing that their ads were still playing on content they didn't want it on, and started pulling their advertising.
The premature part is that there's no reason to believe that YouTube isn't going to do exactly what you said, allow advertisers to pick what they want to show their ads on. But you don't turn a ship the size of YouTube on a dime. From a user's perspective it's just a web site, but the implementation is undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of servers in a sophisticated multi-tier architecture. For that matter, architectural complexity aside, it's a non-trivial problem to identify the contents of billions of videos. My guess is that they are going to give advertisers control, but it'll take time. Probably 1-2 quarters. In the meantime, they need to stop the bleeding. Advertisers pulling out harms all YouTubers, not just the ones with potentially-offensive content.
Nonsense. I'm far from what anyone would call an "SJW". Take a look at this post to see an example of how the playing field can be corrected, without favoritism.
Discrimination is illegal, and has been illegal for longer than most/. readers have been alive. It is quite impossible to have a more level playing field than Law. Your only possible argument would be to claim that there is no prosecution of discrimination cases, to which I will tell you that you are a liar.
Nonsense. That's far from the only possible argument, and not at all the one I would make, because it's ridiculous.
No, the argument that I would make is that only provable cases of discrimination are "prosecuted" (discrimination is a tort not a criminal matter, in nearly all cases, so "prosecuted" really is the wrong word. Litigated is better). Take the example of women receiving lower salaries because they don't negotiate as aggressively, on average, as men. There's a clear systemic discrimination going on, but nothing remotely illegal because the same standard is being applied to both genders, it just happens to be a standard that favors the average man over the average woman in a subtle and non-obvious way.
What you, and many others of the SJW variety (but also simple minded) want is FAVORITISM, not EQUALITY.
Nonsense. I'm far from what anyone would call an "SJW". Take a look at this post to see an example of how the playing field can be corrected, without favoritism. The key is to find the unobvious, hidden root causes of the bias and find ways to gently tweak the system to correct them.
If my language seems a bit mean for your taste, remember I'm not the one being dishonest and demanding group favoritism. Show me some respect by being honest and I'll return the same respect.
Yeah, your strawman argument at the top just screams "honesty". Good luck getting anyone to buy that.
Meh. If they do a lousy job a handling the data, whether that means not having it available when needed, or leaking it when it shouldn't be leaked, they'll lose market share regardless of how good their cameras are. I think the free market is perfectly capable of sorting this out. That's not true of everything, but I see no reason it won't work here.
As a system admin with 20+ years of experience, I never understood this fixation on wanting to be a software architect. That's like a pitcher in baseball wanting to be a quarterback in football.
That may be true for sysadmins, but not for programmers, assuming you're talking about effective software architects. Building software is not like building buildings, and if you want it done well you should follow the organizational pattern Architect Also Implements. In fact, the architects need to be among the best of your programmers, because they need to deeply understand all of the issues, from the high level down to the smallest details. It does make sense to have people who focus on higher levels of design, who don't understand the details but focus on user issues (though the architect should understand a lot of those as well), but those should be called business analysts or program managers or system designers or any of a dozen other titles I've heard around the industry. I suppose you can even call them architects if you like, but it's crucial that you do *not* allow them to define the software architecture. That's a job for your most talented and experienced programmers.
People of the same race are so different it is crazy to look at race or demographics as a way to diversify. It shows they have no idea what diversity is that they assume a whole race or sex is the same.
Race is a cultural construct, not a real thing, that's true. But it's also the case that numerous studies show that diverse teams are more productive and effective than homogeneous teams, with diversity measured on ethnic, racial, gender and socioeconomic (socioeconomic origin, not present status) lines. So this "crazy" view of diversity clearly does matter.
The very best are totally self-trained but that's maybe the top 2%
No, most of the very best have PhDs from top universities PLUS lots of practical work and a lifelong interest that began well before the university. That's a much smaller group than 2%, though.
For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace
Many companies would love to have the problem of having a largely talented and well-educated workplace obtained by recruiting people from elite universities.
Sure. The companies that actually have that problem, though, find it to be a problem in two ways. First, there's lots of evidence that diverse teams perform better than homogeneous teams, so being able to get some diversity (without lowering the talent bar) will make them more productive and effective. Second, there's a roughly fixed supply of people coming from those elite universities, and competition for that supply is fierce... and at some point the supply is just inadequate.
My employer (Google) hires hundreds of people every week, many of them software engineers. That's a big pipeline to keep filled, particularly given the high requirements set for hires (recruiters tell me that Google makes offers to approximately 0.1% of all applicants; I'm sure the number is higher when you look only at the elite school graduates, but I'll bet it's still below 10%). Years ago, Google started aggressively looking for professional hires to broaden their applicant pool (that's what I was when they called me), and they also trawl coding competitions, recruit at lots of smaller schools (and give candidates from smaller schools preferential treatment) as well as recruiting worldwide (which is why Google cares about H1-B visas; they're one option to enable hiring the talented non-Americans they find, though not the preferred one).
Google has never really cared whether you have a degree, but it's pretty challenging for recruiters to identify likely-successful candidates without one. It does happen... I know two engineers without a bachelor's degree or higher. One has an associate's degree and the other has a GED (earned at age 29!). Both are awesome. But it's far from common because it's really tough for recruiters to judge whether or not someone has a prayer of succeeding in the interview process without a relevant degree or solid work experience.
It's important for recruiters to do a decent job of pre-filtering, because interviews are expensive. Google does an initial phone screen to determine whether a candidate should be brought in for an on-site interview, but even that phone screen means that a working engineer has to take 1.5 to 2 hours away from his or her productive workday to do the screen, including interview time, time to write up the detailed feedback and context switch time. If the candidate passes the phone screen, five more engineers take a similar amount of time out of their workdays. I do three phone screens every week, and it's a major drag on my productivity, costing close to one full day per week in aggregate. Basically all Google engineers do 2-3 interviews per week. According to the July 2016 SEC filing, Google has 28,469 people in research & development and operations so that means interviewing currently sucks up on the order of 5000 engineer years per year. Assuming the average Google engineer costs $200K in base, bonus, stock and benefits (probably a lowball estimate), that means the company spends $1B per year on interviews. If we assume 4K hires per year (a number I just made up, but it seems reasonable), that's about $250K per hire, just in interviewer costs, not considering travel expenses for the candidates, etc. Filtering clearly matters, and depending less on "easy" filtering options like "Has a four-year CS degree and a good GPA" means finding other filtering criteria.
I do think though that if he knew the officers had the ability to use lethal force that he'd sober up real quick and either submit to arrest or be free to go on his way.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this assumes he has some degree of rationality. That's often not the case. What the officers needed in this case was a good taser. Pepper spray is good against most humans, but people who are sufficiently angry or have their mood sufficiently chemically altered can ignore it for a while. Given three on one, they really should have had a relatively easy time subduing him with batons as well, regardless of size/strength difference. But tasers would have put him down. Good tasers cause a significant part of the musculature to lock up, and basically no amount drugs or emotion can overcome that. The downside is that tasers are significantly more lethal than pepper spray or a properly-handled baton (an improperly handled baton is more lethal than either).
Guns have their place, too, of course. Tasers are short-ranged, inaccurate, single-shot weapons. Handguns are longer-ranged, more accurate and carry lots of cartridges... though they're not as effective at instantly stopping people as tasers. Police really should have all of the above, *and* solid training in their use.
To anyone that thinks that swinging a fist is insufficient reason to shoot someone then I have a problem with that. A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 150 pound woman is lethal force in my mind.
A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 200 pound man can be lethal as well. The human body is tough, but also has some crucial vulnerabilities. A lucky punch can be the end.
You don't see a problem with a single company controlling the entirety of the evidence collected by police cameras? In the cloud no less. Or the vendor lock-in for that matter?
I see no reason to expect either of those to happen. Yes, this company will probably buy itself a nice chunk of market share, but there's no reason to believe that competitors won't be able to enter.
The feminist movement has made it abundantly clear that women are competent and capable of success, and that they do not need men to provide for them or protect them.
So....there is nothing for me to do in response to this information. The women can take care of this problem themselves, without my help.
The second part does not follow from the first, because the first part is incomplete. What you should have said is:
The feminist movement has made it abundantly clear that women are competent and capable of success, and that they do not need men to provide for them or protect them, they only need a level playing field.
The problem is that the playing field is not, at present, level. Even when everyone is trying to be scrupulously fair, the system they're all operating in was designed and constructed in an era when women weren't in professional roles, and is therefore structured around typical male behavioral norms. It does not recognize that women are typically less assertive than men, for example. This doesn't make women inferior; in general women are somewhat more sensitive to interpersonal dynamics than men are and so can often significantly improve team dynamics. There is a lot of evidence that diverse teams perform better than homogeneous teams... so arguably (if your organization is already predominantly male), their differences make them more valuable to the company, not less.
But the systems were designed without women in mind. Therefore, women don't do as well as men. Duh.
Giving women a level playing field means that we need to alter hiring, promotion, compensation, etc., processes to take into account the typical differences between the genders. This also often benefits men who fall outside of the typical patterns.
But my main point is that there is something for you to do with this information. Open your eyes, educate yourself, and look for the ways in which the systems in which you operate are biased towards white male culture. Then find ways to fix them. The fixes are often simple, but often not obvious.
Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.
So... women do worse in a system designed decades ago when there were no women in the professional workforce. That is, a system designed around male behavioral norms. Is anyone surprised by that?
The HR organization in my employer did an analysis a few years ago and found that while female engineers and male engineers of the same rank on the career ladder got paid the same (because the HR organization had previously worked hard to make it so), female engineers tended to be of lower rank. Looking more closely, they found that this was mostly caused by the fact that women nominated themselves for promotion at a lower rate. Promotion in my company is initiated by the employee seeking promotion, not by management. Promotion success rates for those who applied were equal or slightly higher for women, as were subsequent job performance ratings. In a followup study they interviewed randomly-selected high-performing engineers of both genders and found that the women were less assertive in all sorts of ways that seem clearly related to societal gender stereotypes -- and remember that this was a set of women working in a male-dominated field, and at the highest level of that field, so they were no shrinking violets.
The HR team attempted to counter this problem with a campaign to both encourage female engineers directly and -- what turned out to be more important -- to educate their managers to be more sensitive to the fact that women are often less assertive, and to actively counter that by regularly encouraging high-performing women to seek promotion. Within a year of initiating this program, they found that promotion application rates had equalized across the genders, with no effect on promotion success rates or subsequent job performance. In addition, they found that promotion application rates for both genders had risen (though women rose more). Subsequent analysis attributed that to managers also putting more effort into encouraging high-performing but non-assertive men.
The promo self-nomination process was designed with typical high-performing male behavioral patterns in mind, which turn out to be slightly different than typical high-performing female behavioral patterns. Nature or nurture, I don't know and don't care. The point is that the system was designed for men and that made it difficult for women to keep up. A slight alteration of the system fixed the problem and women are no longer at a disadvantage (not in that area, at least).
Have you seen it? It looks like any of the half-assed knock offs of the original Apple "Aqua" UI that were floating around the web ten years ago. Not an exact copy, but close enough to see what they were trying and failing to do.
-jcr
I have, and I thought was very easy to use and well thought-out. So far all you've said is you don't like the colors and the shapes of the widgets. Do you have any substantive criticisms?
Ok, ic u. But now your ISP buys that VPN-SP and suddenly the dots are connected, and sold.
Or both sell their data to a commercial third party which connects the dots...
Again, selecting the VPN provider is an important part of the process. You need to find one that cares about security and privacy. Luckily, unlike with ISPs you can shop VPN providers worldwide and aren't limited to the small set that happen to operate in your neighborhood.
Sigh. I wasn't trotting out the old "I have nothing to hide" argument. Yes, that argument is flawed, and those flaws are the reason why it's important in principle to reign in the NSA.
My point was that that isn't the proximate risk. There's a much bigger and entirely non-theoretical risk in allowing ISPs to monitor connections that doesn't depend on the government deciding that middle-aged white guys need to be watched, and that's the risk that this thread is about, because that's the change that's in progress, in case you hadn't noticed. Whether or not ISPs can legally track you and sell the data has exactly zero impact on what the NSA may or may not do.
RFID chips can be made as impossible to clone as smart cards.
No, gaining access to the smart card contact pads won't help you in any way, neither will MITMing it.
IOW you're full of shit.
RFIDs are far simpler than Smart Cards, and a lot easier to clone.
Yes, and no.
There are multiple standards here. There is one set of standards which define devices that work like you say, and that set of standards is properly called RFID. However, there's also the contactless smart card protocols, which are often called NFC. Chips which implement those standards can come in virtually any form factor -- including implantable chips. That wasn't always the case, but antenna technology has advanced. The summary says these chips do NFC, which means that they technically are not RFID chips, though you'll never convince the press not to call them that.
You're thinking too local. The ISP maybe can not see what sites you visit, but your VPN-SP can. And the NSA totally can see both, and connect the dots.
Well, the whole point of having a VPN SP is to find one that will not keep track of information about you, sell it to other parties, etc.
As for the NSA, bah. What interest would they have in me? We're talking about ISPs selling user data to parties unknown for profit, which can lead to all sorts of actual badness that impacts normal people. While I think it's very important to reign in the NSA as a matter of principle, in practice whether or not they have our data sitting in a secure database somewhere has little to no impact on ordinary Americans. That Comcast may sell my browsing habits to all sorts of organizations who may misuse the data in ways that harm us, or leak it since they're likely much worse at security than the NSA, that's important in practice, not just in principle.
Through who? iirc all the other WiMAX carriers were smaller clearwire was the big one and afaik there aren't any others still operating.
My carrier is Rise Broadband, which used to operate under various names, including JAB Wireless, Digis, and others. They operate in 16 states.
I thought Clearwire was 4G, not WiMax (IEEE 802.16).
Hmm. Looking at some Wikipedia articles, it appears that there are two different standards, WiMax (802.16, which later gained the name "Fixed WiMax", when the mobile standard was created) and Mobile WiMax (802.16m). It seems you were talking about the latter, while I was talking about the former.
here are literally (old definition) hundreds of ways to encrypt communications and obscure the fact that they are even happening at all.
You can encrypt to your heart's content, but your ISP has access to every single packet that flows over your connection, including where and when, even if they don't have immediate access to its contents. So, I'll stand by my use of the word "literally", thanks!
Fine. So my ISP will know that I send a large stream of encrypted packets to one host that is a known Virtual Public Network service provider. My ISP can know nothing about the sites those packets are ultimately destined for, nor anything about their content. My ISP can see how much data I'm sending and receiving, but that's all... and if I really want to it's even possible to hide that by sending/receiving lots of meaningless packets. With a little work (I suspect I'd have to write some custom software, since I don't think what I'm thinking of exists) I could arrange to send and receive a continuous stream of data at a constant rate, 24x7, only a fraction of which is actual traffic. There's probably not enough information implicit in traffic volumes to make that worth the effort, but it could be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Well then by the same logic you can't really see matter either. All you see is reflected photons.
Or emitted photons.
Oh, one more comment: If Uber is just up-pricing to cover risk, they should be doing it in a more straightforward way. They should do it by adding a simple percentage onto the best estimate of the expected best route. They can then tune that percentage so that they consistently break even or come out a little ahead. They could, and should, IMO, show both prices and let the customer choose.
evidence that your pricing models are not as transparent and honest as you led people to believe
I'm not sure that's the case. This upfront price is a fixed price and fixed prices carry risk, and it's perfectly reasonable -- indeed, necessary! -- to offset risk with some upside. I guess the question is what happens if the driver runs into unexpected delays or detours, and the actual fare is higher. If Uber eats the loss in that case, then it's a perfectly reasonable business model. The driver gets paid the same as if the rider hadn't opted for the up-front price (except that perhaps they have a rider when they wouldn't otherwise), the rider gets to make the decision based on a known price rather than an estimated range, and if all goes well Uber may make a little more money in exchange for the risk they take.
As for the rest of it. Yeah. Sigh.
"The way I read it is that it would cut down on incoming revenue to YouTube: "
It also cuts down the overhead of accounting for the money streams on small channels, so they're probably doing it because it's a net win.
I don't see how it's more difficult to account for money streams on small channels anyway, but that's clearly not what's going on here because small channels (less than 10K views) will have no revenue to account, not for the channel owner or for YouTube, because ads will simply be disabled.
I suspect this may also be part of a larger plan to make it easier for YouTube to tag channels with content labels, so they can allow advertisers to pick what kinds of videos they want their ads shown next to. That's a dramatically tougher problem if they have to try to categorize the long tail. By simply not showing ads on the long tail, I'd guess they reduce the number of channels they have to tag correctly by 99% or so. It also means that YouTube doesn't need to tag channels when they first get created.
No, the argument that I would make is that only provable cases of discrimination are "prosecuted"
So your claim is that allegations should be guilty verdicts?
Again with the strawman arguments. There's no point in talking to you. I'm done here.
I think your criticism is partially ill-informed and partially premature.
The ill-informed part is that this isn't just about PewDiePie. That was just the beginning. YouTube's initial response was minor, but then major advertisers started noticing that their ads were still playing on content they didn't want it on, and started pulling their advertising.
The premature part is that there's no reason to believe that YouTube isn't going to do exactly what you said, allow advertisers to pick what they want to show their ads on. But you don't turn a ship the size of YouTube on a dime. From a user's perspective it's just a web site, but the implementation is undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of servers in a sophisticated multi-tier architecture. For that matter, architectural complexity aside, it's a non-trivial problem to identify the contents of billions of videos. My guess is that they are going to give advertisers control, but it'll take time. Probably 1-2 quarters. In the meantime, they need to stop the bleeding. Advertisers pulling out harms all YouTubers, not just the ones with potentially-offensive content.
Nonsense. I'm far from what anyone would call an "SJW". Take a look at this post to see an example of how the playing field can be corrected, without favoritism.
Gah, wrong link. this is the right one.
Discrimination is illegal, and has been illegal for longer than most /. readers have been alive. It is quite impossible to have a more level playing field than Law. Your only possible argument would be to claim that there is no prosecution of discrimination cases, to which I will tell you that you are a liar.
Nonsense. That's far from the only possible argument, and not at all the one I would make, because it's ridiculous.
No, the argument that I would make is that only provable cases of discrimination are "prosecuted" (discrimination is a tort not a criminal matter, in nearly all cases, so "prosecuted" really is the wrong word. Litigated is better). Take the example of women receiving lower salaries because they don't negotiate as aggressively, on average, as men. There's a clear systemic discrimination going on, but nothing remotely illegal because the same standard is being applied to both genders, it just happens to be a standard that favors the average man over the average woman in a subtle and non-obvious way.
What you, and many others of the SJW variety (but also simple minded) want is FAVORITISM, not EQUALITY.
Nonsense. I'm far from what anyone would call an "SJW". Take a look at this post to see an example of how the playing field can be corrected, without favoritism. The key is to find the unobvious, hidden root causes of the bias and find ways to gently tweak the system to correct them.
If my language seems a bit mean for your taste, remember I'm not the one being dishonest and demanding group favoritism. Show me some respect by being honest and I'll return the same respect.
Yeah, your strawman argument at the top just screams "honesty". Good luck getting anyone to buy that.
Meh. If they do a lousy job a handling the data, whether that means not having it available when needed, or leaking it when it shouldn't be leaked, they'll lose market share regardless of how good their cameras are. I think the free market is perfectly capable of sorting this out. That's not true of everything, but I see no reason it won't work here.
As a system admin with 20+ years of experience, I never understood this fixation on wanting to be a software architect. That's like a pitcher in baseball wanting to be a quarterback in football.
That may be true for sysadmins, but not for programmers, assuming you're talking about effective software architects. Building software is not like building buildings, and if you want it done well you should follow the organizational pattern Architect Also Implements. In fact, the architects need to be among the best of your programmers, because they need to deeply understand all of the issues, from the high level down to the smallest details. It does make sense to have people who focus on higher levels of design, who don't understand the details but focus on user issues (though the architect should understand a lot of those as well), but those should be called business analysts or program managers or system designers or any of a dozen other titles I've heard around the industry. I suppose you can even call them architects if you like, but it's crucial that you do *not* allow them to define the software architecture. That's a job for your most talented and experienced programmers.
People of the same race are so different it is crazy to look at race or demographics as a way to diversify. It shows they have no idea what diversity is that they assume a whole race or sex is the same.
Race is a cultural construct, not a real thing, that's true. But it's also the case that numerous studies show that diverse teams are more productive and effective than homogeneous teams, with diversity measured on ethnic, racial, gender and socioeconomic (socioeconomic origin, not present status) lines. So this "crazy" view of diversity clearly does matter.
The very best are totally self-trained but that's maybe the top 2%
No, most of the very best have PhDs from top universities PLUS lots of practical work and a lifelong interest that began well before the university. That's a much smaller group than 2%, though.
For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace
Many companies would love to have the problem of having a largely talented and well-educated workplace obtained by recruiting people from elite universities.
Sure. The companies that actually have that problem, though, find it to be a problem in two ways. First, there's lots of evidence that diverse teams perform better than homogeneous teams, so being able to get some diversity (without lowering the talent bar) will make them more productive and effective. Second, there's a roughly fixed supply of people coming from those elite universities, and competition for that supply is fierce... and at some point the supply is just inadequate.
My employer (Google) hires hundreds of people every week, many of them software engineers. That's a big pipeline to keep filled, particularly given the high requirements set for hires (recruiters tell me that Google makes offers to approximately 0.1% of all applicants; I'm sure the number is higher when you look only at the elite school graduates, but I'll bet it's still below 10%). Years ago, Google started aggressively looking for professional hires to broaden their applicant pool (that's what I was when they called me), and they also trawl coding competitions, recruit at lots of smaller schools (and give candidates from smaller schools preferential treatment) as well as recruiting worldwide (which is why Google cares about H1-B visas; they're one option to enable hiring the talented non-Americans they find, though not the preferred one).
Google has never really cared whether you have a degree, but it's pretty challenging for recruiters to identify likely-successful candidates without one. It does happen... I know two engineers without a bachelor's degree or higher. One has an associate's degree and the other has a GED (earned at age 29!). Both are awesome. But it's far from common because it's really tough for recruiters to judge whether or not someone has a prayer of succeeding in the interview process without a relevant degree or solid work experience.
It's important for recruiters to do a decent job of pre-filtering, because interviews are expensive. Google does an initial phone screen to determine whether a candidate should be brought in for an on-site interview, but even that phone screen means that a working engineer has to take 1.5 to 2 hours away from his or her productive workday to do the screen, including interview time, time to write up the detailed feedback and context switch time. If the candidate passes the phone screen, five more engineers take a similar amount of time out of their workdays. I do three phone screens every week, and it's a major drag on my productivity, costing close to one full day per week in aggregate. Basically all Google engineers do 2-3 interviews per week. According to the July 2016 SEC filing, Google has 28,469 people in research & development and operations so that means interviewing currently sucks up on the order of 5000 engineer years per year. Assuming the average Google engineer costs $200K in base, bonus, stock and benefits (probably a lowball estimate), that means the company spends $1B per year on interviews. If we assume 4K hires per year (a number I just made up, but it seems reasonable), that's about $250K per hire, just in interviewer costs, not considering travel expenses for the candidates, etc. Filtering clearly matters, and depending less on "easy" filtering options like "Has a four-year CS degree and a good GPA" means finding other filtering criteria.
I do think though that if he knew the officers had the ability to use lethal force that he'd sober up real quick and either submit to arrest or be free to go on his way.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this assumes he has some degree of rationality. That's often not the case. What the officers needed in this case was a good taser. Pepper spray is good against most humans, but people who are sufficiently angry or have their mood sufficiently chemically altered can ignore it for a while. Given three on one, they really should have had a relatively easy time subduing him with batons as well, regardless of size/strength difference. But tasers would have put him down. Good tasers cause a significant part of the musculature to lock up, and basically no amount drugs or emotion can overcome that. The downside is that tasers are significantly more lethal than pepper spray or a properly-handled baton (an improperly handled baton is more lethal than either).
Guns have their place, too, of course. Tasers are short-ranged, inaccurate, single-shot weapons. Handguns are longer-ranged, more accurate and carry lots of cartridges... though they're not as effective at instantly stopping people as tasers. Police really should have all of the above, *and* solid training in their use.
To anyone that thinks that swinging a fist is insufficient reason to shoot someone then I have a problem with that. A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 150 pound woman is lethal force in my mind.
A 200 pound man throwing a punch at a 200 pound man can be lethal as well. The human body is tough, but also has some crucial vulnerabilities. A lucky punch can be the end.
You don't see a problem with a single company controlling the entirety of the evidence collected by police cameras? In the cloud no less. Or the vendor lock-in for that matter?
I see no reason to expect either of those to happen. Yes, this company will probably buy itself a nice chunk of market share, but there's no reason to believe that competitors won't be able to enter.
The feminist movement has made it abundantly clear that women are competent and capable of success, and that they do not need men to provide for them or protect them.
So....there is nothing for me to do in response to this information. The women can take care of this problem themselves, without my help.
The second part does not follow from the first, because the first part is incomplete. What you should have said is:
The feminist movement has made it abundantly clear that women are competent and capable of success, and that they do not need men to provide for them or protect them, they only need a level playing field.
The problem is that the playing field is not, at present, level. Even when everyone is trying to be scrupulously fair, the system they're all operating in was designed and constructed in an era when women weren't in professional roles, and is therefore structured around typical male behavioral norms. It does not recognize that women are typically less assertive than men, for example. This doesn't make women inferior; in general women are somewhat more sensitive to interpersonal dynamics than men are and so can often significantly improve team dynamics. There is a lot of evidence that diverse teams perform better than homogeneous teams... so arguably (if your organization is already predominantly male), their differences make them more valuable to the company, not less.
But the systems were designed without women in mind. Therefore, women don't do as well as men. Duh.
Giving women a level playing field means that we need to alter hiring, promotion, compensation, etc., processes to take into account the typical differences between the genders. This also often benefits men who fall outside of the typical patterns.
But my main point is that there is something for you to do with this information. Open your eyes, educate yourself, and look for the ways in which the systems in which you operate are biased towards white male culture. Then find ways to fix them. The fixes are often simple, but often not obvious.
So women ask for less...and they get it.
Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.
So... women do worse in a system designed decades ago when there were no women in the professional workforce. That is, a system designed around male behavioral norms. Is anyone surprised by that?
The HR organization in my employer did an analysis a few years ago and found that while female engineers and male engineers of the same rank on the career ladder got paid the same (because the HR organization had previously worked hard to make it so), female engineers tended to be of lower rank. Looking more closely, they found that this was mostly caused by the fact that women nominated themselves for promotion at a lower rate. Promotion in my company is initiated by the employee seeking promotion, not by management. Promotion success rates for those who applied were equal or slightly higher for women, as were subsequent job performance ratings. In a followup study they interviewed randomly-selected high-performing engineers of both genders and found that the women were less assertive in all sorts of ways that seem clearly related to societal gender stereotypes -- and remember that this was a set of women working in a male-dominated field, and at the highest level of that field, so they were no shrinking violets.
The HR team attempted to counter this problem with a campaign to both encourage female engineers directly and -- what turned out to be more important -- to educate their managers to be more sensitive to the fact that women are often less assertive, and to actively counter that by regularly encouraging high-performing women to seek promotion. Within a year of initiating this program, they found that promotion application rates had equalized across the genders, with no effect on promotion success rates or subsequent job performance. In addition, they found that promotion application rates for both genders had risen (though women rose more). Subsequent analysis attributed that to managers also putting more effort into encouraging high-performing but non-assertive men.
The promo self-nomination process was designed with typical high-performing male behavioral patterns in mind, which turn out to be slightly different than typical high-performing female behavioral patterns. Nature or nurture, I don't know and don't care. The point is that the system was designed for men and that made it difficult for women to keep up. A slight alteration of the system fixed the problem and women are no longer at a disadvantage (not in that area, at least).
Have you seen it? It looks like any of the half-assed knock offs of the original Apple "Aqua" UI that were floating around the web ten years ago. Not an exact copy, but close enough to see what they were trying and failing to do.
-jcr
I have, and I thought was very easy to use and well thought-out. So far all you've said is you don't like the colors and the shapes of the widgets. Do you have any substantive criticisms?
Ok, ic u. But now your ISP buys that VPN-SP and suddenly the dots are connected, and sold. Or both sell their data to a commercial third party which connects the dots...
Again, selecting the VPN provider is an important part of the process. You need to find one that cares about security and privacy. Luckily, unlike with ISPs you can shop VPN providers worldwide and aren't limited to the small set that happen to operate in your neighborhood.
Sigh. I wasn't trotting out the old "I have nothing to hide" argument. Yes, that argument is flawed, and those flaws are the reason why it's important in principle to reign in the NSA.
My point was that that isn't the proximate risk. There's a much bigger and entirely non-theoretical risk in allowing ISPs to monitor connections that doesn't depend on the government deciding that middle-aged white guys need to be watched, and that's the risk that this thread is about, because that's the change that's in progress, in case you hadn't noticed. Whether or not ISPs can legally track you and sell the data has exactly zero impact on what the NSA may or may not do.
I doubt that even their apps that will attempt to copy Tesla's screen, will come close to it.
Copy? Of course not. Tesla's UI, while better than average for the auto industry, is far below Apple's standards.
-jcr
In what way, specifically?
RFID chips can be made as impossible to clone as smart cards. No, gaining access to the smart card contact pads won't help you in any way, neither will MITMing it.
IOW you're full of shit.
RFIDs are far simpler than Smart Cards, and a lot easier to clone.
Yes, and no.
There are multiple standards here. There is one set of standards which define devices that work like you say, and that set of standards is properly called RFID. However, there's also the contactless smart card protocols, which are often called NFC. Chips which implement those standards can come in virtually any form factor -- including implantable chips. That wasn't always the case, but antenna technology has advanced. The summary says these chips do NFC, which means that they technically are not RFID chips, though you'll never convince the press not to call them that.
You're thinking too local. The ISP maybe can not see what sites you visit, but your VPN-SP can. And the NSA totally can see both, and connect the dots.
Well, the whole point of having a VPN SP is to find one that will not keep track of information about you, sell it to other parties, etc.
As for the NSA, bah. What interest would they have in me? We're talking about ISPs selling user data to parties unknown for profit, which can lead to all sorts of actual badness that impacts normal people. While I think it's very important to reign in the NSA as a matter of principle, in practice whether or not they have our data sitting in a secure database somewhere has little to no impact on ordinary Americans. That Comcast may sell my browsing habits to all sorts of organizations who may misuse the data in ways that harm us, or leak it since they're likely much worse at security than the NSA, that's important in practice, not just in principle.
Through who? iirc all the other WiMAX carriers were smaller clearwire was the big one and afaik there aren't any others still operating.
My carrier is Rise Broadband, which used to operate under various names, including JAB Wireless, Digis, and others. They operate in 16 states.
I thought Clearwire was 4G, not WiMax (IEEE 802.16).
Hmm. Looking at some Wikipedia articles, it appears that there are two different standards, WiMax (802.16, which later gained the name "Fixed WiMax", when the mobile standard was created) and Mobile WiMax (802.16m). It seems you were talking about the latter, while I was talking about the former.
here are literally (old definition) hundreds of ways to encrypt communications and obscure the fact that they are even happening at all. You can encrypt to your heart's content, but your ISP has access to every single packet that flows over your connection, including where and when, even if they don't have immediate access to its contents. So, I'll stand by my use of the word "literally", thanks!
Fine. So my ISP will know that I send a large stream of encrypted packets to one host that is a known Virtual Public Network service provider. My ISP can know nothing about the sites those packets are ultimately destined for, nor anything about their content. My ISP can see how much data I'm sending and receiving, but that's all... and if I really want to it's even possible to hide that by sending/receiving lots of meaningless packets. With a little work (I suspect I'd have to write some custom software, since I don't think what I'm thinking of exists) I could arrange to send and receive a continuous stream of data at a constant rate, 24x7, only a fraction of which is actual traffic. There's probably not enough information implicit in traffic volumes to make that worth the effort, but it could be done.