Rather than offensive, the flag ought to be for 'lies, misrepresentations, and other deceptive content promoting prejudice'.
No, it shouldn't, because lies, misrepresentations and deceptions promoting prejudice aren't what Google wants to downrank. Google wants to downrank results that offend large numbers of people and therefore generate NY Times and Wall Street Journal headlines proclaiming that Google supports offensive idea X because the search engine's ranking algorithm happened to elevate a link supporting X in response to a query that is generally typed by people looking for links that support X.
So "upsetting-offensive" is exactly the right name for the flag.
In the process, of course, Google will generate new headlines about Google downranking holocaust denialism, and maybe another hot topic or two (but probably not). But the headlines won't be in the Times or the Journal, and number of people who will raise a stink about the issue is much smaller. Really, Google can't win here, but this strategy will irritate fewer people.
It's about time one of these tech giants gave back to internet community and taught us all how to think.
This has nothing to do with tech giants teaching you how to think.
This is just a corporation protecting itself from negative press. Returning holocaust denial links as top hits for holocaust-related searches generated a shitstorm of bad publicity for Google, so Google wants to minimize the chance that it will happen again.
Really, the root cause here is the people who don't understand how search engines work and think that Google's algorithms giving a high ranking to some site implies some Google support for the site. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people who don't understand technology than do.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but I'm definitely *not* speaking for Google. No one internally has told me anything about the rationale for this action, nor did I even hear about it until seeing this article. But I have spent nearly 30 years working for US corporations, so I know a little about the thought processes that lead pragmatism to override ideology/culture (Google's ideology is strongly pro free-speech and anti-censorship)).
Have you tried a device with USB-C? I found that most of the aggravation of plugging my phone in was due to the orientation-dependence and general fussiness of micro-USB connectors. I used to have a wireless charger, but I find USB-C connectors are so easy to plug in that I don't feel a significant loss in convenience vs putting my phone on the charging stand.
I also find that very fast charging and decent battery life mitigate the issue. I don't charge my phone at night any more. I just plug it in when I'm in the car; 20-30 minutes a couple of times per day is sufficient, so I rarely think about charging at all. My phone is a Pixel XL.
First stage is denial. You've got about 7 good years left, then you will be deemed not cool and he'll rebel the next 7 years. Then he'll be right back after you cover his huge college bill and need you a good deal longer.
My oldest child is 24 and my youngest 15, so I've been through all of that, and in fact much more parental challenge than is normal... and I still agree with Ogive17. Being a parent is awesome. Hard, absolutely, occasionally heartrending and frustrating, but those who skip it aren't gaining 18 years, they're losing the richest experiences life offers.
compared to the 70's, the environment has been fixed
Yes and no. Air and water quality is dramatically better. Many threatened species have recovered. Our roads, forests and parks are much cleaner. Younger slashdotters probably don't remember the amount of garbage we used to have lying around all over on the sides of roads, etc.; anti-littering advertising and enforcement, and adopt-a-road programs have made it much better. I recall a time in the 70s where I could make $2 ($9 in 2017 dollars) per hour walking down the highway collecting aluminum cans for recycling. It was good money for a kid. Partly that was because the price of aluminum was relatively high, but mostly it was because I could easily fill many large garbage bags with cans every hour, they were so thick on the ground.
So, locally, where it's fairly easy, the environment has been fixed.
On the other hand, global warming's effects are likely to be significant, and reversing that trend is much more difficult both because the causes are global and the problem has been most of a century in the making. You don't turn a supertanker on a dime, no matter how much you want to. Heavy metal levels in fish stocks are a local-ish problem, but one that's widespread and very hard to combat since even if we managed to stop all release into the water, the already-released metals will continue cycling through the ecosystem for a long time. Aquifer depletion is another local-ish problem that was created over a decades and will not be corrected quickly or easily, since the aquifers may take millenia to refill. Most likely we'll just have to stop relying on well water in many areas and find alternative sources.
I don't think we're facing anything remotely close to an insoluble problem, though. Some stuff we'll have to work around or adapt to, other stuff we'll find ways to fix.
The global population problem is well on its way to being solved -- annual global births per year has been declining for a while now, so while we're still experiencing population growth due to the "filling out" of the age brackets (the global population still skews quite young), unless something happens to change current trends we should never have to deal with more than about 10B people, and it's quite clear that we can feed and house that many with existing technology, much less the improvements coming. And since it seems to be wealth and education that is causing the declining birth rate, and both of those are trending upward globally, it's more likely that the current trends will accelerate, not reverse.
The coming wave of automation promises to make the human race as a whole dramatically wealthier, and at the same time we're learning how to apply that wealth to enable a high standard of living with less resource consumption and lower environmental impact. The same automation may pose serious challenges to our economic structures, but the rising tide lifting all boats will serve to offset a lot of it, and with some judicious reallocation (e.g. Universal Basic Income) we should be able to address the most severe of the problems.
Honestly, I think there's no more -- and probably much less -- value to the notion that bringing kids into the world is a bad idea than there was in the 70s. I understand that people whose own lives are not going well feel that way, and I understand that my own relatively privileged position (making decent money, doing what I love, living where I want -- though I have my share of challenges, too, mostly related to my kids) and my naturally optimistic disposition makes me feel quite differently. Still, on balance, and trying to be as coldly analytical and data-based as possible, I really think the world is as good a place for humans as it has ever been, and expect it to continue improving. It'll even survive Trump, I think, and he'll teach us some important lessons.
I, personally, will not be bringing any more children into the world. I'm expecting to become a grandfather this summer, t
Choosing not to sell the Alibaba stake and invest the money in trying to grow Yahoo! was good management.
Throw away the money, you mean. I don't call that good management. Neither is Yahoo in the business of stock speculation.
Yahoo! is in the business of generating value for shareholders. Whatever is legal and effective. I do agree that trying to invest the money in growing Yahoo! would have been throwing it away.
The old GOP is still authoritarian. But the newer GOP are much more "pro-gay marraige, get the government out of your bedroom / life."
Which "newer GOP" is that? Trump's? Because Trump's GOP is taking a hard turn towards authoritarianism. Sure, he doesn't care about gay marriage, but he's all for silencing the press and any other sort of dissent, wants to massively expand the police state (mostly, but not entirely, in the name of fighting illegal immigration), is happy to use government power to lean on any private business he doesn't approve of, etc. He doesn't care about your bedroom primarily because he doesn't want anyone looking too closely at his bedroom, not because he actually believes in liberty.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so.
Maybe not useless in principle but in reality it almost certainly is.
The small sample size and resulting large margin of error does not make the result useless in principle or in reality.
The margin of error is not independent of the sample selection
Certainly not. That was my whole point: it's selection process that matters. Small sample sizes can be perfectly valid.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
It's only a 14% margin of error if the population sample was selected properly. If it wasn't then the actual margin of error is far larger.
We surveyed 100 parents (50 Netflix-only homes, 50 normal television homes),
So an incredibly non-scientific tiny sample size, not at all representative of the population at large.
How do you know it was a non-scientific (or, more precisely, non-representative) sample? The sample size has nothing to do with whether the sample is representative of the population at large. Representativeness is all about the sample selection process.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so. In this case, (assuming good sampling), the margin of error for a 95% confidence interval is 11%, so there's a 95% chance that the true percentage of Netflix-only kids under 10 that don't know what a commercial is lies between 71% and 93%. If you wanted to tighten that down to a 5% margin of error, you'd need a sample size of 227 (assuming a skewed response rate like 82/18. A more conservative analysis that doesn't make that assumption yields a required sample size of 385).
Note that all of this is independent of the size of the population at large, unless the population in question is quite small (For example, suppose you assumed nothing about the responses, and wanted a 5% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval. If your total population is 10, you need to ask all of them. If your population is 100, you need to ask 80. But of 1,000, you only need to ask 278. Of 10,000, ask 370. Of 100,000, ask 383. Of 1,000,000, ask 384. Of any larger number, 1.1M to any size at all, you only need to ask 385 people chosen in an unbiased fashion.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
Note that I'm not claiming this sample is representative. That's a separate question that can only be addressed by carefully examining the selection process, which would presumably require reading TFA, at a minimum. I'm happy to spend several minutes calculating various margins of error and required sample sizes, but reading the article is too much.
My favorite show as a kid was The Transformers. If we're to be honest it was first and foremost a half hour commercial for the Hasbro toy line. This is nothing new.
The reason Pebbles, daughter of Fred and Wilma Flinstone, was a girl rather than a boy was because the producer noted that girl dolls sell better than boy dolls. That was 1962. There's nothing new here.
The people in the first and third lines of your play are not only not the same people, they're opponents. The people in the third line may be called prosecutors, but the people in the first line are not.
But Asimov blandly ignored the obvious fact that there is no known way to implement such laws, which incorporate high-level abstract notions and moral principles.
He didn't ignore that, he simply assumed that it would become possible in the future -- and extensively explored the ways in which it could still go wrong, showing that even with that nonexistent technology, the seemingly foolproof Laws of Robotics were anything but foolproof.
Under Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! generated a 21% annual growth rate in market value, beating Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones. I should point out that those companies also pay dividends, but they're all in the 1-2% range, so the dividend payouts don't change the results.
demolish share value
Yahoo! stock was trading at $15.92 when Mayer became CEO, and is at $46.25 today. There have been splits, so those numbers can be compared directly.
dude your math, it sucks
Are you sure about that?
Full disclosure: When I looked up the numbers this morning I expected to see a crash and burn story... but that's decidedly not what happened.
$23 million for hammering the nails in the coffin. Cushy job.
21% annualized growth in market cap is hardly "hammering the nails in the coffin". Mayer's Yahoo! beat the NASDAQ Composite, S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices. It also beat Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. It did lose to Amazon and Google, but that's hardly a sign of abject failure.
And... they break such laws regularly, with impunity, so it's a moot point.
If you get asked such questions in a job interview and don't get the job, you have an excellent case for an employment discrimination suit. The laws in question have civil remedies, not criminal, so it's up to the employment candidate to file suit and recover the penalty. It happens regularly, which is why every company I've done interviews at has given me specific training on what questions may not be asked during interviews.
It's all but certain that a defense contractor is contractually obligated to perform all security-related work on site in appropriately-secured offices, which would imply that no work can be performed from home
Well, except most night/weekend work would probably be unclassified things like conference calls and status reports.
Even assuming it's true that night/weekend work would be conference calls and status reports, why would discussions about classified work be unclassified? Also, I'd expect that night/weekend work would be more about urgent fixes to production issues.
if the statement about the supervisor saying he was OK with the situation is true
Oops, I somehow missed that statement in the summary. That does paint a different picture, if true. Given that competent cryptographers are not thick on the ground (and while I couldn't name any of his work off the top of my head, I have heard the man's name before, so he's not a nobody), plus all of the negative publicity, BAE may have a new opening in HR...
TFS: "Davis explained that his wife had late-stage cancer. He would work his full work day in the office, but if he was needed nights or weekends, he'd want to work from home. His supervisor was fine with it, but the human resources department fired him on the spot after four hours of employment."
What part of that leads you to believe that his work couldn't be performed from home?
BAE Systems is a defense contractor and Davis' area of expertise is cryptography. It's all but certain that a defense contractor is contractually obligated to perform all security-related work on site in appropriately-secured offices, which would imply that no work can be performed from home, and Davis' job as a cryptographer is all about security. It's also very likely that the company's policies require the same, regardless of contractual requirements. Never mind that cryptographic security should absolutely not depend on secrecy... the contracts/policies don't make that distinction.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Mr. Davis, but it is important to remember that we're only hearing one side of the story, and that's the story as presented by Mr. Davis' attorney, whose job is to put the strongest possible spin on the facts, without actually lying. Attorneys are very good at that.
HR departments in large corporations are typically not intimately familiar with the detailed requirements of a particular position, while the employee's supervisor certainly is.
I fail to see the relevance, unless you're assuming that all hiring is done by HR with no involvement of the hiring department (which does happen in some particularly stupid companies, but not many).
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than offensive, the flag ought to be for 'lies, misrepresentations, and other deceptive content promoting prejudice'.
No, it shouldn't, because lies, misrepresentations and deceptions promoting prejudice aren't what Google wants to downrank. Google wants to downrank results that offend large numbers of people and therefore generate NY Times and Wall Street Journal headlines proclaiming that Google supports offensive idea X because the search engine's ranking algorithm happened to elevate a link supporting X in response to a query that is generally typed by people looking for links that support X.
So "upsetting-offensive" is exactly the right name for the flag.
In the process, of course, Google will generate new headlines about Google downranking holocaust denialism, and maybe another hot topic or two (but probably not). But the headlines won't be in the Times or the Journal, and number of people who will raise a stink about the issue is much smaller. Really, Google can't win here, but this strategy will irritate fewer people.
It's about time one of these tech giants gave back to internet community and taught us all how to think.
This has nothing to do with tech giants teaching you how to think.
This is just a corporation protecting itself from negative press. Returning holocaust denial links as top hits for holocaust-related searches generated a shitstorm of bad publicity for Google, so Google wants to minimize the chance that it will happen again.
Really, the root cause here is the people who don't understand how search engines work and think that Google's algorithms giving a high ranking to some site implies some Google support for the site. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people who don't understand technology than do.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but I'm definitely *not* speaking for Google. No one internally has told me anything about the rationale for this action, nor did I even hear about it until seeing this article. But I have spent nearly 30 years working for US corporations, so I know a little about the thought processes that lead pragmatism to override ideology/culture (Google's ideology is strongly pro free-speech and anti-censorship)).
Isn't this just Zeno's paradox applied to really good fridges?
It would be if each additional half-distance traveled required more work and more time than was expended to travel the first half.
But, frankly the most surprising aspect of this research is that the stress of childrearing doesn't seem to take years off one's life!
No doubt!
Yes, it is important. Primarily convenience.
Have you tried a device with USB-C? I found that most of the aggravation of plugging my phone in was due to the orientation-dependence and general fussiness of micro-USB connectors. I used to have a wireless charger, but I find USB-C connectors are so easy to plug in that I don't feel a significant loss in convenience vs putting my phone on the charging stand.
I also find that very fast charging and decent battery life mitigate the issue. I don't charge my phone at night any more. I just plug it in when I'm in the car; 20-30 minutes a couple of times per day is sufficient, so I rarely think about charging at all. My phone is a Pixel XL.
First stage is denial. You've got about 7 good years left, then you will be deemed not cool and he'll rebel the next 7 years. Then he'll be right back after you cover his huge college bill and need you a good deal longer.
My oldest child is 24 and my youngest 15, so I've been through all of that, and in fact much more parental challenge than is normal... and I still agree with Ogive17. Being a parent is awesome. Hard, absolutely, occasionally heartrending and frustrating, but those who skip it aren't gaining 18 years, they're losing the richest experiences life offers.
compared to the 70's, the environment has been fixed
Yes and no. Air and water quality is dramatically better. Many threatened species have recovered. Our roads, forests and parks are much cleaner. Younger slashdotters probably don't remember the amount of garbage we used to have lying around all over on the sides of roads, etc.; anti-littering advertising and enforcement, and adopt-a-road programs have made it much better. I recall a time in the 70s where I could make $2 ($9 in 2017 dollars) per hour walking down the highway collecting aluminum cans for recycling. It was good money for a kid. Partly that was because the price of aluminum was relatively high, but mostly it was because I could easily fill many large garbage bags with cans every hour, they were so thick on the ground.
So, locally, where it's fairly easy, the environment has been fixed.
On the other hand, global warming's effects are likely to be significant, and reversing that trend is much more difficult both because the causes are global and the problem has been most of a century in the making. You don't turn a supertanker on a dime, no matter how much you want to. Heavy metal levels in fish stocks are a local-ish problem, but one that's widespread and very hard to combat since even if we managed to stop all release into the water, the already-released metals will continue cycling through the ecosystem for a long time. Aquifer depletion is another local-ish problem that was created over a decades and will not be corrected quickly or easily, since the aquifers may take millenia to refill. Most likely we'll just have to stop relying on well water in many areas and find alternative sources.
I don't think we're facing anything remotely close to an insoluble problem, though. Some stuff we'll have to work around or adapt to, other stuff we'll find ways to fix.
The global population problem is well on its way to being solved -- annual global births per year has been declining for a while now, so while we're still experiencing population growth due to the "filling out" of the age brackets (the global population still skews quite young), unless something happens to change current trends we should never have to deal with more than about 10B people, and it's quite clear that we can feed and house that many with existing technology, much less the improvements coming. And since it seems to be wealth and education that is causing the declining birth rate, and both of those are trending upward globally, it's more likely that the current trends will accelerate, not reverse.
The coming wave of automation promises to make the human race as a whole dramatically wealthier, and at the same time we're learning how to apply that wealth to enable a high standard of living with less resource consumption and lower environmental impact. The same automation may pose serious challenges to our economic structures, but the rising tide lifting all boats will serve to offset a lot of it, and with some judicious reallocation (e.g. Universal Basic Income) we should be able to address the most severe of the problems.
Honestly, I think there's no more -- and probably much less -- value to the notion that bringing kids into the world is a bad idea than there was in the 70s. I understand that people whose own lives are not going well feel that way, and I understand that my own relatively privileged position (making decent money, doing what I love, living where I want -- though I have my share of challenges, too, mostly related to my kids) and my naturally optimistic disposition makes me feel quite differently. Still, on balance, and trying to be as coldly analytical and data-based as possible, I really think the world is as good a place for humans as it has ever been, and expect it to continue improving. It'll even survive Trump, I think, and he'll teach us some important lessons.
I, personally, will not be bringing any more children into the world. I'm expecting to become a grandfather this summer, t
If you've got an iPhone, why would you want an iPhone knock-off?
To take your iPhone to the next level: Android!
Choosing not to sell the Alibaba stake and invest the money in trying to grow Yahoo! was good management.
Throw away the money, you mean. I don't call that good management. Neither is Yahoo in the business of stock speculation.
Yahoo! is in the business of generating value for shareholders. Whatever is legal and effective. I do agree that trying to invest the money in growing Yahoo! would have been throwing it away.
The old GOP is still authoritarian. But the newer GOP are much more "pro-gay marraige, get the government out of your bedroom / life."
Which "newer GOP" is that? Trump's? Because Trump's GOP is taking a hard turn towards authoritarianism. Sure, he doesn't care about gay marriage, but he's all for silencing the press and any other sort of dissent, wants to massively expand the police state (mostly, but not entirely, in the name of fighting illegal immigration), is happy to use government power to lean on any private business he doesn't approve of, etc. He doesn't care about your bedroom primarily because he doesn't want anyone looking too closely at his bedroom, not because he actually believes in liberty.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so.
Maybe not useless in principle but in reality it almost certainly is.
The small sample size and resulting large margin of error does not make the result useless in principle or in reality.
The margin of error is not independent of the sample selection
Certainly not. That was my whole point: it's selection process that matters. Small sample sizes can be perfectly valid.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
It's only a 14% margin of error if the population sample was selected properly. If it wasn't then the actual margin of error is far larger.
Note the text I bolded.
We surveyed 100 parents (50 Netflix-only homes, 50 normal television homes),
So an incredibly non-scientific tiny sample size, not at all representative of the population at large.
How do you know it was a non-scientific (or, more precisely, non-representative) sample? The sample size has nothing to do with whether the sample is representative of the population at large. Representativeness is all about the sample selection process.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so. In this case, (assuming good sampling), the margin of error for a 95% confidence interval is 11%, so there's a 95% chance that the true percentage of Netflix-only kids under 10 that don't know what a commercial is lies between 71% and 93%. If you wanted to tighten that down to a 5% margin of error, you'd need a sample size of 227 (assuming a skewed response rate like 82/18. A more conservative analysis that doesn't make that assumption yields a required sample size of 385).
Note that all of this is independent of the size of the population at large, unless the population in question is quite small (For example, suppose you assumed nothing about the responses, and wanted a 5% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval. If your total population is 10, you need to ask all of them. If your population is 100, you need to ask 80. But of 1,000, you only need to ask 278. Of 10,000, ask 370. Of 100,000, ask 383. Of 1,000,000, ask 384. Of any larger number, 1.1M to any size at all, you only need to ask 385 people chosen in an unbiased fashion.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
Note that I'm not claiming this sample is representative. That's a separate question that can only be addressed by carefully examining the selection process, which would presumably require reading TFA, at a minimum. I'm happy to spend several minutes calculating various margins of error and required sample sizes, but reading the article is too much.
My favorite show as a kid was The Transformers. If we're to be honest it was first and foremost a half hour commercial for the Hasbro toy line. This is nothing new.
The reason Pebbles, daughter of Fred and Wilma Flinstone, was a girl rather than a boy was because the producer noted that girl dolls sell better than boy dolls. That was 1962. There's nothing new here.
The people in the first and third lines of your play are not only not the same people, they're opponents. The people in the third line may be called prosecutors, but the people in the first line are not.
But Asimov blandly ignored the obvious fact that there is no known way to implement such laws, which incorporate high-level abstract notions and moral principles.
He didn't ignore that, he simply assumed that it would become possible in the future -- and extensively explored the ways in which it could still go wrong, showing that even with that nonexistent technology, the seemingly foolproof Laws of Robotics were anything but foolproof.
That is entirely about Yahoo's windfall stake in Alibaba and has nothing whatsoever to do with good management by Marissa Mayer
Choosing not to sell the Alibaba stake and invest the money in trying to grow Yahoo! was good management.
You have to check more than just share price, you have to check for stock splits and such.
https://www.stocksplithistory.com/yahoo/
Last split was in 2004.
I did the numbers, here.
Under Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! generated a 21% annual growth rate in market value, beating Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Dow Jones. I should point out that those companies also pay dividends, but they're all in the 1-2% range, so the dividend payouts don't change the results.
demolish share value
Yahoo! stock was trading at $15.92 when Mayer became CEO, and is at $46.25 today. There have been splits, so those numbers can be compared directly.
dude your math, it sucks
Are you sure about that?
Full disclosure: When I looked up the numbers this morning I expected to see a crash and burn story... but that's decidedly not what happened.
$23 million for hammering the nails in the coffin. Cushy job.
21% annualized growth in market cap is hardly "hammering the nails in the coffin". Mayer's Yahoo! beat the NASDAQ Composite, S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices. It also beat Apple, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. It did lose to Amazon and Google, but that's hardly a sign of abject failure.
And... they break such laws regularly, with impunity, so it's a moot point.
If you get asked such questions in a job interview and don't get the job, you have an excellent case for an employment discrimination suit. The laws in question have civil remedies, not criminal, so it's up to the employment candidate to file suit and recover the penalty. It happens regularly, which is why every company I've done interviews at has given me specific training on what questions may not be asked during interviews.
Well, except most night/weekend work would probably be unclassified things like conference calls and status reports.
Even assuming it's true that night/weekend work would be conference calls and status reports, why would discussions about classified work be unclassified? Also, I'd expect that night/weekend work would be more about urgent fixes to production issues.
if the statement about the supervisor saying he was OK with the situation is true
Oops, I somehow missed that statement in the summary. That does paint a different picture, if true. Given that competent cryptographers are not thick on the ground (and while I couldn't name any of his work off the top of my head, I have heard the man's name before, so he's not a nobody), plus all of the negative publicity, BAE may have a new opening in HR...
Your reply doesn't match the message you are replying to.
Well, yours doesn't, anyway.
15 years who?
From the post 110010001000 replied to: "I worked at BAE for almost fifteen years"
What hospital?
From the post 110010001000 replied to: "I saw them fire a guy for leaving work to go to the hospital when his mom had just had a heart attack."
Did something get deleted?
Not from what I see.
TFS: "Davis explained that his wife had late-stage cancer. He would work his full work day in the office, but if he was needed nights or weekends, he'd want to work from home. His supervisor was fine with it, but the human resources department fired him on the spot after four hours of employment."
What part of that leads you to believe that his work couldn't be performed from home?
BAE Systems is a defense contractor and Davis' area of expertise is cryptography. It's all but certain that a defense contractor is contractually obligated to perform all security-related work on site in appropriately-secured offices, which would imply that no work can be performed from home, and Davis' job as a cryptographer is all about security. It's also very likely that the company's policies require the same, regardless of contractual requirements. Never mind that cryptographic security should absolutely not depend on secrecy... the contracts/policies don't make that distinction.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Mr. Davis, but it is important to remember that we're only hearing one side of the story, and that's the story as presented by Mr. Davis' attorney, whose job is to put the strongest possible spin on the facts, without actually lying. Attorneys are very good at that.
HR departments in large corporations are typically not intimately familiar with the detailed requirements of a particular position, while the employee's supervisor certainly is.
I fail to see the relevance, unless you're assuming that all hiring is done by HR with no involvement of the hiring department (which does happen in some particularly stupid companies, but not many).
Your assumption is noted and is also wrong.
What the AC said about employment law is true. It is illegal for companies in the US to ask about such things.