Gardening is a much higher risk job then being a cop. Roofing and fishing is another league completely.
When it comes to death/injury rates, yes. Psychologically speaking, definitely no. There is a distinct difference between dealing with passive inanimate hazards and hostile people. Lawnmowers do not come to life and attack gardeners except in bad movie adaptations of Stephen King stories.
Sounds like you're never going to find out, because it can't exist. In your closed-minded model, at least.
This is precisely the point of diversity - you find stuff out from unexpected viewpoints. How the fuck will you find out IF there's such a viewpoint bias unless you seek out different viewpoints?
The problem with your assertion is that there are many many more variables than you could ever hope to ensure diversity on. It's one thing to notice an unexpected impact of a variable on an outcome from an unsifted sample. It's an entirely different thing to spend time and effort ensuring a spread on a variable ("seeking out" diversity) when there is no logical reason why that variable should make a difference. Time and effort being finite, you have to pick the variables that you have a good reason to think will change things -- and you provide no reason why we would be more likely to get unexpected viewpoints about an abstract topic like programming if we have a diverse sample of race or gender than if we have a diverse sample of shoe size, color preference, birth month, blood pressure, favorite beverage, or any of a thousand other things.
Note that we're not talking about fairness to the people in the sample, here. You're the one asserting there is some benefit to the overall discussion above and beyond that. The onus is on you to explain why one should care more about having a proper mix of men and women more than about having a proper mix of coffee drinkers and tea drinkers.
Shouldn't a conference be about the technology, not the people speaking about the technology?
Precisely. Why, exactly, would there be a black vs. white or male vs. female perspective when it comes to a programming language? Do men prefer having function parameters passed by reference and women prefer having them passed by value, or something?
For instance, one savvy user noticed that current piracy legislation could mistakenly leave a person who owns a domain name legally responsible for the actions of the website administrator (the equivalent of holding a landlord responsible if his tenant was growing pot in the backyard).
Actually, that can happen (at least in the US) due to asset forfeiture laws. The landlord won't be held criminally liable, but his property can be confiscated. The property itself will be prosecuted for aiding in the commission of a crime, fx. "State of Massachusetts vs. 123 S. Main Street." No, I am not joking. Even more bizarre things have happened, including a case (back in the 90s when I was following this more closely) where a car jointly owned by a married couple was seized when the husband was caught having sex with a prostitute in it. The wife had no recourse and received no compensation, even though she had no idea her husband was doing this. How easily this can happen varies from state to state; some states have better protection against it than others.
It's possible that there are specific problems in this case (someone else on the thread mentioned liver flukes being a danger), but the general "oh no, they're growing things with shit!" reaction is silly. People who buy organic produce pay a premium to have their food grown using shit, a.k.a. "natural fertilizers." Either it's the more obvious kind (farm animal or similar manure), or it's compost -- which is just worm and bacteria manure from digesting plant matter, mixed with the bits that didn't get eaten.
Heck, alcohol is basically the waste product of yeast cells digesting sugars.
Again, I'm taking issue with the overall "eww" reaction, not this specific instance. I don't want feces in my food directly, but whenever we eat something that was alive, feces was consumed somewhere along its food chain. I don't want to eat rotting carrion, either, but the vegetables I ate today probably drew nourishment from a little bit of it, even if it was only dead earthworms or insects.
"Have you noticed, that humans and Neanderthals are still having sex?
All the denouncement had absolutely no effect.
Parents and counselors constantly scorn them,
But humans and Neanderthals are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them."
Haven't see it yet, but isn't that sort of the whole premise of The Hunger Games?
Good point, hadn't thought of that. Haven't seen it either, but after a brief bit of research, it seems like the movie version upped the age of most of the younger characters. At least, most of the adolescent characters are played by people in their early twenties, and the pre-adolescent characters are played by adolescents. I suppose they could do likewise with Ender's Game, but then they'd be ditching the contrast between age and intelligence -- all of the kids are supposed to be incredible geniuses just by virtue of being picked for the Battle School, with Ender being a genius among geniuses, smarter than his own parents when he's just six. The older you make the kids, the less impressive that aspect is.
While the IRG as a whole is not the "special forces" of Iran, one of its sub-formations (the Quds Force) is. The job of the regular Iranian military is to defend Iran, while the IRG is there to "defend the revolution" -- i.e. to maintain the Islamic rulers in power against both external and internal threats.
And the only reason you hate Obama is because he's black.
You honestly believe that? You really think that everyone who opposes Obama would be just fine with him if he were Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, or Al Franken? Or that, conversely, they'd vote for those guys rather than Condi Rice or Allen West?
It's not as if I agreed with Obama back when he was a white guy named Jimmy Carter.
Iranians are not Arabs, but they are almost purelyMuslim. 89-90% Shi'ite Muslim, 9% Sunni Muslim, and 0.4-2% all other religions. That doesn't leave much room for atheists and agnostics!
It's not so much of a question of what religion you are, but how big of a factor that is in your decision making, and how much it impacts your opinion and behavior towards other people, especially violent behavior. For example, prior to the revolution, none of my female Iranian relatives in my dad's generation (what would be "baby-boomers" in the US) wore head coverings at all, and even those in my grandmother's generation only wore headscarves, not chadors (the black tent-like things). Most of the men drank about as much alcohol (a no-no for Muslims) as the average American male of their age. They didn't object to kids celebrating "chaharshanbe suri", a Zoroastrian fire festival thing that a lot of the mullahs have tried to ban (the situation has similarities with fundamentalist Christians in the US objecting to Halloween). Yet pretty much all of them were believing Muslims, and most of the older ones had performed their pilgrimage to Mecca at some point in their lives.
Also note that apostate Muslims (those who leave the faith) are subject to the death penalty in Iran -- and you're considered Muslim if you were brought up as one. Things like that tend interfere with accurate information gathering. You don't answer "atheist" if you're afraid that your answer won't stay secret and you'll wind up in front of a judge trying to explain the difference between that answer and the fact that you always used to attend services with your parents at the local mosque.
Do you have any sympathy for those that were killed by the army of crazy?
If you had the power to not release that video, and the knowledge that the people would die, would you have saved their lives by not uploading the video?
I would save their lives by warning them to be armed to the teeth and prepared to turn the army of crazy into an army of corpses. Anyone who reacts to an expression of opinion by resorting to violence deserves no less, and the rest of the world deserves better than to have to live in danger because of them.
This video is the very essence of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and causing a panic.
Ummm... no. That involves making people believe there is an immediate physical threat. Their reaction to get out of the theater is a perfectly reasonable one, but they need to not panic and exit in an orderly way. The problem with the people attacking the embassies is that they did it at all, not that they didn't draw up into orderly ranks and carry out the assault with proper discipline.
How would this play in the media if some guy in Saudi Arabia trolled a bunch of bible thumpers or skinheads into something horrible?
Actually, I expect the media would be much more enthusiastic about criticizing the beliefs of those involved. But it's much less likely that there would be that reaction. Not impossible, just much less likely. Did Christians around the world burn down embassies in response to The DaVinci Code? I believe there was one significant act of violence (in France, not usually known for its "Bible thumpers") during the run of The Last Temptation of Christ -- after huge amounts of news coverage and advertising. I don't recall any "we have to censor this or the Christians will kill people!" hysteria. And that's as it should be.
Beyond the principle of freedom of speech in this specific instance, you're also overlooking the long-term incentive of what you espouse. If people can get things censored by resorting to violence, then the message you're sending is "if you want something censored, get violent." By giving in to one religious group's violent demands for censorship, you're telling every other religious group that if they remain well-behaved they can be mocked, but if they break out the torches they can shut up their critics.
I would love for you to educate me on how Jews are insidiously infiltrating and controlling world politics considering the number of stone-age countries with outright mandates on Israel's destruction.
Please explain to me how Jews control the US economy (have you seen the US economy? whomever is in control is doing a crappy job).
I would love for you to explain to me how you came to the conclusion that is it the Jewish destiny to dominate the world militarily (seeing as Jews make up a tiny fraction of the world population)...
Reminds me of an old joke. Two elderly Jewish guys are enjoying a sunny day in the park, sitting on a bench reading two different newspapers. The first guy is reading the New York Times, and after a while he looks over, curious to see what the second guy is reading. To his horror, he sees that it's some sort of Neo-Nazi publication. "How in the world can you stand to read that kind of garbage?" he asks in shock. The second guy smiles and says, "When I read your paper, it's 'Recession, war, crime, disaster.' But when I read this, it's 'Jews run the banks, Jews run the government, Jews run Hollywood...'"
On the subject of "permutations", that brings to mind one particular kind of problem: patents being issued for a specific instantiation of an already-documented abstraction. For example, a few years ago there was a patent dispute (involving RIM, I think) where the patent was basically "sending email over a wireless connection." But a major point of the OSI and TCP/IP layer models is that the implementation of a given layer isn't supposed to care (or even know) about the implementation of another layer. IMAP at the Application layer doesn't care whether the Physical layer is 802.11n, RS-232, DOCSIS, or 1000BASE-T, while 802.11n at the Physical layer doesn't care whether the Application layer is IMAP, HTTP, or FTP. The layer models intentionally include the idea of plugging things into the various layers independently, so while you might be able to patent the thing you're plugging in, you should not be able to patent what things you plug in. The layer models should be considered "prior art" against any attempt to patent a specific combination of layer implementations. Or to put it differently, if there already exists a thing designed to be flexed in any direction, you shouldn't be able to patent flexing it in some specific direction. The same thing that goes for communications layer models goes for any sort of layer, framework, or similar abstraction.
Basically, at least as far as high tech is concerned, the patent system has morphed from its original "encourage inventors to share and explain their inventions in exchange for a short period of official monopoly" to a legally-empowered version of "I call dibs on that." Rather than developing something and patenting the result, people are observing trends, anticipating where things will go, and patenting that. Sometimes (such as with Apple) they proceed to actually develop something, and other times (as with patent trolls) they just wait to cash in. But in either case, the patent boils down to "I was the first person to tell the Patent Office that things were moving in this direction."
A question, in all seriousness, to any Russians in the audience: does Putin doing these sorts of stunts actually increase his appeal to voters (I presume that's why he wants publicity of him doing these things), or is the reaction more along the lines of "there goes Putin, making himself look macho again"? Obviously national leaders have hobbies, just like anyone else does, but he's racked up a long list. Sometimes it seems like he's trying to get himself into Mountain Dew commercials.
You're right that intent may be considered, but re taking part vs just wanting to make trouble, you're standing in the minority in your interpretation of the moderation options.
I'm not making an interpretation, I'm pointing to the exact text of the FAQ. I'll quote it again: "Flamebait: Comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage." Note the word "purpose" in there. As to my standing in the minority, I'm reminded of an Abraham Lincoln quote:
"How many legs does a dog have, if we agree to call a tail a leg?"
"Five."
"Four. Calling a tail a leg, doesn't make it so."
What you are doing is, essentially, treating "-1, Flamebait" as if it means "-1, Not Insightful", and that's not what it means.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure you don't mean the Unthinking Depths?
Gardening is a much higher risk job then being a cop. Roofing and fishing is another league completely.
When it comes to death/injury rates, yes. Psychologically speaking, definitely no. There is a distinct difference between dealing with passive inanimate hazards and hostile people. Lawnmowers do not come to life and attack gardeners except in bad movie adaptations of Stephen King stories.
Sounds like you're never going to find out, because it can't exist. In your closed-minded model, at least.
This is precisely the point of diversity - you find stuff out from unexpected viewpoints. How the fuck will you find out IF there's such a viewpoint bias unless you seek out different viewpoints?
The problem with your assertion is that there are many many more variables than you could ever hope to ensure diversity on. It's one thing to notice an unexpected impact of a variable on an outcome from an unsifted sample. It's an entirely different thing to spend time and effort ensuring a spread on a variable ("seeking out" diversity) when there is no logical reason why that variable should make a difference. Time and effort being finite, you have to pick the variables that you have a good reason to think will change things -- and you provide no reason why we would be more likely to get unexpected viewpoints about an abstract topic like programming if we have a diverse sample of race or gender than if we have a diverse sample of shoe size, color preference, birth month, blood pressure, favorite beverage, or any of a thousand other things.
Note that we're not talking about fairness to the people in the sample, here. You're the one asserting there is some benefit to the overall discussion above and beyond that. The onus is on you to explain why one should care more about having a proper mix of men and women more than about having a proper mix of coffee drinkers and tea drinkers.
Shouldn't a conference be about the technology, not the people speaking about the technology?
Precisely. Why, exactly, would there be a black vs. white or male vs. female perspective when it comes to a programming language? Do men prefer having function parameters passed by reference and women prefer having them passed by value, or something?
If only this had happened 34 years ago...
Given the accumulation of annoyances in Skype since MS acquired it (the whole ads thing, for instance) I expected they'd bought it to kill it.
For instance, one savvy user noticed that current piracy legislation could mistakenly leave a person who owns a domain name legally responsible for the actions of the website administrator (the equivalent of holding a landlord responsible if his tenant was growing pot in the backyard).
Actually, that can happen (at least in the US) due to asset forfeiture laws. The landlord won't be held criminally liable, but his property can be confiscated. The property itself will be prosecuted for aiding in the commission of a crime, fx. "State of Massachusetts vs. 123 S. Main Street." No, I am not joking. Even more bizarre things have happened, including a case (back in the 90s when I was following this more closely) where a car jointly owned by a married couple was seized when the husband was caught having sex with a prostitute in it. The wife had no recourse and received no compensation, even though she had no idea her husband was doing this. How easily this can happen varies from state to state; some states have better protection against it than others.
Here come the baby elephants.
It's possible that there are specific problems in this case (someone else on the thread mentioned liver flukes being a danger), but the general "oh no, they're growing things with shit!" reaction is silly. People who buy organic produce pay a premium to have their food grown using shit, a.k.a. "natural fertilizers." Either it's the more obvious kind (farm animal or similar manure), or it's compost -- which is just worm and bacteria manure from digesting plant matter, mixed with the bits that didn't get eaten.
Heck, alcohol is basically the waste product of yeast cells digesting sugars.
Again, I'm taking issue with the overall "eww" reaction, not this specific instance. I don't want feces in my food directly, but whenever we eat something that was alive, feces was consumed somewhere along its food chain. I don't want to eat rotting carrion, either, but the vegetables I ate today probably drew nourishment from a little bit of it, even if it was only dead earthworms or insects.
"Have you noticed, that humans and Neanderthals are still having sex?
All the denouncement had absolutely no effect.
Parents and counselors constantly scorn them,
But humans and Neanderthals are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them."
Haven't see it yet, but isn't that sort of the whole premise of The Hunger Games?
Good point, hadn't thought of that. Haven't seen it either, but after a brief bit of research, it seems like the movie version upped the age of most of the younger characters. At least, most of the adolescent characters are played by people in their early twenties, and the pre-adolescent characters are played by adolescents. I suppose they could do likewise with Ender's Game, but then they'd be ditching the contrast between age and intelligence -- all of the kids are supposed to be incredible geniuses just by virtue of being picked for the Battle School, with Ender being a genius among geniuses, smarter than his own parents when he's just six. The older you make the kids, the less impressive that aspect is.
I do wonder how much of the child-on-child violence they're going to retain in the movie, especially given that there are two rather brutal deaths.
I love Hillarys wank
Her husband Bill apparently wasn't satisfied with that.
While the IRG as a whole is not the "special forces" of Iran, one of its sub-formations (the Quds Force) is. The job of the regular Iranian military is to defend Iran, while the IRG is there to "defend the revolution" -- i.e. to maintain the Islamic rulers in power against both external and internal threats.
bill=google.civics.findBill("SOPA").clone();
while ((bill.isPending()) && (!bill.isPassed()))
{
senator=google.civics.randomSenator();
senator.bribe(10000);
}
And the only reason you hate Obama is because he's black.
You honestly believe that? You really think that everyone who opposes Obama would be just fine with him if he were Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, or Al Franken? Or that, conversely, they'd vote for those guys rather than Condi Rice or Allen West?
It's not as if I agreed with Obama back when he was a white guy named Jimmy Carter.
I found this funny at the time, but it happened almost three weeks ago.
Iranians are not Arabs, but they are almost purely Muslim. 89-90% Shi'ite Muslim, 9% Sunni Muslim, and 0.4-2% all other religions. That doesn't leave much room for atheists and agnostics!
It's not so much of a question of what religion you are, but how big of a factor that is in your decision making, and how much it impacts your opinion and behavior towards other people, especially violent behavior. For example, prior to the revolution, none of my female Iranian relatives in my dad's generation (what would be "baby-boomers" in the US) wore head coverings at all, and even those in my grandmother's generation only wore headscarves, not chadors (the black tent-like things). Most of the men drank about as much alcohol (a no-no for Muslims) as the average American male of their age. They didn't object to kids celebrating "chaharshanbe suri", a Zoroastrian fire festival thing that a lot of the mullahs have tried to ban (the situation has similarities with fundamentalist Christians in the US objecting to Halloween). Yet pretty much all of them were believing Muslims, and most of the older ones had performed their pilgrimage to Mecca at some point in their lives.
Also note that apostate Muslims (those who leave the faith) are subject to the death penalty in Iran -- and you're considered Muslim if you were brought up as one. Things like that tend interfere with accurate information gathering. You don't answer "atheist" if you're afraid that your answer won't stay secret and you'll wind up in front of a judge trying to explain the difference between that answer and the fact that you always used to attend services with your parents at the local mosque.
The right to speak freely and shoot anyone in the face who reacts to that with violence.
Either your reading comprehension is lacking, or you're being disingenuous. I suspect it's the latter.
Do you have any sympathy for those that were killed by the army of crazy?
If you had the power to not release that video, and the knowledge that the people would die, would you have saved their lives by not uploading the video?
I would save their lives by warning them to be armed to the teeth and prepared to turn the army of crazy into an army of corpses. Anyone who reacts to an expression of opinion by resorting to violence deserves no less, and the rest of the world deserves better than to have to live in danger because of them.
This video is the very essence of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and causing a panic.
Ummm... no. That involves making people believe there is an immediate physical threat. Their reaction to get out of the theater is a perfectly reasonable one, but they need to not panic and exit in an orderly way. The problem with the people attacking the embassies is that they did it at all, not that they didn't draw up into orderly ranks and carry out the assault with proper discipline.
How would this play in the media if some guy in Saudi Arabia trolled a bunch of bible thumpers or skinheads into something horrible?
Actually, I expect the media would be much more enthusiastic about criticizing the beliefs of those involved. But it's much less likely that there would be that reaction. Not impossible, just much less likely. Did Christians around the world burn down embassies in response to The DaVinci Code? I believe there was one significant act of violence (in France, not usually known for its "Bible thumpers") during the run of The Last Temptation of Christ -- after huge amounts of news coverage and advertising. I don't recall any "we have to censor this or the Christians will kill people!" hysteria. And that's as it should be.
Beyond the principle of freedom of speech in this specific instance, you're also overlooking the long-term incentive of what you espouse. If people can get things censored by resorting to violence, then the message you're sending is "if you want something censored, get violent." By giving in to one religious group's violent demands for censorship, you're telling every other religious group that if they remain well-behaved they can be mocked, but if they break out the torches they can shut up their critics.
Wow... where to begin?
I would love for you to educate me on how Jews are insidiously infiltrating and controlling world politics considering the number of stone-age countries with outright mandates on Israel's destruction.
Please explain to me how Jews control the US economy (have you seen the US economy? whomever is in control is doing a crappy job).
I would love for you to explain to me how you came to the conclusion that is it the Jewish destiny to dominate the world militarily (seeing as Jews make up a tiny fraction of the world population)...
Reminds me of an old joke. Two elderly Jewish guys are enjoying a sunny day in the park, sitting on a bench reading two different newspapers. The first guy is reading the New York Times, and after a while he looks over, curious to see what the second guy is reading. To his horror, he sees that it's some sort of Neo-Nazi publication. "How in the world can you stand to read that kind of garbage?" he asks in shock. The second guy smiles and says, "When I read your paper, it's 'Recession, war, crime, disaster.' But when I read this, it's 'Jews run the banks, Jews run the government, Jews run Hollywood...'"
On the subject of "permutations", that brings to mind one particular kind of problem: patents being issued for a specific instantiation of an already-documented abstraction. For example, a few years ago there was a patent dispute (involving RIM, I think) where the patent was basically "sending email over a wireless connection." But a major point of the OSI and TCP/IP layer models is that the implementation of a given layer isn't supposed to care (or even know) about the implementation of another layer. IMAP at the Application layer doesn't care whether the Physical layer is 802.11n, RS-232, DOCSIS, or 1000BASE-T, while 802.11n at the Physical layer doesn't care whether the Application layer is IMAP, HTTP, or FTP. The layer models intentionally include the idea of plugging things into the various layers independently, so while you might be able to patent the thing you're plugging in, you should not be able to patent what things you plug in. The layer models should be considered "prior art" against any attempt to patent a specific combination of layer implementations. Or to put it differently, if there already exists a thing designed to be flexed in any direction, you shouldn't be able to patent flexing it in some specific direction. The same thing that goes for communications layer models goes for any sort of layer, framework, or similar abstraction.
Basically, at least as far as high tech is concerned, the patent system has morphed from its original "encourage inventors to share and explain their inventions in exchange for a short period of official monopoly" to a legally-empowered version of "I call dibs on that." Rather than developing something and patenting the result, people are observing trends, anticipating where things will go, and patenting that. Sometimes (such as with Apple) they proceed to actually develop something, and other times (as with patent trolls) they just wait to cash in. But in either case, the patent boils down to "I was the first person to tell the Patent Office that things were moving in this direction."
A question, in all seriousness, to any Russians in the audience: does Putin doing these sorts of stunts actually increase his appeal to voters (I presume that's why he wants publicity of him doing these things), or is the reaction more along the lines of "there goes Putin, making himself look macho again"? Obviously national leaders have hobbies, just like anyone else does, but he's racked up a long list. Sometimes it seems like he's trying to get himself into Mountain Dew commercials.
You're right that intent may be considered, but re taking part vs just wanting to make trouble, you're standing in the minority in your interpretation of the moderation options.
I'm not making an interpretation, I'm pointing to the exact text of the FAQ. I'll quote it again: "Flamebait: Comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage." Note the word "purpose" in there. As to my standing in the minority, I'm reminded of an Abraham Lincoln quote:
"How many legs does a dog have, if we agree to call a tail a leg?"
"Five."
"Four. Calling a tail a leg, doesn't make it so."
What you are doing is, essentially, treating "-1, Flamebait" as if it means "-1, Not Insightful", and that's not what it means.