good for them but to give them too much credibility is dangerous. I much prefer many individual nations each answerable to its on citizenry
No, because if your citizenry decide it's OK to attack another country (*cough* Iraq in 2003 *cough*), your citizenry won't hold you accountable.
The UN is intended to have you accountable to other countries.
And, when the US violates the rights of everyone on the planet, do we see the US citizenry holding their government to task? Clearly, the answer is no.
The problem is every nation would misbehave and act like assholes, and say it's all OK because they've convinced their citizens it's a good idea.
At which point, if there wasn't a body with some teeth, countries would simply annex other countries stuff.
Maybe you think that's a great idea, but the rest of us don't.
People only whine about sovereignty when they're being held to account, but not when they're violating someone else's.
Right, because nerds don't give a rats ass about civilian casualties in war zones from commercial jets getting shot down.
Nosirree, none of us ever fly because we're always safely ensconced in our mom's basement. Doesn't affect us at all. And we certainly might not know people from the region.
If they were honest, they wouldn't be collecting everyone's data to begin with. That in itself is a violation of people's liberties.
Except that the response you get from Americans is "well, fuck it, as long as it's someone else's rights, who cares?".
Which more or less forces the rest of the world to decide that the rights of Americans isn't their damned problem. Because the rest of the world doesn't see their rights as secondary to those of Americans.
Your options are... try to work together in a reasoned diplomatic process, or say fuck it and simply got to war.
Since the UN is the only mechanism for the former, what are your options?
Complaining that they're ineffective just points out problems which exist in all such bodies -- not everybody agrees with everybody else.
So, if you have a solution to the UN, you'll have a solution to all broken democracies.
But if you think you're doing any better, you're sadly mistaken. The UN is no more, or no less broken than any other organization made up of different entities with different views.
But this "oh, screw the UN, they're broken" is a statement made by people who have nothing better to offer, and are incapable of seeing the same problems in their own government.
Unless, of course, you think the solution is to simply decide that the US is in charge. And, well, that's not really a good solution to anything.
It's unrelated to dark matter (which has positive mass- that's how we know it's there), but dark energy is gravitationally negative (it causes expansion to accelerate: it's gravitationally repulsive)
Wait... dark matter and dark energy are separate things now? Are they related? Or totally separate things?
Honestly, are you guys just fucking with us?;-)
You're in good company! If you did understand it, you could publish, and you should be getting a phone call from Stockholm soon.
Oh, good, I'm not supposed to understand it.
OK, it's official, cosmologists are just fucking with us. It's the post-modernism of the sciences where nobody actually knows what you're talking about. Gotcha.;-)
You are no more equipped to understand their job than they are to understand yours.
Horseshit.
I once worked at a company which primarily grew by acquisition.
The running joke (albeit real) was that the VP of R&D from the last major acquisition was now the VP of R&D for the entire company.
And that VP would develop a huge sense of "Not Invented Here", and start to decide that any product which wasn't invented by his company wasn't worth pursuing.
In several instances they tried to fiddle with the core competencies, get rid of things which were absolutely central to the business model, and generally fsck things up. Because the particular brand of hammer they sold was all they understood, and anything else must therefore be unimportant.
I can't even count how many MBAs I've met who had precisely zero experience in the industry they were suddenly in, who started to make decisions which demonstrated that, other than the case studies they did in school, they didn't have a frigging clue. In fact, I've seen numerous examples where their understanding of the technology was so non-existent they couldn't understand what it did, and why their arbitrary choices were disconnected from the real world.
People get parachuted into management positions in companies they know nothing about and don't fully understand, and then apply their one size fits all solution -- even if that solution is a terrible idea.
This belief that someone who has studied management understand either the business or the process of management is a crock of shit. Because anybody who has worked in tech long enough knows damned well that most of them are doing things just to make themselves look important.
We once had a departmental manager insist on building ER diagrams for our product. The problem was, the software wasn't based on an RDB, the ER diagrams were meaningless and misleading, and had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I've seen situations in which the guy who owned a piece of technology was responsible for deciding that it was the one we should go with, despite overwhelming evidence that the piece of software he was responsible for wasn't capable of doing what it was supposed to replace. This was purely ego, politics, and carving out their own little fiefdom.
You think Elon Musk went into Nokia with an understanding of what Nokia needed as a business? Or merely a view that whatever they were doing was wrong because it wasn't based on Microsoft stuff?
You won't get this until you become a manager, I'm afraid.
If I hadn't seen so many examples of gross incompetence in management, I might actually believe there is a kernel of truth here.
But since I have, I don't.
Management isn't some elite bunch of people with all of the answers. They're a bunch of people who were chosen by a bunch of people like them to carry out policies which have already been decided upon.
And it is as much about politics as it is reality.
A government inquiry has been launched into whether or not Australian authorities are using Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act inappropriately.
Governments, when given a tool like this, will always abuse it.
They'll expand the scope of it. They'll use it for things it was never meant to be used for.
They'll claim up and down they're following the letter and intent of it, while ignoring both.
Once you give a government a tool for this, you can pretty much expect it to be abused. And since increasingly these kinds of powers are also there to benefit the interests of corporations, even more so.
Wait a minute. Microsoft has the ability to innovate? Who knew!
That's been true of most companies since the.com era.
Long term thinking is out the window in favor of short term increases to the stock, which increases the net worth of the CEO and makes them darlings of Wall Street.
That they might be actually harming the company long term is irrelevant.
We have buzzword BINGO in the first paragraph. Holy cow.
I have yet to hear a CEO speak without winning buzzword bingo in the first few sentences.
It's funny (and cringeworthy) because it's true.
I honestly can't decide if they know what they say sounds absurd, or if they really think they're saying intelligible things.
Years ago at another job, during the quarterly "Kool Aid/Rah Rah" speeches, if they were on a conference call... people openly played buzzword bingo in the meeting room. With HR in the room.
Heck, we used to look at the semi annual roadmaps to see what unicorns and rainbows the CEO had cooked up now -- because invariably there were several entries which were gone in six months, and several entries which were so far outside of what the company did that nobody understood WTF they were about.
You can only hear a CEO be completely wrong about what we'll be doing in six months (let alone two years) before you come to the conclusion CEOs live in their own little bubble, and mostly company success happens without their help (or more accurately, despite their help).
But they still give themselves massive bonuses, even if not a single prediction they made in the last year actually came true.
Nothing can be as demoralizing as being managed by exec's so stupid that they have never read Dilbert.
The problem in real life, as it is in Dilbert, is the things we cringe at are the things the executives think "now there's a damned fine idea".
There's a huge disconnect between how management people respond to those things versus what the rest of us do.
Unfortunately, they're the ones calling the shots -- and what we see as parody and satire, they see as an instruction manual.
I don't believe I've ever worked at a company where the management team didn't (on a semi regular basis) take a page straight out of the Dilbert playbook and begin to implement it.
It's like we experience an entirely different reality.
So, no, there is not a "shortage of girls in tech." Now, there may be a "shortage of girls" in certain avenues of the tech industry
Were they in actual tech roles, or non tech roles?
My own experience says I've never seen more than about 10-15% female actually in tech roles. I've never worked at a place which didn't have women in tech roles, but there's always been a bit of a skewing towards males.
Heck, when I was in school, the ratio was about the same in my classes, and seemed to drop as you went to more advanced classes. There were more in first year classes, but as you went up there were fewer people overall, and the number of women dropped faster for the most part. I was dating the only female in my classes for the last few years of school.
But my experience (yes, purely anecdotal, and I don't claim otherwise) is that out of 27 cubes the most I've ever seen is 2-3 women, and that's an upper bound.
eBook service called: The Library. You should see if your library has an eBook lending service.
You joke, but my mother in law used to work at a local library. A very small local library with a very small budget.
At one point, they started getting into eBook lending. Because the publishers are greedy, the cost of an eBook to a library is huge -- in the hundreds if not thousands per title.
Basically what they used to do was go to book sales, used book stores and stuff like that, and buy a very large amount of titles for the library. It was inexpensive, and got them a lot of titles.
After the eBook thing, they had no budget for new paper books, and only about 100 eBook titles (or something equally ridiculous). Because they'd spent the entire budget on getting screwed over by publishers.
Unless you're a very well funded library, eBook lending is so prohibitively expensive that you almost have to give up your money to buy paper books for the library.
She couldn't retire fast enough, because she figured if they were spending the entire budget on a handful of eBooks, the library was pretty much screwed.
Me, I prefer to stick with my dead tree editions of books. I can sit by a pool reading Tom Clancy, battery life isn't an issue, water splashing isn't going to be a catastrophic failure, and some greedy bastard doesn't get to monetize my reading habits.
But I wouldn't think for a minute that eBooks and the like aren't actually damaging many libraries more than they benefit.
Why sell you something when we can endlessly rent it to you?
I will hold out from this model for as long as possible, because I don't give a shit about the profitability of these companies and their rent-seeking behavior.
I'm certainly not advocating extortion. In fact, I would assume what he did was illegal.
What I said is there is a huge difference between Defamation/Libel/Slander and a negative restaurant review on a blog, and being able to sue someone for that.
The first I consider illegal and stupid. The second, I consider to be hugely stupid and a sign that the European courts are moving towards a model where getting your feelings hurt is illegal.
At which point, I'll just hurt all of your feelings now, and say if Europeans want the ability to be free from having their feelings hurt, they're childish morons with a broken legal system, who have lost touch with reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always assumed it was the sound whatever hypothetical machine would make.
"Recipes for turducken" ... Bing!
You know, like where the computer in Star Trek made mechanical noises while it was thinking.
Hmmmm ... I'm afraid I don't see how this passes the "is my wife a robot test?"
Honey, have you seen my keys? "Where did you leave them?"
Honey, have you see my wallet? "Why would I know where you left it?"
Honey, what's for dinner? "What are you making?"
None of these things help me tell if my wife is a robot or not. ;-)
That was my first thought ... all the cool kids are doing it.
So far Google has gotten all the publicity.
When so much profits depends on fast, direct access to skim money off the top with high frequency trading, these people do not want security.
They want to be able to access the system directly, and security be damned.
No, because if your citizenry decide it's OK to attack another country (*cough* Iraq in 2003 *cough*), your citizenry won't hold you accountable.
The UN is intended to have you accountable to other countries.
And, when the US violates the rights of everyone on the planet, do we see the US citizenry holding their government to task? Clearly, the answer is no.
The problem is every nation would misbehave and act like assholes, and say it's all OK because they've convinced their citizens it's a good idea.
At which point, if there wasn't a body with some teeth, countries would simply annex other countries stuff.
Maybe you think that's a great idea, but the rest of us don't.
People only whine about sovereignty when they're being held to account, but not when they're violating someone else's.
Was it a foreign government, or your own government?
Quite frankly, I find either plausible.
It's not my primary source, but it's hardly surprising when something like this actually gets posted.
Because it is stuff that matters.
As opposed to all of the whining and bitching about Apple v Microsoft and other pointless stuff that goes on around here.
Right, because nerds don't give a rats ass about civilian casualties in war zones from commercial jets getting shot down.
Nosirree, none of us ever fly because we're always safely ensconced in our mom's basement. Doesn't affect us at all. And we certainly might not know people from the region.
Don't like these stories? Don't read 'em.
Except that the response you get from Americans is "well, fuck it, as long as it's someone else's rights, who cares?".
Which more or less forces the rest of the world to decide that the rights of Americans isn't their damned problem. Because the rest of the world doesn't see their rights as secondary to those of Americans.
Your options are ... try to work together in a reasoned diplomatic process, or say fuck it and simply got to war.
Since the UN is the only mechanism for the former, what are your options?
Complaining that they're ineffective just points out problems which exist in all such bodies -- not everybody agrees with everybody else.
So, if you have a solution to the UN, you'll have a solution to all broken democracies.
But if you think you're doing any better, you're sadly mistaken. The UN is no more, or no less broken than any other organization made up of different entities with different views.
But this "oh, screw the UN, they're broken" is a statement made by people who have nothing better to offer, and are incapable of seeing the same problems in their own government.
Unless, of course, you think the solution is to simply decide that the US is in charge. And, well, that's not really a good solution to anything.
As opposed to the US government, which is a model of competency and the ability to get something done?
Sorry, but if you have a better system for doing stuff, we're all ears.
If not ... well, then you have nothing of value to add here.
Apparently, yes ... I knew there was an "Elo" in there somewhere. :-P
Wait ... dark matter and dark energy are separate things now? Are they related? Or totally separate things?
Honestly, are you guys just fucking with us? ;-)
Oh, good, I'm not supposed to understand it.
OK, it's official, cosmologists are just fucking with us. It's the post-modernism of the sciences where nobody actually knows what you're talking about. Gotcha. ;-)
Ummm ... in the same way that "chocolate cake" does? "Wood table"? "Steel Sword"? "Silicon Wafer"?
Seriously, what are you on about?
LOL, so you don't know either then?
So, I will happily demonstrate my complete lack of understanding on this topic ...
Is this similar to, unrelated to, part of, dissimilar, orthogonal, integral, or in any way linked to Dark Matter?
Because I (and probably most of us) don't understand that either.
Horseshit.
I once worked at a company which primarily grew by acquisition.
The running joke (albeit real) was that the VP of R&D from the last major acquisition was now the VP of R&D for the entire company.
And that VP would develop a huge sense of "Not Invented Here", and start to decide that any product which wasn't invented by his company wasn't worth pursuing.
In several instances they tried to fiddle with the core competencies, get rid of things which were absolutely central to the business model, and generally fsck things up. Because the particular brand of hammer they sold was all they understood, and anything else must therefore be unimportant.
I can't even count how many MBAs I've met who had precisely zero experience in the industry they were suddenly in, who started to make decisions which demonstrated that, other than the case studies they did in school, they didn't have a frigging clue. In fact, I've seen numerous examples where their understanding of the technology was so non-existent they couldn't understand what it did, and why their arbitrary choices were disconnected from the real world.
People get parachuted into management positions in companies they know nothing about and don't fully understand, and then apply their one size fits all solution -- even if that solution is a terrible idea.
This belief that someone who has studied management understand either the business or the process of management is a crock of shit. Because anybody who has worked in tech long enough knows damned well that most of them are doing things just to make themselves look important.
We once had a departmental manager insist on building ER diagrams for our product. The problem was, the software wasn't based on an RDB, the ER diagrams were meaningless and misleading, and had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I've seen situations in which the guy who owned a piece of technology was responsible for deciding that it was the one we should go with, despite overwhelming evidence that the piece of software he was responsible for wasn't capable of doing what it was supposed to replace. This was purely ego, politics, and carving out their own little fiefdom.
You think Elon Musk went into Nokia with an understanding of what Nokia needed as a business? Or merely a view that whatever they were doing was wrong because it wasn't based on Microsoft stuff?
If I hadn't seen so many examples of gross incompetence in management, I might actually believe there is a kernel of truth here.
But since I have, I don't.
Management isn't some elite bunch of people with all of the answers. They're a bunch of people who were chosen by a bunch of people like them to carry out policies which have already been decided upon.
And it is as much about politics as it is reality.
Governments, when given a tool like this, will always abuse it.
They'll expand the scope of it. They'll use it for things it was never meant to be used for.
They'll claim up and down they're following the letter and intent of it, while ignoring both.
Once you give a government a tool for this, you can pretty much expect it to be abused. And since increasingly these kinds of powers are also there to benefit the interests of corporations, even more so.
That's been true of most companies since the .com era.
Long term thinking is out the window in favor of short term increases to the stock, which increases the net worth of the CEO and makes them darlings of Wall Street.
That they might be actually harming the company long term is irrelevant.
I have yet to hear a CEO speak without winning buzzword bingo in the first few sentences.
It's funny (and cringeworthy) because it's true.
I honestly can't decide if they know what they say sounds absurd, or if they really think they're saying intelligible things.
Years ago at another job, during the quarterly "Kool Aid/Rah Rah" speeches, if they were on a conference call ... people openly played buzzword bingo in the meeting room. With HR in the room.
Heck, we used to look at the semi annual roadmaps to see what unicorns and rainbows the CEO had cooked up now -- because invariably there were several entries which were gone in six months, and several entries which were so far outside of what the company did that nobody understood WTF they were about.
You can only hear a CEO be completely wrong about what we'll be doing in six months (let alone two years) before you come to the conclusion CEOs live in their own little bubble, and mostly company success happens without their help (or more accurately, despite their help).
But they still give themselves massive bonuses, even if not a single prediction they made in the last year actually came true.
The problem in real life, as it is in Dilbert, is the things we cringe at are the things the executives think "now there's a damned fine idea".
There's a huge disconnect between how management people respond to those things versus what the rest of us do.
Unfortunately, they're the ones calling the shots -- and what we see as parody and satire, they see as an instruction manual.
I don't believe I've ever worked at a company where the management team didn't (on a semi regular basis) take a page straight out of the Dilbert playbook and begin to implement it.
It's like we experience an entirely different reality.
Were they in actual tech roles, or non tech roles?
My own experience says I've never seen more than about 10-15% female actually in tech roles. I've never worked at a place which didn't have women in tech roles, but there's always been a bit of a skewing towards males.
Heck, when I was in school, the ratio was about the same in my classes, and seemed to drop as you went to more advanced classes. There were more in first year classes, but as you went up there were fewer people overall, and the number of women dropped faster for the most part. I was dating the only female in my classes for the last few years of school.
But my experience (yes, purely anecdotal, and I don't claim otherwise) is that out of 27 cubes the most I've ever seen is 2-3 women, and that's an upper bound.
You joke, but my mother in law used to work at a local library. A very small local library with a very small budget.
At one point, they started getting into eBook lending. Because the publishers are greedy, the cost of an eBook to a library is huge -- in the hundreds if not thousands per title.
Basically what they used to do was go to book sales, used book stores and stuff like that, and buy a very large amount of titles for the library. It was inexpensive, and got them a lot of titles.
After the eBook thing, they had no budget for new paper books, and only about 100 eBook titles (or something equally ridiculous). Because they'd spent the entire budget on getting screwed over by publishers.
Unless you're a very well funded library, eBook lending is so prohibitively expensive that you almost have to give up your money to buy paper books for the library.
She couldn't retire fast enough, because she figured if they were spending the entire budget on a handful of eBooks, the library was pretty much screwed.
Me, I prefer to stick with my dead tree editions of books. I can sit by a pool reading Tom Clancy, battery life isn't an issue, water splashing isn't going to be a catastrophic failure, and some greedy bastard doesn't get to monetize my reading habits.
But I wouldn't think for a minute that eBooks and the like aren't actually damaging many libraries more than they benefit.
Why of course, that's the ultimate goal.
Why sell you something when we can endlessly rent it to you?
I will hold out from this model for as long as possible, because I don't give a shit about the profitability of these companies and their rent-seeking behavior.
I'm certainly not advocating extortion. In fact, I would assume what he did was illegal.
What I said is there is a huge difference between Defamation/Libel/Slander and a negative restaurant review on a blog, and being able to sue someone for that.
The first I consider illegal and stupid. The second, I consider to be hugely stupid and a sign that the European courts are moving towards a model where getting your feelings hurt is illegal.
At which point, I'll just hurt all of your feelings now, and say if Europeans want the ability to be free from having their feelings hurt, they're childish morons with a broken legal system, who have lost touch with reality.