You can make your blood pressure spike by visualizing a rattlesnake, riding in a plummeting airplane, catching your spouse cheating, or being forced onto stage in front of a huge audience... whatever you happen to fear most.
Come to think of it, just knowing your career rests in the hands of a techno-witchdoctor must be pretty stressful in itself, and it's not like you have to use any imagination to summon that thought.
In the version I heard, they place a colander on his head, with some wires attaching it to the copier. The copier had an original saying "Lie" on it, and they'd push the copy button whenever they thought he was lying.
Probably an urban legend, but I'm sure plenty of such tricks have been used throughout the history of law enforcement.
I'll stand with you against censorship, even if you conflate the authority-driven epistemology of religion with the transparent, empirical methods of science.
i think people should be able to decide for themselves how much safety equipment they want to have
That would be fine if the only people who suffered were the people who made the bad decisions. In this case, however, it's not only the inattentive-and-cheap car owner who suffers, but also whatever (or whomever) he runs into.
Even then it wouldn't really be fine. Case in point: before state legislators started passing seat belt laws in the late 80's/early 90's, the usage rate was ~14%. Think about it: six supposedly mature adults each climb behind the wheel of a 1 ton death machine and prepare to undertake the most dangerous part of their day, and only one of them takes the most basic precaution of buckling up. Incredible. Fast-forward to present day and 5 of those 6 adults (87%) buckle-up. Thank you government regulation and public advocacy. Somehow, 4 out of 6 people find their own mortality less worthy of motivation than the threat of a $25 fine and a chiming dashboard nag light.
Sometimes a little nanny government can go a long ways.
The color red was assigned to the GOP by someone who hated them,
The media alternated color assignment between parties up thru the 2000 election. No hate involved, just pandering use of our national colors.
the reason it stuck is simple: people kept on bitching about how Gore "should have" won the election
Your tone is caustic, but you're essentially correct: the long,drawn-out contested election of 2000 got folks to start identifying themselves in red state/blue state terminology. After a month+ media circus, the association was bound to stick no matter who won that extremely tight and controversial election.
In typical American fashion, our colors got stuck backwards from how most other western democracies use them (with red typically being the color of liberal parties and blue typically being the color of conservative parties). See political color for examples.
Even random change is very likely to be for the better.
Um, no. Even with all our problems, things could be much worse than they currently are. Medicine is vastly overpriced, for instance, but we don't have the health catastrophes of Africa. Religious zealots hold substantial political sway, but it's not like the middle east. There aren't enough jobs, but conditions are generally safe and nothing like the borderline-slavery of China. Even compared to the more equitable democracies of western Europe, we do pretty well, with the U.S. ranking #6 in the OECD's quality of life index.
Keep in mind that humans have been at the mercy of disease, famine, genocide, war, and various other forms of barbarianism throughout the bulk of history. We can get back there with the right mix of corruption, injustice, and boneheaded policy moves. Things can easily be made much, much worse.
Yes, but this could let you throw puppies in front of hundreds of cars all at once. Interstate cloverleafs would be particularly vulnerable under the right weather and traffic conditions. Two bored teens could rack up dozens of deaths and millions of damages, and while that's probably "only" 10x the damage they could do with a brick and an overpass, the psychological impact on the population would be tremendous.
I'd much rather manufacturers build thorough defenses before any lives are lost than for legislators to pass knee-jerk draconian legislation (criminalizing lasers or home electronics, for instance) after the fact.
But you get it all wrong, see. Unless you can use it to build a bigger bomb or increase next quarter's earnings per share, knowledge isn't worth acquiring./s
Churchill said "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.".
The same can be said with technology in general... social and technical factors are deeply intertwined. It's true that individual character help shapes the final outcome/feel of a community, but that's just one factor out of many.
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
Instead of becoming an oasis where truth could emerge thru spirited, rational civic discourse, internet forums have instead become a choose-your-own-reality wasteland, where any politicized issue predictably elicits the same set of canned responses. You'll occasionally find some gems (well reasoned arguments, vigorous data-backed analysis, insider perspectives, etc.), but you have to wade thru a lot of dreck to get there.
So, while you can claim that censorship is the motivation for removing comment systems, I suspect it has more to do with the difficulty of achieving "everyday" standards of civility, courtesy, and self-restraint. For whatever reason, commenters are willing to speak with a level of venom that they would never use in real life, even if debating their worst enemy. What motivation do websites have to tarnish their brand with that?
"It probably won a prize" is a disparaging remark in this book. Why? Because prizes tend to be given for some aspects of design, to the neglect of all others—usually including usability.
...but the problem with the great man myth is that revolutions usually require a lot of great men.
It's amusing, for instance, how George Crow and Bob Belleville had to sneak a deal with Sony behind Job's back, or the original Mac would have been delayed by months.
In another episode, Bob Belleville was the guy with the blind-spot, as he wanted to fire Bruce Horn, the guy working on Resource Manager subsystem (a nifty development/hacking tool that was fundamental to Mac applications until the advent of PowerPC). Bruce and his coworkers stood their ground (and also got Jobs involved) and thwarted what would have been a serious managerial mistake.
Micro-USB adapters follow a sort of buttered-toast physics for me: no matter which way I try to plug them in, it's the wrong way until I have sufficient light to see what I'm doing. It's a two-hand, lights-on operation every. single. time.
I don't think there is a hidden agenda with camp 1. Camp 1 says "we cannot secure your private shit phone and thus giving it access to the VPN etc is a stupid idea and we're not doing it."
Camp 1's hidden agenda is making life simple for them (e.g., IT security). When a gatekeeper's opened for opening a gate, they'll have no incentive to do what's actually best for the organization. It's not just IT, either. We all do it. Want to order some software? Legal and Supply Chain and IT will all conspire to make this a big fucking deal that takes two months to get done. (Shhh... don't tell them about the thousands of packages flitting into their network via nuget/npm/git/aptitude/docker/whatever. This is the real reason Open Source won the world of software reuse. Blow your deadline doing paperwork and politics, or `npm install foo` and keep programming?)
That's not to say I'm a fan of camp 2 and the BYOD movement; I was saying "hell yeah" reading your post, so I'm probably not the best person to put forth the camp 2 argument. It's just that dealing with risk is a very, very hard balancing game. When you ask the person in charge of managing risk, they'll always say "no"; when you ask the person in charge of getting results, they'll always say "yes". But the optimal solution... the one that best maximizes shareholder value while keeping it within their preferred level of risk tolerance... is going to vary case by case.
If what is on the test is not what you want the students to be learning, then the problem is with the design of that test
Most people that object to our current system of testing, have no interest in improving it, but rather prefer no accountability at all.
Oh hi there! Sorry Test 1.0 didn't work for you, but there's an easy fix... it's Test 2.0! It has everything you love about the original, but now with even more tests!! Buy it today! No, the conflicts with Teach 1.0.1 haven't been fixed, and if you're one of the folks who filed a bug report about it, you're probably just a louse who wants to play Solitaire 2000.
The argument isn't against testing, it's against standardized testing, and over-reliance on testing.
I like the term high-stakes testing, because issuing a standardized test once a year is a fine to gain visibility into trends and patterns (and maybe figure out where extra help is needed), but once you start tying compensation and school budgets directly to the score, it's over. People are going to game the system.
Downsides: 1. you lose remote access (save for second-class stuff like VNC), 2. you need to port most software or use X emulation. Upsides:... [crickets]...
Performance, battery life, innovation.
(And if you haven't noticed, X remote access is already second-class to thinks like RDP and SPICE.)
This has immediately raised concerns. Today, if a Windows user finds that an update breaks something BLAH BLAH BLAH
Author immediately launches into rationalization, but the most important "concern" is that IT'S MY DAMN BOX and you can't modify it without my consent.
Now I agree that patching is a good thing, but you can default users into it without usurping their property rights. That Microsoft didn't deign to do so makes you wonder what other infringements are baked into their new OS.
(This goes for all modern game consoles as well... there seems to be this ridiculous notion that you want to turn these puppies on and watch a progress bar instead of, you know, play.)
Merely possessing nukes changes the power dynamics. You don't have to use them to alter how your neighbors, trading partners, and enemies perceive you. Even if you have no rational way to use them, you need only convince people that you're capable of behaving irrationality to gain leverage.
Take Israel... they've done some pretty crazy stuff, and they maintain deliberate ambiguity over whether they possess nukes or not. If you're Iran, it might be nice to have a back-pocket action there. Of course, they're probably also aware that they sit b/t Turkey (who hosts US nukes), Russia (their love/hate trading partner across the Caspian Sea), and Pakistan. And wouldn't it be nice to intervene diplomatically if things got heated b/t India and Pakistan, since fallout doesn't confine itself to national boundaries? And while Saudi Arabia doesn't have nukes, anything they can do to one-up them and gain more influence over the region is highly desirable.
Basically, nukes put you in a very exclusive club.
You asked for proof and I pointed out that we don't have the visibility necessary for proof. I then appealed to wisdom vis-a-vis human nature to establish concern. (Which was directed at first world countries in general, not NZ in particular, though granted I didn't spell that out. Hey, maybe the Kiwis have their act together... that's great if so! I'd love to be wrong.) The drumbeat of incremental power grabs is very telling though, at least to those of us who've seen a bit of history. But feel free to close your eyes and pretend you aren't boiling...
I note that the NSW Police was a user of Finn Fisher - but in that case also I've seen no evidence they misused it.
Of course you haven't... until the Hacking Team breach, you didn't know they were using it at all, am I right? With no transparency comes no accountability.
Human nature is predictable. If you want to give me primae facia evidence that they aren't abusing it, then show me the warrants they've obtained for the use of the product. Show me the disclosure reports. Show me the convictions for those individuals who inevitably misused it (in exchange for a bribe or to spy on their girlfriend, for instance). Saying that nobody misused it whatsoever is like Russia claiming they don't have any handicap or gay people... just simply ridiculous.
Western governments--those very countries which first embraced and first reaped the benefits of following sound democratic principles (limited government, human rights, due process, separation of powers, etc.)--are sliding into totalitarianism. I don't know how to fix it, but one thing we can all do is not be naive about human nature.
at some point in the chain there is a rule that says "favour males"
Not necessarily. As phayes was saying, it could be the sheer plurality of rules that target females that crowd out the executive ads. It's perfectly possible that the targeting preferences for those ads are completely free of rules that target gender. Heck, they could even be targeted at females and still be getting drowned out by the "shop here" and "be a good mom"-type ads.
Furthermore, it's unclear from the abstract (1) whether the experimenters constructed a search history that does not itself have a gender bias [similar to how Pandora can make a pretty good inference of your gender based on what music you listen to], (2) whether they collected information on low- and modest-paying job ads for comparison [this could help validate or rule out the effect phayes mentioned], and (3) whether or not they've done similar experiments with race as a variable [comparing white men to black men might be a better clue as to whether job advertisers are including protected classes in their targeting].
All this focus on workplace discrimination (which does exist, granted) ignores the true cause of the gender imbalance in "prestige" jobs: differing interests and priorities based on upbringing, social pressures, and (I'm going to get modded down for saying this...) sex-attributed psychological persuasions (towards risk-taking, child-rearing, nesting, whatever). If you want more equal gender representation in the workplace, you need to reach girls (and boys--because men are excluded from many jobs where they could make a positive impact on society) at an earlier age. (The danger with this approach is that you might be directly fighting organized religion at this point, the institutions of which strongly push traditional gender roles.)
Ha ha, did you think he meant warrants? No, no, no... just like every other effort to chip away at freedom and privacy, it comes dressed in the noblest of promises. But once the necessary powers are secured, the promises can be gradually (if not immediately) infringed upon.
Slashdot Mirror
You can make your blood pressure spike by visualizing a rattlesnake, riding in a plummeting airplane, catching your spouse cheating, or being forced onto stage in front of a huge audience... whatever you happen to fear most. Come to think of it, just knowing your career rests in the hands of a techno-witchdoctor must be pretty stressful in itself, and it's not like you have to use any imagination to summon that thought.
In the version I heard, they place a colander on his head, with some wires attaching it to the copier. The copier had an original saying "Lie" on it, and they'd push the copy button whenever they thought he was lying. Probably an urban legend, but I'm sure plenty of such tricks have been used throughout the history of law enforcement.
I'll stand with you against censorship, even if you conflate the authority-driven epistemology of religion with the transparent, empirical methods of science.
About 500 of them, according to Devon's market research. (Personally, I think they've underestimated Star Wars fans.)
i think people should be able to decide for themselves how much safety equipment they want to have
That would be fine if the only people who suffered were the people who made the bad decisions. In this case, however, it's not only the inattentive-and-cheap car owner who suffers, but also whatever (or whomever) he runs into.
Even then it wouldn't really be fine. Case in point: before state legislators started passing seat belt laws in the late 80's/early 90's, the usage rate was ~14%. Think about it: six supposedly mature adults each climb behind the wheel of a 1 ton death machine and prepare to undertake the most dangerous part of their day, and only one of them takes the most basic precaution of buckling up. Incredible. Fast-forward to present day and 5 of those 6 adults (87%) buckle-up. Thank you government regulation and public advocacy. Somehow, 4 out of 6 people find their own mortality less worthy of motivation than the threat of a $25 fine and a chiming dashboard nag light.
Sometimes a little nanny government can go a long ways.
The color red was assigned to the GOP by someone who hated them,
The media alternated color assignment between parties up thru the 2000 election. No hate involved, just pandering use of our national colors.
the reason it stuck is simple: people kept on bitching about how Gore "should have" won the election
Your tone is caustic, but you're essentially correct: the long,drawn-out contested election of 2000 got folks to start identifying themselves in red state/blue state terminology. After a month+ media circus, the association was bound to stick no matter who won that extremely tight and controversial election.
In typical American fashion, our colors got stuck backwards from how most other western democracies use them (with red typically being the color of liberal parties and blue typically being the color of conservative parties). See political color for examples.
Even random change is very likely to be for the better.
Um, no. Even with all our problems, things could be much worse than they currently are. Medicine is vastly overpriced, for instance, but we don't have the health catastrophes of Africa. Religious zealots hold substantial political sway, but it's not like the middle east. There aren't enough jobs, but conditions are generally safe and nothing like the borderline-slavery of China. Even compared to the more equitable democracies of western Europe, we do pretty well, with the U.S. ranking #6 in the OECD's quality of life index.
Keep in mind that humans have been at the mercy of disease, famine, genocide, war, and various other forms of barbarianism throughout the bulk of history. We can get back there with the right mix of corruption, injustice, and boneheaded policy moves. Things can easily be made much, much worse.
Yes, but this could let you throw puppies in front of hundreds of cars all at once. Interstate cloverleafs would be particularly vulnerable under the right weather and traffic conditions. Two bored teens could rack up dozens of deaths and millions of damages, and while that's probably "only" 10x the damage they could do with a brick and an overpass, the psychological impact on the population would be tremendous.
I'd much rather manufacturers build thorough defenses before any lives are lost than for legislators to pass knee-jerk draconian legislation (criminalizing lasers or home electronics, for instance) after the fact.
But you get it all wrong, see. Unless you can use it to build a bigger bomb or increase next quarter's earnings per share, knowledge isn't worth acquiring. /s
Churchill said "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.".
The same can be said with technology in general... social and technical factors are deeply intertwined. It's true that individual character help shapes the final outcome/feel of a community, but that's just one factor out of many.
You may find this essay by Clay Shirky interesting: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
Instead of becoming an oasis where truth could emerge thru spirited, rational civic discourse, internet forums have instead become a choose-your-own-reality wasteland, where any politicized issue predictably elicits the same set of canned responses. You'll occasionally find some gems (well reasoned arguments, vigorous data-backed analysis, insider perspectives, etc.), but you have to wade thru a lot of dreck to get there.
So, while you can claim that censorship is the motivation for removing comment systems, I suspect it has more to do with the difficulty of achieving "everyday" standards of civility, courtesy, and self-restraint. For whatever reason, commenters are willing to speak with a level of venom that they would never use in real life, even if debating their worst enemy. What motivation do websites have to tarnish their brand with that?
"It probably won a prize" is a disparaging remark in this book. Why? Because prizes tend to be given for some aspects of design, to the neglect of all others—usually including usability.
-- Don Norman, Design of Everyday Things
It's amusing, for instance, how George Crow and Bob Belleville had to sneak a deal with Sony behind Job's back, or the original Mac would have been delayed by months.
In another episode, Bob Belleville was the guy with the blind-spot, as he wanted to fire Bruce Horn, the guy working on Resource Manager subsystem (a nifty development/hacking tool that was fundamental to Mac applications until the advent of PowerPC). Bruce and his coworkers stood their ground (and also got Jobs involved) and thwarted what would have been a serious managerial mistake.
Why do they need any international law? Might makes right.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a big rock...
Micro-USB adapters follow a sort of buttered-toast physics for me: no matter which way I try to plug them in, it's the wrong way until I have sufficient light to see what I'm doing. It's a two-hand, lights-on operation every. single. time.
I don't think there is a hidden agenda with camp 1. Camp 1 says "we cannot secure your private shit phone and thus giving it access to the VPN etc is a stupid idea and we're not doing it."
Camp 1's hidden agenda is making life simple for them (e.g., IT security). When a gatekeeper's opened for opening a gate, they'll have no incentive to do what's actually best for the organization. It's not just IT, either. We all do it. Want to order some software? Legal and Supply Chain and IT will all conspire to make this a big fucking deal that takes two months to get done. (Shhh... don't tell them about the thousands of packages flitting into their network via nuget/npm/git/aptitude/docker/whatever. This is the real reason Open Source won the world of software reuse. Blow your deadline doing paperwork and politics, or `npm install foo` and keep programming?)
That's not to say I'm a fan of camp 2 and the BYOD movement; I was saying "hell yeah" reading your post, so I'm probably not the best person to put forth the camp 2 argument. It's just that dealing with risk is a very, very hard balancing game. When you ask the person in charge of managing risk, they'll always say "no"; when you ask the person in charge of getting results, they'll always say "yes". But the optimal solution... the one that best maximizes shareholder value while keeping it within their preferred level of risk tolerance... is going to vary case by case.
If what is on the test is not what you want the students to be learning, then the problem is with the design of that test
Most people that object to our current system of testing, have no interest in improving it, but rather prefer no accountability at all.
Oh hi there! Sorry Test 1.0 didn't work for you, but there's an easy fix... it's Test 2.0! It has everything you love about the original, but now with even more tests!! Buy it today! No, the conflicts with Teach 1.0.1 haven't been fixed, and if you're one of the folks who filed a bug report about it, you're probably just a louse who wants to play Solitaire 2000.
The argument isn't against testing, it's against standardized testing, and over-reliance on testing.
I like the term high-stakes testing, because issuing a standardized test once a year is a fine to gain visibility into trends and patterns (and maybe figure out where extra help is needed), but once you start tying compensation and school budgets directly to the score, it's over. People are going to game the system.
Downsides: 1. you lose remote access (save for second-class stuff like VNC), 2. you need to port most software or use X emulation. Upsides: ... [crickets] ...
Performance, battery life, innovation.
(And if you haven't noticed, X remote access is already second-class to thinks like RDP and SPICE.)
This has immediately raised concerns. Today, if a Windows user finds that an update breaks something BLAH BLAH BLAH
Author immediately launches into rationalization, but the most important "concern" is that IT'S MY DAMN BOX and you can't modify it without my consent.
Now I agree that patching is a good thing, but you can default users into it without usurping their property rights. That Microsoft didn't deign to do so makes you wonder what other infringements are baked into their new OS.
(This goes for all modern game consoles as well... there seems to be this ridiculous notion that you want to turn these puppies on and watch a progress bar instead of, you know, play.)
What possible use are nukes for Iran anyway?
Merely possessing nukes changes the power dynamics. You don't have to use them to alter how your neighbors, trading partners, and enemies perceive you. Even if you have no rational way to use them, you need only convince people that you're capable of behaving irrationality to gain leverage.
Take Israel... they've done some pretty crazy stuff, and they maintain deliberate ambiguity over whether they possess nukes or not. If you're Iran, it might be nice to have a back-pocket action there. Of course, they're probably also aware that they sit b/t Turkey (who hosts US nukes), Russia (their love/hate trading partner across the Caspian Sea), and Pakistan. And wouldn't it be nice to intervene diplomatically if things got heated b/t India and Pakistan, since fallout doesn't confine itself to national boundaries? And while Saudi Arabia doesn't have nukes, anything they can do to one-up them and gain more influence over the region is highly desirable.
Basically, nukes put you in a very exclusive club.
You asked for proof and I pointed out that we don't have the visibility necessary for proof. I then appealed to wisdom vis-a-vis human nature to establish concern. (Which was directed at first world countries in general, not NZ in particular, though granted I didn't spell that out. Hey, maybe the Kiwis have their act together... that's great if so! I'd love to be wrong.) The drumbeat of incremental power grabs is very telling though, at least to those of us who've seen a bit of history. But feel free to close your eyes and pretend you aren't boiling...
I note that the NSW Police was a user of Finn Fisher - but in that case also I've seen no evidence they misused it.
Of course you haven't... until the Hacking Team breach, you didn't know they were using it at all, am I right? With no transparency comes no accountability.
Human nature is predictable. If you want to give me primae facia evidence that they aren't abusing it, then show me the warrants they've obtained for the use of the product. Show me the disclosure reports. Show me the convictions for those individuals who inevitably misused it (in exchange for a bribe or to spy on their girlfriend, for instance). Saying that nobody misused it whatsoever is like Russia claiming they don't have any handicap or gay people... just simply ridiculous.
Western governments--those very countries which first embraced and first reaped the benefits of following sound democratic principles (limited government, human rights, due process, separation of powers, etc.)--are sliding into totalitarianism. I don't know how to fix it, but one thing we can all do is not be naive about human nature.
at some point in the chain there is a rule that says "favour males"
Not necessarily. As phayes was saying, it could be the sheer plurality of rules that target females that crowd out the executive ads. It's perfectly possible that the targeting preferences for those ads are completely free of rules that target gender. Heck, they could even be targeted at females and still be getting drowned out by the "shop here" and "be a good mom"-type ads.
Furthermore, it's unclear from the abstract (1) whether the experimenters constructed a search history that does not itself have a gender bias [similar to how Pandora can make a pretty good inference of your gender based on what music you listen to], (2) whether they collected information on low- and modest-paying job ads for comparison [this could help validate or rule out the effect phayes mentioned], and (3) whether or not they've done similar experiments with race as a variable [comparing white men to black men might be a better clue as to whether job advertisers are including protected classes in their targeting].
All this focus on workplace discrimination (which does exist, granted) ignores the true cause of the gender imbalance in "prestige" jobs: differing interests and priorities based on upbringing, social pressures, and (I'm going to get modded down for saying this...) sex-attributed psychological persuasions (towards risk-taking, child-rearing, nesting, whatever). If you want more equal gender representation in the workplace, you need to reach girls (and boys--because men are excluded from many jobs where they could make a positive impact on society) at an earlier age. (The danger with this approach is that you might be directly fighting organized religion at this point, the institutions of which strongly push traditional gender roles.)
Ha ha, did you think he meant warrants? No, no, no... just like every other effort to chip away at freedom and privacy, it comes dressed in the noblest of promises. But once the necessary powers are secured, the promises can be gradually (if not immediately) infringed upon.