It's fundamental to user interface design that the interface not lie to the user and that it put them in control, rather than the other way around. Whenever a system takes that power away the results vary from irritating (inability to control Windows updates) to enraging (inability to disable location tracking in newer versions of Android, cell network locking) to dangerous (the MCAS system). The system is transformed from a trustworthy tool to something unpredictable and harmful.
I'm all for a 30 km/h speed limit on residential roads, the stats cited by other posters are absolutely true, it would save a lot of lives in pedestrian collisions. But an automated system enforcing a hard limit is the wrong way to achieve this.
To say nothing of the potential carnage if a system like this fails. What if your speed regulator has a problem, decides that your limit is 30 km/h on a highway where everyone else is doing 110, and slams on the brakes for you?
I don't think the point of the piece is that people see content on youtube and mindlessly vote a certain way because of it. What these budding politicians have done is tap into a new broadcast medium to build networks of supporters. They've created a sense of common identity. Like Trump, they've figured out that they don't have to go through mainstream media to reach interested people, they can just speak directly to them.
I suspect that this is a sign of the times. The power of TV, radio, and newsprint isn't going away overnight, but my guess is that we'll increasingly see successful campaigns built on networks like these, without any gatekeeper between supporter and candidate.
Changing the terms because some people find them offensive is the right thing to do.
It's true that offence is personal. Not everyone has a problem using master/slave, lots of commenters here clearly don't. It's true that people can theoretically claim to be 'offended' by just about anything. Lots of commenters have come up with wild fantasies where other words could (but never will) be targeted for replacement.
The civil war may have ended the formal institution of slavery, but racism against blacks is alive and well. If you doubt this, try googling "life while black". I find it completely reasonable for people who daily face different treatment because of their skin to ask for one less reminder of it while they're at work. "Political correctness" isn't about forcing people to change their language just because, or about rubbing your virtue in everyone's face. It's about having some fucking empathy for the people around you.
The cost of changing a few words in the docs is marginal to non-existent. If it improves a few people's days, we should gladly do it.
Both of course! CR followed by LF has been the Microsoft line ending style since DOS at least. The convention dates to the teletype era, where moving the print head to a new line required a carriage return command (to send the print head back to the left) and a line feed command (to step the paper up one line).
I don't understand the cries of "censorship! censorship!" in this comment thread. The FSF's projects like glibc are collective endeavours following meritocratic / semi-democratic ideals, right? If the group has a discussion to decide what is appropriate content for its documentation, that's just the normal execution of a democratic process, not some imposed censorship. There's only one set of docs, the community needs to agree on what goes into them, even if that means some have to compromise or not get their way.
As far as I can see, the only autocratic decision here was RMS's assertion of control over glibc, and that the joke should be restored.
Your post is actually a good example of undue fear stoked in the US.
Kim Jong Un is not actually crazy. He understands clearly that if he actually drops a nuke on someone, he and his country will be blasted to matchsticks. Kim's only concern is survival, and he has seen the way dictators on the outs with the US tend to go: Saddam, Gadaffi, etc, and he wants a deterrent. Obviously it's not a good thing for North Korea to have nukes, but short of a regime-ending invasion of NK the weapons will never actually be used.
The hysteria that NYC or another US city might wake up in flames tomorrow is just that. But that fear glues eyeballs to the news, and fear makes for compliant citizens, so newsmakers and politicians have seen fit to feed that fear. It's manipulative and dangerous, and something we should each personally resist.
I've had the... opportunity... to develop on a 2016 era Macbook recently. I actually enjoy the mechanical aspects of the new keyboards: the low travel isn't an issue to me, and the sharp distinction between depressed and released states for the keys plus the relatively loud click on each keypress is an aid to typing. Most other keyboards (including older Macbook keyboards) seem very mushy by comparison. The only issue with the keyboard itself is how tightly spaced the keys are, combined with their low height, it can be difficult to even sense the gap between the keys to orient your fingers.
What's a shame is that these Macbooks have other glaring human interface issues. The touch bar is garbage. The entire point of a keyboard is that you can operate it without looking at it, and while looking at the screen I invariably end up brushing random buttons on the touch bar all day long without intending to. There is no tactile warning or feedback whatsoever, I'm working on a task one moment and the next my system has gone into expose mode, or begun playing a song, or muted what I was playing, or gone to sleep, or cancelled what I was doing, or dimmed the screen, or switched to a different tab, or something else entirely.
The enormous touch pad is similarly garbage. There's only a few millimetres of separation between the touch pad and the keyboard, and while the palm rejection is top notch it is also far from perfect. It's not possible to use the keyboard without your hands lurking near or on the touch pad. And so, it happens a dozen times per day that a brush of the touch pad by my palm while typing sends the input cursor off somewhere else in my open file, producing confusion and wasting time.
Much love for my 2005 IBM R series Thinkpad, that keyboard remains remarkable even after all this time.
Also much love for my Unicomp Model M replica. I grew up on the Model M and I'll own a keyboard like it until I die, despite the fact that I can't hear my own thoughts over the keyboard clatter.
Some folks I know in Australia describe the cockatoos there as amazingly destructive. They travel in flocks, and will occasionally settle on some poor somebody's roof and rip half of the shingles off, just for fun. TFA is no surprise to me.
There was once a time in the US where you could reasonably make the case that armed militia were a useful way to keep the government in check, but no longer. Look at the equipment, weapons, numbers, and discipline that the police and national guard possesss these days. Any individual or small group (or even large group) taking armed action against the state is committing suicide.
Further, what kind of collapse would the country have to suffer before some sort of armed confrontation with the state becomes anything like a reasonable choice? The US may be up against many crises, but it is still a functioning country and (nearly) a functioning democracy.
I think, if you want to guard your governments against tyranny, your time is much better spent reading good journalism and being engaged with local and state politics, rather than arming yourself for some imagined doomsday.
Guns are only tools, but it's important to consider what they are useful for. Handguns and assault rifles are only useful for hunting one kind of animal: humans.
In my town, the worst mass killing we ever experienced occurred a few years ago. A young man became mentally disturbed, and killed five people, with a knife. I can only imagine what he might have been able to do with greater access to more efficient tools for killing people, but I live in Canada, where there is no legal path to obtain an automatic weapon, and where even obtaining a handgun requires two licenses, two safety courses, and two cumulative months of cooling off after obtaining those permits.
We will likely always have mentally ill and malicious people with us, but we should make it as hard as possible for them to do harm. Tightly restricting ownership of weapons designed for killing only human beings is a reasonable way to do this.
Guns are not a silly hobby, they are an enshrined RIGHT.
Only in the US. Guns are tools for killing things. As tools, shotguns and long rifles have lots of legitimate uses in the countryside. But the only animals you can hunt with a handgun are other human beings, and the only purpose for a fully automatic weapon is to kill lots of humans at high efficiency.
These are tools that have no place in modern society, the rest of the first world has figured this out. But the US has been ensnared by an irrational culture of gun fear: fear for personal safety, fear of state and police, fear of vanishingly rare incidents of terror. It is a fear that says: the only way to be safe is to wrap your hands around a rifle. It a fear fostered by the makers of weapons and their ideological friends, and they make millions off of it.
For the US to recover from its plague of shootings large and small, it needs to recover from that fear first. A good next step after that would be a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Every country except for the US and Canada has it on Netflix. This year it's on cable in Canada... but I hear the CBS subscription service is moving north.
I'd just like to point out that those of us who DVR'd the premiere were in for some disappointment: some football game ran late and the show aired off of schedule.
How many of those pirates torrented the show just to find out how it ended?
I use ESLint with editor integration, which will tell me if I have unused, misspelled, or shadowed variables, among a hundred other code correctness issues.
For people who really want type checks in Javascript, there are also tools like Flow and transpiled languages like Typescript. It's more of a 'types optional' thing now.
I wouldn't be born for a little while, but Challenger still ended up leaving a mark on me. It affected my father enough that he pinned a colour printout of the explosion to the wall by our computer, and it stayed there for much of my childhood.
The various browser DOM implementations are an endless fountain of weird bugs, even today. One of the most bizarre I've tackled was an issue that cropped up in a headless browser test. One input element for currency would intermittently report the reverse of the value entered into it by the automated test. 234.00 became $432.00.
Try as I might, I couldn't reproduce the problem in an actual browser, which meant using the slightly less than awesome tools for inspecting state in a headless browser. Suspecting that the jQuery plugin for currency formatting responsible, I debugged its handling of the input end to end, and found nothing. But disabling the plugin suppressed the problem. Identical code on other pages worked without issue. And then, I discovered that commenting out the input element *after* my currency element made the problem go away. So what followed was a few hours of trying to find any way in which the code for managing these two inputs could possibly be interacting, nothing.
Finally, I got to bisecting the HTML itself, and found a styling related HTML class on the second input, that would suppress the problem if it was removed.
Some combination of unsupported CSS in the headless browser squashing my form elements, the jQuery plugin reformatting input, and the way the test runner entered input into the form resulted in the string getting reversed, sometimes. To this day I still don't know exactly what was happening.
The fix ended up being a tiny CSS tweak completely unrelated to my poor currency input.
I think a better idea would be to encourage the students to participate in bringing their objections to the teacher, whom could let them do the assignment with a different image.
That's a great idea! Tell you what, from now on, lets bake sexist messages into every assignment in every class, so that our students can have endless learning experiences confronting their teacher's authority. Better than doing homework!
1) How do you distinguish between 'censorship' and progress? If we don't speak up and call out problems at work and at school when we see them, then things will never change. Compare this with attempts to introduce intelligent design into science classrooms; was it 'censorship' to demand that 'Of Pandas and People' not be introduced as a school textbook?
2) I'm not calling for the photo to be erased from history, or for old papers to be banned for containing it. I'm asking people to think carefully about what the purpose of CS class is and about what we content we choose to put into it.
Some students will come to class prepared to deal with the messages introduced by the Lena photo. But some students will not be. Those latter students (men and women) may well have internalized lots of horrible ideas about how men and women should interact with each other from endless other places in society. The guys may experience this as a tiny validation of dude-bro culture, the girls may see this as confirmation that they're mainly valuable for their looks.
We can't know who the people who will experience this story in their classroom will be. So why the heck should we risk turning some of these young people off of CS, or risk deepening some of their prejudices, when if we just chose another photo we could avoid the problem?
There is one circumstance where I could see bringing the Lena photo up in CS class though. As an exhibit of the sexism baked into the field, and as a starting point for a discussion about it.
It is astonishing to me how many ways commenters have found to contort themselves around the obvious problems that come with using a porn-derived image in a classroom.
We should try to create environments at school and at work where people can excel based on their ability, character, and drive. And we should try to break down barriers related to identity, whether they be external (limits imposed on someone by the prejudices of others) or internal (messages received by someone saying they don't belong, or aren't competent, that assault a person's self confidence purely because of their identity). That should go for our field, and for every field. That should go for every conceivable way we could label a person: gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, language, everything. This is liberalism 101.
This photo is a slap in the face. It is derived from porn, a medium that is today inseparable from images of women as objects for men to control and humiliate, and that obliterate women as human beings. Like it or not, these are the connotations of porn, and these are the messages that explode into the classroom when you put a playboy centrefold in your students' homework. Young women hear that this is how women are thought of in this field. Young men hear that it is OK think of women this way too. This isn't about causing offense, this isn't about anybody's feelings. This is about the tacit messages of porn infiltrating CS class.
Yes, the cropped image itself has no nudity. Yes, it's an established piece of CS history. Neither of these things lessen the problem.
Folks, your reaction here is a big part of the reason why we have a massive gender imbalance in software and IT. You and I are each responsible a little slice of the culture that has excluded women for so long, and we are each responsible for changing our slice for the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly this.
It's fundamental to user interface design that the interface not lie to the user and that it put them in control, rather than the other way around. Whenever a system takes that power away the results vary from irritating (inability to control Windows updates) to enraging (inability to disable location tracking in newer versions of Android, cell network locking) to dangerous (the MCAS system). The system is transformed from a trustworthy tool to something unpredictable and harmful.
I'm all for a 30 km/h speed limit on residential roads, the stats cited by other posters are absolutely true, it would save a lot of lives in pedestrian collisions. But an automated system enforcing a hard limit is the wrong way to achieve this.
To say nothing of the potential carnage if a system like this fails. What if your speed regulator has a problem, decides that your limit is 30 km/h on a highway where everyone else is doing 110, and slams on the brakes for you?
I don't think the point of the piece is that people see content on youtube and mindlessly vote a certain way because of it. What these budding politicians have done is tap into a new broadcast medium to build networks of supporters. They've created a sense of common identity. Like Trump, they've figured out that they don't have to go through mainstream media to reach interested people, they can just speak directly to them.
I suspect that this is a sign of the times. The power of TV, radio, and newsprint isn't going away overnight, but my guess is that we'll increasingly see successful campaigns built on networks like these, without any gatekeeper between supporter and candidate.
Yes, obviously, slavery and those things you just invented warrant similar levels of justified outrage.
Changing the terms because some people find them offensive is the right thing to do.
It's true that offence is personal. Not everyone has a problem using master/slave, lots of commenters here clearly don't. It's true that people can theoretically claim to be 'offended' by just about anything. Lots of commenters have come up with wild fantasies where other words could (but never will) be targeted for replacement.
The civil war may have ended the formal institution of slavery, but racism against blacks is alive and well. If you doubt this, try googling "life while black". I find it completely reasonable for people who daily face different treatment because of their skin to ask for one less reminder of it while they're at work. "Political correctness" isn't about forcing people to change their language just because, or about rubbing your virtue in everyone's face. It's about having some fucking empathy for the people around you.
The cost of changing a few words in the docs is marginal to non-existent. If it improves a few people's days, we should gladly do it.
Both of course! CR followed by LF has been the Microsoft line ending style since DOS at least. The convention dates to the teletype era, where moving the print head to a new line required a carriage return command (to send the print head back to the left) and a line feed command (to step the paper up one line).
Sorry to burst your bubble about Shaggy, but...
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...
I don't understand the cries of "censorship! censorship!" in this comment thread. The FSF's projects like glibc are collective endeavours following meritocratic / semi-democratic ideals, right? If the group has a discussion to decide what is appropriate content for its documentation, that's just the normal execution of a democratic process, not some imposed censorship. There's only one set of docs, the community needs to agree on what goes into them, even if that means some have to compromise or not get their way.
As far as I can see, the only autocratic decision here was RMS's assertion of control over glibc, and that the joke should be restored.
Your post is actually a good example of undue fear stoked in the US.
Kim Jong Un is not actually crazy. He understands clearly that if he actually drops a nuke on someone, he and his country will be blasted to matchsticks. Kim's only concern is survival, and he has seen the way dictators on the outs with the US tend to go: Saddam, Gadaffi, etc, and he wants a deterrent. Obviously it's not a good thing for North Korea to have nukes, but short of a regime-ending invasion of NK the weapons will never actually be used.
The hysteria that NYC or another US city might wake up in flames tomorrow is just that. But that fear glues eyeballs to the news, and fear makes for compliant citizens, so newsmakers and politicians have seen fit to feed that fear. It's manipulative and dangerous, and something we should each personally resist.
I've had the... opportunity... to develop on a 2016 era Macbook recently. I actually enjoy the mechanical aspects of the new keyboards: the low travel isn't an issue to me, and the sharp distinction between depressed and released states for the keys plus the relatively loud click on each keypress is an aid to typing. Most other keyboards (including older Macbook keyboards) seem very mushy by comparison. The only issue with the keyboard itself is how tightly spaced the keys are, combined with their low height, it can be difficult to even sense the gap between the keys to orient your fingers.
What's a shame is that these Macbooks have other glaring human interface issues. The touch bar is garbage. The entire point of a keyboard is that you can operate it without looking at it, and while looking at the screen I invariably end up brushing random buttons on the touch bar all day long without intending to. There is no tactile warning or feedback whatsoever, I'm working on a task one moment and the next my system has gone into expose mode, or begun playing a song, or muted what I was playing, or gone to sleep, or cancelled what I was doing, or dimmed the screen, or switched to a different tab, or something else entirely.
The enormous touch pad is similarly garbage. There's only a few millimetres of separation between the touch pad and the keyboard, and while the palm rejection is top notch it is also far from perfect. It's not possible to use the keyboard without your hands lurking near or on the touch pad. And so, it happens a dozen times per day that a brush of the touch pad by my palm while typing sends the input cursor off somewhere else in my open file, producing confusion and wasting time.
Much love for my 2005 IBM R series Thinkpad, that keyboard remains remarkable even after all this time.
Also much love for my Unicomp Model M replica. I grew up on the Model M and I'll own a keyboard like it until I die, despite the fact that I can't hear my own thoughts over the keyboard clatter.
Some folks I know in Australia describe the cockatoos there as amazingly destructive. They travel in flocks, and will occasionally settle on some poor somebody's roof and rip half of the shingles off, just for fun. TFA is no surprise to me.
There was once a time in the US where you could reasonably make the case that armed militia were a useful way to keep the government in check, but no longer. Look at the equipment, weapons, numbers, and discipline that the police and national guard possesss these days. Any individual or small group (or even large group) taking armed action against the state is committing suicide.
Further, what kind of collapse would the country have to suffer before some sort of armed confrontation with the state becomes anything like a reasonable choice? The US may be up against many crises, but it is still a functioning country and (nearly) a functioning democracy.
I think, if you want to guard your governments against tyranny, your time is much better spent reading good journalism and being engaged with local and state politics, rather than arming yourself for some imagined doomsday.
Guns are only tools, but it's important to consider what they are useful for. Handguns and assault rifles are only useful for hunting one kind of animal: humans.
In my town, the worst mass killing we ever experienced occurred a few years ago. A young man became mentally disturbed, and killed five people, with a knife. I can only imagine what he might have been able to do with greater access to more efficient tools for killing people, but I live in Canada, where there is no legal path to obtain an automatic weapon, and where even obtaining a handgun requires two licenses, two safety courses, and two cumulative months of cooling off after obtaining those permits.
We will likely always have mentally ill and malicious people with us, but we should make it as hard as possible for them to do harm. Tightly restricting ownership of weapons designed for killing only human beings is a reasonable way to do this.
Guns are not a silly hobby, they are an enshrined RIGHT.
Only in the US. Guns are tools for killing things. As tools, shotguns and long rifles have lots of legitimate uses in the countryside. But the only animals you can hunt with a handgun are other human beings, and the only purpose for a fully automatic weapon is to kill lots of humans at high efficiency.
These are tools that have no place in modern society, the rest of the first world has figured this out. But the US has been ensnared by an irrational culture of gun fear: fear for personal safety, fear of state and police, fear of vanishingly rare incidents of terror. It is a fear that says: the only way to be safe is to wrap your hands around a rifle. It a fear fostered by the makers of weapons and their ideological friends, and they make millions off of it.
For the US to recover from its plague of shootings large and small, it needs to recover from that fear first. A good next step after that would be a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Every country except for the US and Canada has it on Netflix. This year it's on cable in Canada... but I hear the CBS subscription service is moving north.
I'd just like to point out that those of us who DVR'd the premiere were in for some disappointment: some football game ran late and the show aired off of schedule. How many of those pirates torrented the show just to find out how it ended?
I use ESLint with editor integration, which will tell me if I have unused, misspelled, or shadowed variables, among a hundred other code correctness issues.
For people who really want type checks in Javascript, there are also tools like Flow and transpiled languages like Typescript. It's more of a 'types optional' thing now.
I wouldn't be born for a little while, but Challenger still ended up leaving a mark on me. It affected my father enough that he pinned a colour printout of the explosion to the wall by our computer, and it stayed there for much of my childhood.
The various browser DOM implementations are an endless fountain of weird bugs, even today. One of the most bizarre I've tackled was an issue that cropped up in a headless browser test. One input element for currency would intermittently report the reverse of the value entered into it by the automated test. 234.00 became $432.00. Try as I might, I couldn't reproduce the problem in an actual browser, which meant using the slightly less than awesome tools for inspecting state in a headless browser. Suspecting that the jQuery plugin for currency formatting responsible, I debugged its handling of the input end to end, and found nothing. But disabling the plugin suppressed the problem. Identical code on other pages worked without issue. And then, I discovered that commenting out the input element *after* my currency element made the problem go away. So what followed was a few hours of trying to find any way in which the code for managing these two inputs could possibly be interacting, nothing. Finally, I got to bisecting the HTML itself, and found a styling related HTML class on the second input, that would suppress the problem if it was removed. Some combination of unsupported CSS in the headless browser squashing my form elements, the jQuery plugin reformatting input, and the way the test runner entered input into the form resulted in the string getting reversed, sometimes. To this day I still don't know exactly what was happening. The fix ended up being a tiny CSS tweak completely unrelated to my poor currency input.
I think a better idea would be to encourage the students to participate in bringing their objections to the teacher, whom could let them do the assignment with a different image.
That's a great idea! Tell you what, from now on, lets bake sexist messages into every assignment in every class, so that our students can have endless learning experiences confronting their teacher's authority. Better than doing homework!
Two points,
1) How do you distinguish between 'censorship' and progress? If we don't speak up and call out problems at work and at school when we see them, then things will never change. Compare this with attempts to introduce intelligent design into science classrooms; was it 'censorship' to demand that 'Of Pandas and People' not be introduced as a school textbook?
2) I'm not calling for the photo to be erased from history, or for old papers to be banned for containing it. I'm asking people to think carefully about what the purpose of CS class is and about what we content we choose to put into it.
Some students will come to class prepared to deal with the messages introduced by the Lena photo. But some students will not be. Those latter students (men and women) may well have internalized lots of horrible ideas about how men and women should interact with each other from endless other places in society. The guys may experience this as a tiny validation of dude-bro culture, the girls may see this as confirmation that they're mainly valuable for their looks.
We can't know who the people who will experience this story in their classroom will be. So why the heck should we risk turning some of these young people off of CS, or risk deepening some of their prejudices, when if we just chose another photo we could avoid the problem?
There is one circumstance where I could see bringing the Lena photo up in CS class though. As an exhibit of the sexism baked into the field, and as a starting point for a discussion about it.
It is astonishing to me how many ways commenters have found to contort themselves around the obvious problems that come with using a porn-derived image in a classroom.
We should try to create environments at school and at work where people can excel based on their ability, character, and drive. And we should try to break down barriers related to identity, whether they be external (limits imposed on someone by the prejudices of others) or internal (messages received by someone saying they don't belong, or aren't competent, that assault a person's self confidence purely because of their identity). That should go for our field, and for every field. That should go for every conceivable way we could label a person: gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, language, everything. This is liberalism 101.
This photo is a slap in the face. It is derived from porn, a medium that is today inseparable from images of women as objects for men to control and humiliate, and that obliterate women as human beings. Like it or not, these are the connotations of porn, and these are the messages that explode into the classroom when you put a playboy centrefold in your students' homework. Young women hear that this is how women are thought of in this field. Young men hear that it is OK think of women this way too. This isn't about causing offense, this isn't about anybody's feelings. This is about the tacit messages of porn infiltrating CS class.
Yes, the cropped image itself has no nudity. Yes, it's an established piece of CS history. Neither of these things lessen the problem.
Folks, your reaction here is a big part of the reason why we have a massive gender imbalance in software and IT. You and I are each responsible a little slice of the culture that has excluded women for so long, and we are each responsible for changing our slice for the better.