The headline and summary of this article are not only false, but probably illegal slander. In no way can the sharing of "shared" data be considered "sharing private data," whether or not some users fooled themselves into thinking it was private. If anything, this is a benevolent move on Google's part because it makes users more aware of the fact that data they are explicitly making public is, in fact, public.
So fuck you, Slashdot, for lying to me and wasting my time.
That bears reiterating. If you are passing user input to a database in anything but a bind variable, you are incompetent. Period. End of story.
I've seen it so many times. Why do programmers think that it's a good idea to write their own escape routines when every database has a facility for denoting what is variable data and what is not? Unbelievable.
Well, that's just it. It failed because it was a stupid idea to begin with, at least in the form it took here. It seems pretty obvious that having people duplicate (quintuplicate?) expensive infrastructure that's inherently monopolistic in nature (no, you can't run another ugly wire down that mess sitting above my street) was doomed to failure. Competition/deregulation in the services area is a great idea, though. What should have happened is that the wiring/infrastructure that's inherently monopolistic be controlled by a central authority that provides equal access to all service providers and that takes direction from consumers. That might actually have a shot at benefitting Americans.
If I had to guess, I'd say that growth is slowing down because our infrastructure is stuck in the tarpit of failed deregulation. I just checked yesterday, and in Germany you can get a broadband connection approximately equivalent to one for which I'd have to pay $50/mo., for only €9/mo. In Sweden it seems regular people can get 100MBit connections to their homes at reasonable prices.
Maybe nobody else is jumping to get on the Internet because it's not getting any cheaper and it's not getting any better. $40-$50/mo. is a lot to pay for a lot of people. The giant media/telecom conglomerates certainly aren't making anything any better.
I'm a Comcast customer. I promise that if they institute filtering for traffic to attempt to control what I can and can't do with the network I'm paying for, I will switch to another provider. (Yes, I already went through this with port filtering, I did switch, but unfortunately I lost...at least they have a good argument for port 25, and they're not blocking port 80 anymore.) The only way to stop the big companies from doing asinine things like this is to make it affect their bottom line. So you too should promise to switch to providers with better policies when ISPs make decisions that hurt their customers.
I for one never understood why I shouldn't be able to watch DVDs that I bought in Europe because I *cannot* get them here.
That's easy! By denying you the ability to watch films from other countries, the members of the MPAA cartel encourage you to get your media fix by spending your money on their own films. As a fringe benefit, since you won't be exposed to other films, you won't even realize how bad their schlock is, nor will you be aware that their increasing influence over American politics is creating a more restrictive environment than that found in countries over which America has traditionally touted its freedom!
That must be a damn fine line doubler, or your cable company is ruining your HD (or maybe you have horrible eyesight or something). While the line-doubler/scaler in my DVD player probably isn't as fancy as yours, it's decent and I notice a HUGE difference between DVD and HD content. (Are you using HDMI/DVI? That makes a pretty big difference too.) There's a huge amount of resolution difference between 480p and 720p.
Granted, I have a projector that fills my living room wall, so I probably notice more of a difference than you if you've got a tiny 50" or so TV (tee hee). For me, though, even 720p/1080i are noticably lacking. I'm already wishing for 1080p (interlacing is just stupid anyway), so BluRay is definitely not useless!
Okay, this has got to be the most crackheaded story I've found on/., and that's saying a lot. Apple would lose 90% of its distinction if it moved to Windows. It will never happen. And dropping FireWire on the iPod as an indication? Hello? Moving to more standard components reduces price, and making a consumer device work with more than one operating system is hardly an indication that the other operating system is going to go away.
Please. This is just sensationalism. Move along; nothing to see here, folks.
Actually, I think (and I have no data to back this up, so I could be entirely wrong, but I'm probably not) that most things that have been released on DVD were done with a digital transfer at 1080p, which is still much better resolution than even typical HD and Blu-Ray will get us. They then recode that (digitally) down to the 480p resolution of DVDs, which should be a fairly inexpensive and straightforward process (I could do it on my PC with transcode, just give me the 1080p stream:) ) that's inexpensive and straightforward to do again for the 720p or 1080i formats of HD/Blu-Ray.
So I don't think it will take long at all for movies to come out on Blu-Ray, assuming it catches on and there's enough of a market for them to press/distribute the discs.
I love Legos* to death, but they are just too damn expensive.
Okay, I just searched on Amazon for Lego, and the first thing that came up was the Lego Creator 1000-Piece Tub: Fun with Building (4496), which sells for $20.99. So you're telling me that $21 for 1000 little machined pieces that can be put together in millions of ways and that will last generations is too expensive? You must be spending all your money on crack.
Sure, you can pay more for specialized things that create flashy toys that resemble other toys (for which Lego probably has to pay a licensing fee to the particular brand it resembles), or you can pay a lot for the Mindstorms kit that includes a microcomputer, but all this talk about Legos seems to be hogwash to me.
Hmmm...so basically, Sony violated copyright and some software licenses in order to create software that takes over your computer in order to...stop copyright infringement?
Actually, it does suck. Maybe it's fun to use and lets you do fancy things, but it undermines the things about the world wide web that make it fabulous. Things like openness and interoperability and compatibility and true platform-independence (working on three platforms is not platform independence).
Flash stifles innovation and hurts the web, by locking people into a proprietary standard, bringing us back to the situation we had before the web revolutionized communication. It's exactly this kind of move that should signal to people that Flash is bad. Now it's illegal to install Flash on a cell phone? You've got to be kidding me. One of the greatest features of the web is that it allows people to consume information in whatever way best meets their needs. Flash defeats that. It's time to start demanding a better, open standard, like SVG.
BTW, anyone who assumes that everyone has Flash and doesn't provide an alternate path through a website is flagrantly incompetent. *pfft* Okay, I'm done now.
Compared to all that, what benefit does Google Talk provide to customers? No, you can't hide behind "they MIGHT improve it"... Why does Google belong in this market? Is there something they're going to make available that makes it a stand-out? Do Google's existing skills make it likely that they can improve the IM market for consumers?
Google Talk provides the first globally scalable implementation of an open instant messaging protocol. That's a big deal. Sure Jabber existed before now, but jabber.com/jabber.org are relatively unreliable servers and don't have the hype to get "normal" users to use them. Google isn't Microsoft yet.
Still, I think they'll have to at least implement offline messages before they wean me off jabber.org for my geek-friends.
While we're on the subject of naivete...I really don't get the whole idea of "wireless security." People should be focusing on secure end-to-end protocols, not trying to secure the link that goes from your computer to the next hop. You do realize that everything is sent in the clear after that hop, right?
While making the wireless connection as secure as a wired connection (i.e. not very) may impede the casual traffic sniffer, it's really rather silly to think that it affors the user a "secure" connection to anywhere but that router in your house.
If you're worried about terrorists and pedophiles creeping into your backyard and sneaking into your wireless network, you need to be concerned with access control, not secure communication.
Besides, are you really comfortable with the idea that everything that goes across your network is loggable and directly traceable back to you? Kind of sounds like Big Brother to me. I'd rather we have a little bit of ambiguity here and there. I'll still be leaving my access point wide open, thanks.
There are enough people out there who are saturating there u/l as it is, and would saturate whatever the speed provided.
You're right that P2P poses a problem, but there's also a limit on how much people are going to download/upload. If everyone had good upstream, demand would be more easily satisfied as well, and spread out among more people/network nodes.
I pay $40/mo for a 3+ mbs line. ***$40***.
I paid about $250 for a high-end 300GB hard drive not long ago. That wouldn't have gotten me nearly as much space a few years ago. Network speeds are still getting higher; there are 10Gb network interfaces starting to come out. It only makes sense that our network speeds should keep pace with data storage rates. Especially companies that own their own fiber shouldn't have such a hard time offering large amounts of bandwidth. How many people are paying $40/mo. for a high-speed line now, compared to those paying $20/mo. for dialup a few years ago? Now most people I know have high-speed lines, while not so long ago most people didn't even know what dialup was. If a good portion of those people are casual web browsers that don't use a lot of bandwidth, it shouldn't be too hard to support a few kids with P2P that are saturating their lines.
Bandwidth is not free, people. Home servers that need more than 256 kbps upload speed generally use the bandwidth on a consistent basis. The service you get residentially is extremely cheap compared to business-class circuits, and this is why. You get the speed benefit (down) of a fat pipe but you won't get the volume that a more expensive circuit would offer. This is not because your ISP is evil, simply because, gasp!, they intend to make a profit.
Seriously, do you really think that if they moved to unlimited upload speeds, every user in America would be saturating their upstream pipe? I don't think so. Sort of like how they switched me up to 10Mb/s down and I still only use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth/month. Mostly the upstream would be used by chintzy personal websites that only a handful of people look at. BUT people could post their vacation pictures at full resolution and it wouldn't take their family 5 hours to look at them all. And a few people would put up really useful, interesting sites that use a lot of bandwidth and further increase the demand for high-speed connections. And a few people would come up with interesting applications that would take advantage of the ability of the average person to communicate bidirectionally at high speed.
I think the cost-saving argument against large upstream pipes is, frankly, bullshit. (If they can provide lots of high-bandwidth downstream pipes to people at low cost, they can do the same for upstream.) The issue is much more about control of content (Media conglomerates, anyone? Who owns your cable company?) and administrative issues that could be solved relatively easily.
I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.
What about firefox -P <profile>? (I have no idea whether or not the args are the same on Windows.) I know that's not a default, but I'm not sure what you mean by, "could default."
A properly defined standard and a browser plugin would make this idea go much farther.
Please no. Kill it now. Seriously, this is just another really bad idea that seems sort of neat that will make the web harder to use, like embedding your entire website in a flash animation. *shudder*
Here's why: Do you really think that a disambiguation entry that takes up a whole page in wikipedia is better expressed by a little popup window that you won't even see unless you move your mouse over the link? It's just more information that won't make it into search engines, that will confuse users, and that will encourage designers to produce websites that are difficult to navigate. Did you notice that with all that fancy multi-link functionality, the author didn't manage to link to a single other source that thought this was a good idea? Really, folks, it's not that hard to just add a footnote or parenthetical remark (see also fake links), and doing that is so much easier on the reader.
Stop making it so damned hard to get useful information out of a website!
Thank you.
P.S. I'm not kidding, just take that idea out into your backyard and bury it deep under the ground where no one will find it. I know, you're thinking, "Ooh, but it would be kind of cool if it were just integrated into the browser and you'd just get a nice list of links to click on." No. Just think of all the information that you'd need to present to the user to help her decide which one to pick. It just doesn't work in a little popup. Here, I'll get the shovel.
If you admittedly can't be bothered to read the entire thread the capacity for meaningful discussion is nerfed to zero because then nothing is context. It's convenient if your just looking for an argument rather than a reasonable discussion though.
Oop...I thought you were talking about the previous thread to which you linked. I'm responding to what you've said in this thread (and I don't see anything in this that supports the assertion that doing something that probably 90% of ~1/2 the population does for different reasons is displaying poor judgement on medical grounds), which I presume to be already vetted for refinements of your opinion as stated in the other thread.
You can stand on the social acceptability for customer-facing positions, but your claim about judgement is entirely bogus, being based on circular and flawed logic and generally unreasonable comparisons.
Well no, not if you accept that it can have a negative impact on the ability to perform the role by interacting with clients (all the development work I do involves external customers at some point).
Interacting with clients counts as a customer-facing position, and I'm not arguing with you there (not because I think that you're entirely correct there, either, but because I think that's a gray area more subject to opinion). In about 10 years, I can confidently say that the clear majority of engineering positions I've encountered (software development, QA, IT) were not customer-facing positions. IT is questionable because you have internal customers, but they don't have competition, so the company can take a stand for human tolerance and decide to disregard peculiarities of culture/appearance.
I'm also not talking about lizard boy. I think someone who has "freak" tattooed across his chest would likely be prepared for unusual difficulty in seeking traditional employment.
What, are you making a nuanced point or something? I don't have time to read all the posts you've ever written on the topic, but I don't need to anyway because I'm responding to what you just wrote here.
You tried to make the claim, erroneously, that body piercing displays poor judgement of the sort that would indicate poor performance as a developer. I'm claiming that your claim is without merit. You can stand on the social acceptability for customer-facing positions, but your claim about judgement is entirely bogus, being based on circular and flawed logic and generally unreasonable comparisons.
But it's okay if you're a woman and you just pierce your ears. Because that's totally different.
Well I don't think that's okay (hell, I'm sufficiently practical that I think high heeled shoes are very poor idea -a sensible approach to footwear is actually something I look for in women) not buying in to the pierced ears thing would definitely earn plus points in my book (ditto for thinking that diamonds on rings are ridiculously overpriced, not actually that pretty and are far better off on a drill bit).
However, it is undeniably different as far as social acceptability goes.
So you wouldn't hire a woman with pierced ears as a developer because her decision to pierce them demonstrates poor judgement? I doubt it.
At least be frank and realize that you're discriminating based on your personal biases and your perception of the biases of your customers (you have a point for customer-facing positions, but not otherwise), rather than trying to make a bogus argument about sound decision-making skills.
But it's okay if you're a woman and you just pierce your ears. Because that's totally different.
One of the fringe benefits of having a nose piercing and some earrings is that it's a decent way to weed out the idiots that are petty enough to care about them. If you're in a job interview for something that doesn't involve customer interaction and your interviewers are overly concerned about your piercings or look at you funny, you know you're going to be working with people who value irrational, emotional, societal prejudices over open-minded logic. They probably won't be able to think for themselves when designing or reviewing software either, and you'll probably be happier not working for them anyway.
That said, when times get tight, you might want to work with those idiots anyway. They have an uncanny ability to hold down tedious jobs, which have an interesting ability to remain in periods of lowered prosperity.
Also, if you're looking for a position with a lot of customer interaction, depending on the field, you might want to keep visibile body-mods to a minimum. It is a business reality that some customers will be idiots and unless your company is wildly successful, it will want to make money from idiots as well.
Really folks, not much interesting would happen if everyone worried about social acceptability all the time. Think about it.
Yeah, I don't want to get started on Nikon tech support.
The really vexing thing for me is that the hardware that I have is so good. The D70 is an amazing camera, and with my nice lenses I get great, clean photos. I got great scans from the LS-2000 when I got it all working, and if it had worked the way it should have, the slide feeder combination would be brilliant. They just make it so bloody difficult to work with because of their software, and then they go around trying to prevent others from making it easier! It's a waste, really.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline and summary of this article are not only false, but probably illegal slander. In no way can the sharing of "shared" data be considered "sharing private data," whether or not some users fooled themselves into thinking it was private. If anything, this is a benevolent move on Google's part because it makes users more aware of the fact that data they are explicitly making public is, in fact, public.
So fuck you, Slashdot, for lying to me and wasting my time.
That bears reiterating. If you are passing user input to a database in anything but a bind variable, you are incompetent. Period. End of story.
I've seen it so many times. Why do programmers think that it's a good idea to write their own escape routines when every database has a facility for denoting what is variable data and what is not? Unbelievable.
Well, that's just it. It failed because it was a stupid idea to begin with, at least in the form it took here. It seems pretty obvious that having people duplicate (quintuplicate?) expensive infrastructure that's inherently monopolistic in nature (no, you can't run another ugly wire down that mess sitting above my street) was doomed to failure. Competition/deregulation in the services area is a great idea, though. What should have happened is that the wiring/infrastructure that's inherently monopolistic be controlled by a central authority that provides equal access to all service providers and that takes direction from consumers. That might actually have a shot at benefitting Americans.
If I had to guess, I'd say that growth is slowing down because our infrastructure is stuck in the tarpit of failed deregulation. I just checked yesterday, and in Germany you can get a broadband connection approximately equivalent to one for which I'd have to pay $50/mo., for only €9/mo. In Sweden it seems regular people can get 100MBit connections to their homes at reasonable prices.
Maybe nobody else is jumping to get on the Internet because it's not getting any cheaper and it's not getting any better. $40-$50/mo. is a lot to pay for a lot of people. The giant media/telecom conglomerates certainly aren't making anything any better.
I'm a Comcast customer. I promise that if they institute filtering for traffic to attempt to control what I can and can't do with the network I'm paying for, I will switch to another provider. (Yes, I already went through this with port filtering, I did switch, but unfortunately I lost...at least they have a good argument for port 25, and they're not blocking port 80 anymore.) The only way to stop the big companies from doing asinine things like this is to make it affect their bottom line. So you too should promise to switch to providers with better policies when ISPs make decisions that hurt their customers.
That's easy! By denying you the ability to watch films from other countries, the members of the MPAA cartel encourage you to get your media fix by spending your money on their own films. As a fringe benefit, since you won't be exposed to other films, you won't even realize how bad their schlock is, nor will you be aware that their increasing influence over American politics is creating a more restrictive environment than that found in countries over which America has traditionally touted its freedom!
Good times here in America.
That must be a damn fine line doubler, or your cable company is ruining your HD (or maybe you have horrible eyesight or something). While the line-doubler/scaler in my DVD player probably isn't as fancy as yours, it's decent and I notice a HUGE difference between DVD and HD content. (Are you using HDMI/DVI? That makes a pretty big difference too.) There's a huge amount of resolution difference between 480p and 720p.
Granted, I have a projector that fills my living room wall, so I probably notice more of a difference than you if you've got a tiny 50" or so TV (tee hee). For me, though, even 720p/1080i are noticably lacking. I'm already wishing for 1080p (interlacing is just stupid anyway), so BluRay is definitely not useless!
Okay, this has got to be the most crackheaded story I've found on /., and that's saying a lot. Apple would lose 90% of its distinction if it moved to Windows. It will never happen. And dropping FireWire on the iPod as an indication? Hello? Moving to more standard components reduces price, and making a consumer device work with more than one operating system is hardly an indication that the other operating system is going to go away.
Please. This is just sensationalism. Move along; nothing to see here, folks.
Actually, I think (and I have no data to back this up, so I could be entirely wrong, but I'm probably not) that most things that have been released on DVD were done with a digital transfer at 1080p, which is still much better resolution than even typical HD and Blu-Ray will get us. They then recode that (digitally) down to the 480p resolution of DVDs, which should be a fairly inexpensive and straightforward process (I could do it on my PC with transcode, just give me the 1080p stream :) ) that's inexpensive and straightforward to do again for the 720p or 1080i formats of HD/Blu-Ray.
So I don't think it will take long at all for movies to come out on Blu-Ray, assuming it catches on and there's enough of a market for them to press/distribute the discs.
Er, that should have read "all this talk about Legos being expensive seems to be hogwash to me".
Okay, I just searched on Amazon for Lego, and the first thing that came up was the Lego Creator 1000-Piece Tub: Fun with Building (4496), which sells for $20.99. So you're telling me that $21 for 1000 little machined pieces that can be put together in millions of ways and that will last generations is too expensive? You must be spending all your money on crack.
Sure, you can pay more for specialized things that create flashy toys that resemble other toys (for which Lego probably has to pay a licensing fee to the particular brand it resembles), or you can pay a lot for the Mindstorms kit that includes a microcomputer, but all this talk about Legos seems to be hogwash to me.
Hmmm...so basically, Sony violated copyright and some software licenses in order to create software that takes over your computer in order to...stop copyright infringement?
Nice.
Actually, it does suck. Maybe it's fun to use and lets you do fancy things, but it undermines the things about the world wide web that make it fabulous. Things like openness and interoperability and compatibility and true platform-independence (working on three platforms is not platform independence).
Flash stifles innovation and hurts the web, by locking people into a proprietary standard, bringing us back to the situation we had before the web revolutionized communication. It's exactly this kind of move that should signal to people that Flash is bad. Now it's illegal to install Flash on a cell phone? You've got to be kidding me. One of the greatest features of the web is that it allows people to consume information in whatever way best meets their needs. Flash defeats that. It's time to start demanding a better, open standard, like SVG.
BTW, anyone who assumes that everyone has Flash and doesn't provide an alternate path through a website is flagrantly incompetent. *pfft* Okay, I'm done now.
Google Talk provides the first globally scalable implementation of an open instant messaging protocol. That's a big deal. Sure Jabber existed before now, but jabber.com/jabber.org are relatively unreliable servers and don't have the hype to get "normal" users to use them. Google isn't Microsoft yet.
Still, I think they'll have to at least implement offline messages before they wean me off jabber.org for my geek-friends.
Haha, heh...wait, are you serious?
While we're on the subject of naivete...I really don't get the whole idea of "wireless security." People should be focusing on secure end-to-end protocols, not trying to secure the link that goes from your computer to the next hop. You do realize that everything is sent in the clear after that hop, right?
While making the wireless connection as secure as a wired connection (i.e. not very) may impede the casual traffic sniffer, it's really rather silly to think that it affors the user a "secure" connection to anywhere but that router in your house.
If you're worried about terrorists and pedophiles creeping into your backyard and sneaking into your wireless network, you need to be concerned with access control, not secure communication.
Besides, are you really comfortable with the idea that everything that goes across your network is loggable and directly traceable back to you? Kind of sounds like Big Brother to me. I'd rather we have a little bit of ambiguity here and there. I'll still be leaving my access point wide open, thanks.
You're right that P2P poses a problem, but there's also a limit on how much people are going to download/upload. If everyone had good upstream, demand would be more easily satisfied as well, and spread out among more people/network nodes.
I paid about $250 for a high-end 300GB hard drive not long ago. That wouldn't have gotten me nearly as much space a few years ago. Network speeds are still getting higher; there are 10Gb network interfaces starting to come out. It only makes sense that our network speeds should keep pace with data storage rates. Especially companies that own their own fiber shouldn't have such a hard time offering large amounts of bandwidth. How many people are paying $40/mo. for a high-speed line now, compared to those paying $20/mo. for dialup a few years ago? Now most people I know have high-speed lines, while not so long ago most people didn't even know what dialup was. If a good portion of those people are casual web browsers that don't use a lot of bandwidth, it shouldn't be too hard to support a few kids with P2P that are saturating their lines.
Seriously, do you really think that if they moved to unlimited upload speeds, every user in America would be saturating their upstream pipe? I don't think so. Sort of like how they switched me up to 10Mb/s down and I still only use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth/month. Mostly the upstream would be used by chintzy personal websites that only a handful of people look at. BUT people could post their vacation pictures at full resolution and it wouldn't take their family 5 hours to look at them all. And a few people would put up really useful, interesting sites that use a lot of bandwidth and further increase the demand for high-speed connections. And a few people would come up with interesting applications that would take advantage of the ability of the average person to communicate bidirectionally at high speed.
I think the cost-saving argument against large upstream pipes is, frankly, bullshit. (If they can provide lots of high-bandwidth downstream pipes to people at low cost, they can do the same for upstream.) The issue is much more about control of content (Media conglomerates, anyone? Who owns your cable company?) and administrative issues that could be solved relatively easily.
I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.
What about firefox -P <profile>? (I have no idea whether or not the args are the same on Windows.) I know that's not a default, but I'm not sure what you mean by, "could default."
Yes, that's pretty annoying. Firefox lets you set a minimum font size, which effectively defeats such abuse.
Please no. Kill it now. Seriously, this is just another really bad idea that seems sort of neat that will make the web harder to use, like embedding your entire website in a flash animation. *shudder*
Here's why: Do you really think that a disambiguation entry that takes up a whole page in wikipedia is better expressed by a little popup window that you won't even see unless you move your mouse over the link? It's just more information that won't make it into search engines, that will confuse users, and that will encourage designers to produce websites that are difficult to navigate. Did you notice that with all that fancy multi-link functionality, the author didn't manage to link to a single other source that thought this was a good idea? Really, folks, it's not that hard to just add a footnote or parenthetical remark (see also fake links), and doing that is so much easier on the reader.
Stop making it so damned hard to get useful information out of a website!
Thank you.
P.S. I'm not kidding, just take that idea out into your backyard and bury it deep under the ground where no one will find it. I know, you're thinking, "Ooh, but it would be kind of cool if it were just integrated into the browser and you'd just get a nice list of links to click on." No. Just think of all the information that you'd need to present to the user to help her decide which one to pick. It just doesn't work in a little popup. Here, I'll get the shovel.
Oop...I thought you were talking about the previous thread to which you linked. I'm responding to what you've said in this thread (and I don't see anything in this that supports the assertion that doing something that probably 90% of ~1/2 the population does for different reasons is displaying poor judgement on medical grounds), which I presume to be already vetted for refinements of your opinion as stated in the other thread.
Interacting with clients counts as a customer-facing position, and I'm not arguing with you there (not because I think that you're entirely correct there, either, but because I think that's a gray area more subject to opinion). In about 10 years, I can confidently say that the clear majority of engineering positions I've encountered (software development, QA, IT) were not customer-facing positions. IT is questionable because you have internal customers, but they don't have competition, so the company can take a stand for human tolerance and decide to disregard peculiarities of culture/appearance.
I'm also not talking about lizard boy. I think someone who has "freak" tattooed across his chest would likely be prepared for unusual difficulty in seeking traditional employment.
What, are you making a nuanced point or something? I don't have time to read all the posts you've ever written on the topic, but I don't need to anyway because I'm responding to what you just wrote here.
You tried to make the claim, erroneously, that body piercing displays poor judgement of the sort that would indicate poor performance as a developer. I'm claiming that your claim is without merit. You can stand on the social acceptability for customer-facing positions, but your claim about judgement is entirely bogus, being based on circular and flawed logic and generally unreasonable comparisons.
So you wouldn't hire a woman with pierced ears as a developer because her decision to pierce them demonstrates poor judgement? I doubt it.
At least be frank and realize that you're discriminating based on your personal biases and your perception of the biases of your customers (you have a point for customer-facing positions, but not otherwise), rather than trying to make a bogus argument about sound decision-making skills.
But it's okay if you're a woman and you just pierce your ears. Because that's totally different.
One of the fringe benefits of having a nose piercing and some earrings is that it's a decent way to weed out the idiots that are petty enough to care about them. If you're in a job interview for something that doesn't involve customer interaction and your interviewers are overly concerned about your piercings or look at you funny, you know you're going to be working with people who value irrational, emotional, societal prejudices over open-minded logic. They probably won't be able to think for themselves when designing or reviewing software either, and you'll probably be happier not working for them anyway.
That said, when times get tight, you might want to work with those idiots anyway. They have an uncanny ability to hold down tedious jobs, which have an interesting ability to remain in periods of lowered prosperity.
Also, if you're looking for a position with a lot of customer interaction, depending on the field, you might want to keep visibile body-mods to a minimum. It is a business reality that some customers will be idiots and unless your company is wildly successful, it will want to make money from idiots as well.
Really folks, not much interesting would happen if everyone worried about social acceptability all the time. Think about it.
Yeah, I don't want to get started on Nikon tech support.
The really vexing thing for me is that the hardware that I have is so good. The D70 is an amazing camera, and with my nice lenses I get great, clean photos. I got great scans from the LS-2000 when I got it all working, and if it had worked the way it should have, the slide feeder combination would be brilliant. They just make it so bloody difficult to work with because of their software, and then they go around trying to prevent others from making it easier! It's a waste, really.