You mean these accusations without proof didn't stick and he didn't get "me-too'd" so now we say it's about his conduct during the testimony in which he was put in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. That testimony shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Though I'm not a republican and wouldn't want someone with Kavanaugh's views (don't care about his conduct) on the supreme court, the attention given to the accusations leveled at him was nothing short of remarkable, and the way the press (and shows like the Daily Show) pumped and milked the issue was pretty disgusting. Then again I'm not an American either, so whatever... Except that the same sort of new puritanism is creeping into our politics as well.
If you're contracted to do a certain job, I don't think it's unethical to continue drawing a pay check after you've automated the job into a zero effort activity. It might not be the smart thing to do, but there's nothing wrong with it unless you're lying to your boss about what you are up to all day. But at the same time I don't see why the company shouldn't fire you when they find out. Usually, whatever you produce on company hours is theirs, including your automation scripts. Now if I as an employer found out about something like this, I'd be on the fence: on the one hand I would want to retain an employee who did such a valuable service to the company, maybe they can do the same in other departments as well. On the other hand, I'd have some questions about the employee's work ethic...
That last swatting incident (well, I do hope there haven't been any since) absolutely did not warrant a huge response in the form of massive presence of police with weapons at the ready, nor did it in any way shape or form warrant the officers opening fire on the guy. GP is absolutely right that police officers would do well to realize they are "not in Iraq", and that they are dealing with citizens who are at most suspected of wrongdoing. And as long as they are merely suspect, they deserve to be treated courteously and not end up dead.
Given the MO of police in the USA, I seriously doubt that this anti swatting database is going to make any difference.
As with most affirmative action laws, this one is probably made around the idea that women are being excluded from boards for reasons other than a lack of qualities relevant to the job, and forcing companies to take on women in such roles will reduce such sexism over time to the point where affirmative action isn't needed anymore. A bit like offering a free sample at a supermarket: if you like it, you'll hopefully buy more. Except this is mandatory. And not free.
So no: there will be no law that says you can't have an all female board, because there's no widespread bias against men when selecting board members. The all-male boards aren't the problem, the bias is. And once that has been addressed, presumably the law will be repealed and it'll be ok again to have an all male (or all female) board.
With that said, I am not so sure if there really is a significant bias against women in this day and age. There are other factors that affect a woman's career differently than a man's, both cultural and biological. And I don't think we should compensate for any natural disadvantages certain groups may or may not have, because then you're definitely doing away with selecting the best person for the job. I also don't know if affirmative action laws are terribly effective at addressing that bias, if it exists.
And soon, false accusations and backstabbing will start as well, completely destroying the community
That fear is not wholly unfounded, I suppose. Some time (ages) ago I was involved in running a couple of RPG guilds and online communities. As with any community, there was some friction and occasional fighting or bad language. And as I remember, setting rules around this required great care. In some cases, not setting any rules worked well, it sent a message "we don't really care" and if some people started fighting, the rest of them told them to grow up and that would be that. In other cases, setting some ground rules worked well, especially when it came to cleaning up the language... but this was about swear words that everyone knew were bad, not about SJW stuff like not saying kill (a process) or slave (process) or female (connector). The rules that got people arguing (like banning those non sweary words) didn't work out so well: they tended to suck everyone into every argument, with calls to ban this or that person, or to institute more rules to cover additional cases.
In the end I feel the same way about codes of conduct as I do about coding standards: best when they are clear and brief rather than all-encompassing, best when they are guidelines rather than rules,and best when you don't summarily execute transgressors. The COC for the Linux Kernel doesn't look all that bad, but as I said before, the devil is in the enforcement... and with the current hyper-sensitivity around certain subjects, this in itself modest COC has the potential to turn into an utterly divisive ruleset.
Personally, I don't think foul language is required to tell someone that their contribution is not up to par. Be respectful of others, but also be honest to them. At the same time I also don't believe people need to think of my "feelings" when telling me that I did something stupid. I'd take a good bollocking any day over that wishy-washy we-are-all-equal-unicorns nonsense.
Fully agree. The real question is what happens if someone does decide to use foul or sexist language. Will they tell him: "Language please!" or will he be booted off the project?
Sure, but it would be the rights holders asking for it to be rescinded, not the contributor. The contributor can of course point out a rights violation to the team, after that it's up to them to either seek a license from the rights holders or replace the offending code.
Offenders are easy to spot. The offense is not for 'making a call' but for 'holding a phone' while driving / cycling. And making a law against that is a good first step towards more awareness about the dangers. People here have a pretty strong faith in the overall fairness and usefulness of the law, so they reason: "If using a phone while cycling really was that dangerous, they would have made a law against it". Well, now we have.
It's also good for motorists, even if it isn't policed particularly well. Over here, if there's an accident between a cyclist and a motorist, the motorist will pretty much always have to pay even if they are deemed not to have caused the accident. The reasoning is that motorists are "cagers"; well protected, and should therefore exercise maximum due caution towards more vulnerable road users. Also they always have insurance. But there are exceptions when a cyclist is shown to be particularly careless: riding without lights on a dark country road, for instance. And under this new law, perhaps riding while using a cell phone will also count as carelessness.
"Idaho stop" sounds like something nasty happening on a dark highway. "I got pulled over, and that bastard cop gave me an Idaho stop! I couldn't sit properly for a week..."
You are allowed to use them if they are in a cradle, as is the case when driving a car. Mind, a copper can still do you for 'dangerous conduct' (Art. 5 WVW 1994) if he notices you spend an awful long time looking at the cell phone clipped to the dash instead of watching the road. I wonder if they will apply that law to bike riders as well.
Is there a responsible way to use Roundup? I've used it before to get rid of hops (a real bastard of a plant), spraying Roundup on the leaves while taking care to not spill any on the other plants and flowers or the ground. That kills it good, and I don't see how it would bother the bees much (I have loads but they never get near the hops), but now I'm not so sure about that. Still, it's not quite the same as a farmer spraying his entire field of Roundup-ready crop.
Good for him - both the selling out and the walking out. If I had an opportunity to sell acompany I built, for a couple of billion, I might hesitate if the buyer had questionable ethics on matters of privacy... but I wouldn't hesitate for very long. Especially if my company was burning through money at a prodigious rate without much opportunity to bring in significant revenue. The real question is: if a second buyer shows up, promising to respect users' privacy, but they only offer 50 million, would you sell to them instead? I think I would...
Besides, didn't Facebook make a pledge to keep the Whatsapp data separate? He might have known that was an iffy promise from the start, but this broken promise is not on him, it's on FB. And it's something the EU have given them shit for.
The sad thing is that this seems to be a common revenue model for startups nowadays. Whatever it is you're building, it must be cloud based and/or collect user data (or have the option to tack that on later), so that you can have a good payday selling the service to Google or FaceBook once you've garnered enough users.
These things on tracks are called trams everywhere in Europe. And I've never heard the word tram used to refer to anything other than a tracked vehicle that to some degree shares the road with other traffic.
Making them autonomous is a good thing: my wife got rear-ended by a tram because the driver was dicking around on his cell phone, and the results were pretty bad: an extensive hospital stay & totaled car (she didn't get a dime from the f*ckers either). A self driving tram or one with anti collision might have prevented that accident.
I'm noticing the same thing in younger adults. Personally I do try to listen to contemporary music from time to time, I have a pretty high tolerance level for crap and there still is the occasional worthwhile piece of music to be had. What I do find sad is that there are more than a few bands out there with obvious qualities, great vocals and guys who know their way around their instruments, but the songs are still shit and sound like they were written by some algorithm. Wasted talent.
There's quite a few good military applications of "simple" AR. No need for super performance to conjure up those floating jellyfish or whales jumping up out of the ground. A small processing unit and ocular for one eye (perhaps attached to a helmet) is enough to overlay whatever the soldier is looking at with relevant information. The examples mentioned in the article wouldn't require much, but it makes sense for the military to contract with a firm who already have experience with the necessary optics and sensors, and who have put in a lot of effort to make the thing wearable and affordable.
Animal (and I guess kid) group names in (British) English are wonderfully weird:
A shrewdness of monkeys
A business of ferrets
A conspiracy of lemurs
A shadow of jaguars
An unkindness of ravens
A risk of lobsters
An audience of squid
I kid you not...
In normal cases about taxes, yes. But it rarely works like this if a tax ruling is deemed to constitute illegal state aid as well. In that case the EC think they have to re-level te playing field as it were, and roll back whatever was given as "state aid".
It depends on the circumstances in which the deal was made. If there was clear wrongdoing on Ireland's part, then a fine would be in order. But if Ireland acted in good faith and the Commission merely ruled differently on the interpretation of the rules, then the message to Ireland is: "Sorry, but you can't do that. You'll have to collect those taxes retroactively"
This is a case about illegal state aid, and was always against Ireland first, ordering them to collected taxes they should have collected in the first place. Apple has very little to do with this as far as the Commission is concerned. And had Apple decided not to pay, Europe would still have had no business suing Apple, they would - again - have to lean on Ireland instead to prosecute Apple for not paying. That is how all these cases work.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean these accusations without proof didn't stick and he didn't get "me-too'd" so now we say it's about his conduct during the testimony in which he was put in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. That testimony shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Though I'm not a republican and wouldn't want someone with Kavanaugh's views (don't care about his conduct) on the supreme court, the attention given to the accusations leveled at him was nothing short of remarkable, and the way the press (and shows like the Daily Show) pumped and milked the issue was pretty disgusting. Then again I'm not an American either, so whatever... Except that the same sort of new puritanism is creeping into our politics as well.
If you're contracted to do a certain job, I don't think it's unethical to continue drawing a pay check after you've automated the job into a zero effort activity. It might not be the smart thing to do, but there's nothing wrong with it unless you're lying to your boss about what you are up to all day. But at the same time I don't see why the company shouldn't fire you when they find out. Usually, whatever you produce on company hours is theirs, including your automation scripts. Now if I as an employer found out about something like this, I'd be on the fence: on the one hand I would want to retain an employee who did such a valuable service to the company, maybe they can do the same in other departments as well. On the other hand, I'd have some questions about the employee's work ethic...
That last swatting incident (well, I do hope there haven't been any since) absolutely did not warrant a huge response in the form of massive presence of police with weapons at the ready, nor did it in any way shape or form warrant the officers opening fire on the guy. GP is absolutely right that police officers would do well to realize they are "not in Iraq", and that they are dealing with citizens who are at most suspected of wrongdoing. And as long as they are merely suspect, they deserve to be treated courteously and not end up dead.
Given the MO of police in the USA, I seriously doubt that this anti swatting database is going to make any difference.
Stick enough "diverse" people into the same ridiculous echo chamber, and fights are bound to break out.
As with most affirmative action laws, this one is probably made around the idea that women are being excluded from boards for reasons other than a lack of qualities relevant to the job, and forcing companies to take on women in such roles will reduce such sexism over time to the point where affirmative action isn't needed anymore. A bit like offering a free sample at a supermarket: if you like it, you'll hopefully buy more. Except this is mandatory. And not free.
So no: there will be no law that says you can't have an all female board, because there's no widespread bias against men when selecting board members. The all-male boards aren't the problem, the bias is. And once that has been addressed, presumably the law will be repealed and it'll be ok again to have an all male (or all female) board.
With that said, I am not so sure if there really is a significant bias against women in this day and age. There are other factors that affect a woman's career differently than a man's, both cultural and biological. And I don't think we should compensate for any natural disadvantages certain groups may or may not have, because then you're definitely doing away with selecting the best person for the job. I also don't know if affirmative action laws are terribly effective at addressing that bias, if it exists.
And soon, false accusations and backstabbing will start as well, completely destroying the community
That fear is not wholly unfounded, I suppose. Some time (ages) ago I was involved in running a couple of RPG guilds and online communities. As with any community, there was some friction and occasional fighting or bad language. And as I remember, setting rules around this required great care. In some cases, not setting any rules worked well, it sent a message "we don't really care" and if some people started fighting, the rest of them told them to grow up and that would be that. In other cases, setting some ground rules worked well, especially when it came to cleaning up the language... but this was about swear words that everyone knew were bad, not about SJW stuff like not saying kill (a process) or slave (process) or female (connector). The rules that got people arguing (like banning those non sweary words) didn't work out so well: they tended to suck everyone into every argument, with calls to ban this or that person, or to institute more rules to cover additional cases.
In the end I feel the same way about codes of conduct as I do about coding standards: best when they are clear and brief rather than all-encompassing, best when they are guidelines rather than rules,and best when you don't summarily execute transgressors. The COC for the Linux Kernel doesn't look all that bad, but as I said before, the devil is in the enforcement... and with the current hyper-sensitivity around certain subjects, this in itself modest COC has the potential to turn into an utterly divisive ruleset.
Personally, I don't think foul language is required to tell someone that their contribution is not up to par. Be respectful of others, but also be honest to them. At the same time I also don't believe people need to think of my "feelings" when telling me that I did something stupid. I'd take a good bollocking any day over that wishy-washy we-are-all-equal-unicorns nonsense.
Fully agree. The real question is what happens if someone does decide to use foul or sexist language. Will they tell him: "Language please!" or will he be booted off the project?
the new CoC is absolutely guaranteed to drive away people who believe their contributions are more important than their genitals
Why is that?
Sure, but it would be the rights holders asking for it to be rescinded, not the contributor. The contributor can of course point out a rights violation to the team, after that it's up to them to either seek a license from the rights holders or replace the offending code.
Offenders are easy to spot. The offense is not for 'making a call' but for 'holding a phone' while driving / cycling. And making a law against that is a good first step towards more awareness about the dangers. People here have a pretty strong faith in the overall fairness and usefulness of the law, so they reason: "If using a phone while cycling really was that dangerous, they would have made a law against it". Well, now we have.
It's also good for motorists, even if it isn't policed particularly well. Over here, if there's an accident between a cyclist and a motorist, the motorist will pretty much always have to pay even if they are deemed not to have caused the accident. The reasoning is that motorists are "cagers"; well protected, and should therefore exercise maximum due caution towards more vulnerable road users. Also they always have insurance. But there are exceptions when a cyclist is shown to be particularly careless: riding without lights on a dark country road, for instance. And under this new law, perhaps riding while using a cell phone will also count as carelessness.
"Idaho stop" sounds like something nasty happening on a dark highway. "I got pulled over, and that bastard cop gave me an Idaho stop! I couldn't sit properly for a week..."
You are allowed to use them if they are in a cradle, as is the case when driving a car. Mind, a copper can still do you for 'dangerous conduct' (Art. 5 WVW 1994) if he notices you spend an awful long time looking at the cell phone clipped to the dash instead of watching the road. I wonder if they will apply that law to bike riders as well.
The domain wasn’t worth more than $5000, they only thought it was because the Packers intended to use it.
And no, this won’t happen to any domain. It happens if you are obviously engaging in cybersquatting.
Is there a responsible way to use Roundup? I've used it before to get rid of hops (a real bastard of a plant), spraying Roundup on the leaves while taking care to not spill any on the other plants and flowers or the ground. That kills it good, and I don't see how it would bother the bees much (I have loads but they never get near the hops), but now I'm not so sure about that. Still, it's not quite the same as a farmer spraying his entire field of Roundup-ready crop.
Good for him - both the selling out and the walking out. If I had an opportunity to sell acompany I built, for a couple of billion, I might hesitate if the buyer had questionable ethics on matters of privacy... but I wouldn't hesitate for very long. Especially if my company was burning through money at a prodigious rate without much opportunity to bring in significant revenue. The real question is: if a second buyer shows up, promising to respect users' privacy, but they only offer 50 million, would you sell to them instead? I think I would...
Besides, didn't Facebook make a pledge to keep the Whatsapp data separate? He might have known that was an iffy promise from the start, but this broken promise is not on him, it's on FB. And it's something the EU have given them shit for.
The sad thing is that this seems to be a common revenue model for startups nowadays. Whatever it is you're building, it must be cloud based and/or collect user data (or have the option to tack that on later), so that you can have a good payday selling the service to Google or FaceBook once you've garnered enough users.
These things on tracks are called trams everywhere in Europe. And I've never heard the word tram used to refer to anything other than a tracked vehicle that to some degree shares the road with other traffic.
Making them autonomous is a good thing: my wife got rear-ended by a tram because the driver was dicking around on his cell phone, and the results were pretty bad: an extensive hospital stay & totaled car (she didn't get a dime from the f*ckers either). A self driving tram or one with anti collision might have prevented that accident.
I'm noticing the same thing in younger adults. Personally I do try to listen to contemporary music from time to time, I have a pretty high tolerance level for crap and there still is the occasional worthwhile piece of music to be had. What I do find sad is that there are more than a few bands out there with obvious qualities, great vocals and guys who know their way around their instruments, but the songs are still shit and sound like they were written by some algorithm. Wasted talent.
There's quite a few good military applications of "simple" AR. No need for super performance to conjure up those floating jellyfish or whales jumping up out of the ground. A small processing unit and ocular for one eye (perhaps attached to a helmet) is enough to overlay whatever the soldier is looking at with relevant information. The examples mentioned in the article wouldn't require much, but it makes sense for the military to contract with a firm who already have experience with the necessary optics and sensors, and who have put in a lot of effort to make the thing wearable and affordable.
As a European I say that's a good plan.
`They have phones for the home now? And what on earth is an "answering machine"?
Animal (and I guess kid) group names in (British) English are wonderfully weird:
A shrewdness of monkeys
A business of ferrets
A conspiracy of lemurs
A shadow of jaguars
An unkindness of ravens
A risk of lobsters
An audience of squid
I kid you not...
In normal cases about taxes, yes. But it rarely works like this if a tax ruling is deemed to constitute illegal state aid as well. In that case the EC think they have to re-level te playing field as it were, and roll back whatever was given as "state aid".
It depends on the circumstances in which the deal was made. If there was clear wrongdoing on Ireland's part, then a fine would be in order. But if Ireland acted in good faith and the Commission merely ruled differently on the interpretation of the rules, then the message to Ireland is: "Sorry, but you can't do that. You'll have to collect those taxes retroactively"
This is a case about illegal state aid, and was always against Ireland first, ordering them to collected taxes they should have collected in the first place. Apple has very little to do with this as far as the Commission is concerned. And had Apple decided not to pay, Europe would still have had no business suing Apple, they would - again - have to lean on Ireland instead to prosecute Apple for not paying. That is how all these cases work.