See the book "Unlocking the Clubhouse" for how high-achieving girls fascinated by computers suffer a death by a thousand cuts and switch fields despite their preference.
Yeah, like I'm going to pay $9.99 to read about what a heel I am. Plenty of places I can get that for free.
Google does not suffer from the NIH syndrome at all. Everything their own people developed like labs, autonomous car, lively, knol, orkut, dodgeball, buzz, wave and basically everything else failed pretty miserably. Their succesful products have been bought from other companies: android, earth, maps, gmail, youtube etc.
OK, I'll feed the troll. The autonomous car is neither an initially in-house project nor a failure. Dodgeball was an acquisition. Gmail was not an acquisition. "Labs" wasn't a product at all. Also you seem to have left out Search, Docs, and Drive.
Unfortunately, the average person that can afford one is not 'an excellent driver' by any stretch of the imagination, just a very rich one, and likely used to doing what they want in life.
Ah, so these cars are a way of teaching the wealthy (or their never-to-be-conceived descendants) that they can't buy their way out of the laws of physics. Sounds good to me.
So while China is putting robots on the moon, the US has had robots on Mars for some time now. China declared an air defense zone, the US military sent B52s over to pointedly ignore it. (The Japanese and South Korean militaries have also sent flights through the zone without following China's rules). As for the debt, there's a saying that if you owe the bank $100 you have a problem; if you owe the bank $100 million the bank has a problem.
Yeah, the "fine" fails on so many levels. A contract term added after the formation of the contract, enforced based on a contract that KlearGear breached (by not delivering), enforced on someone who was not the contracting party (the person posting the review was not the person who made the purchase), and unconscionable to boot.
Based on all this and my knowledge of the integrity of the legal system, my bet is the Palmers will lose their suit and KlearGear's fine will be upheld, with the Palmers paying KlearGear's attorney fees.
After all, for DHS translated to Russian, KGB is pretty accurate translation.
I think it's actually translated from the German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit -- the Stasi. Fortunately they lost the Stasi's competence in translation, unfortunately they kept the evil.
The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.
Only if they bought the company whole. If the company goes bankrupt and Toshiba buys "substantially all the assets of" the company, they may not get the obligations.
Try to pick up a few things on the way home from work in bag-free areas. Oops, damn, have the wrong car, the bags are in the other car. Fuck. Or you go into the supermarket and realize halfway through you forgot the bags. Or you get all the way up to the checkout and realize you have no bags (or if you're from out of area, learn about this shit the first time).
It's just one of the little things that demonstrate how much government is micromanaging people's lives.
I would be fine with you not wearing a seat belt, as long as it does not affect me when you get into an accident, including: - my health insurance premium does not go up because you pose a greater risk of requiring treatment (if your answer is: differentiate premiums between seat belt wearers and libertarians, how do you monitor that differentiating without an even greater breach of your Liberties?)
The idea that you should be able to control other's behavior which might have a deleterious effect on your health insurance premiums is not even a slippery slope to tyranny, it's tyranny in a single step.
- my taxes don't go up because you are now a burden on the emergency medical care system
I mean "worse" in all the ways sexual harrassment indoctrination tells you are worse. They make off-color jokes all the time, they hit on women brazenly, they discuss female co-workers physical attributes and how much they'd like to (or not like to) have sex with them, they refer to women in sex-specific derogatory ways (e.g. "bitch"), etc.
But the interesting thing about the articles in TFS is that 23&me has been very uncooperative. For a company with the level of financial backing and sophistication that they are presumed to have, I find it puzzling. I would like to hear what they have to say about the demand letter.
I would speculate that they intend to claim that their product is NOT a diagnostic device, and therefore does not fall under the purview of the FDA. If that's their claim, any co-operation with the FDA would tend to undermine it.
The FDA has been very, very conservative about letting complex medical information out to the public.
Yeah, don't really need a nanny protecting me from dangerous information. Might even be a first amendment issue there.
They tend to act like the very careful deliberative committee that they are.
"Hey Ms Wojcicki, could you shut down your company for 10 or 15 years while we decide whether it's OK for the public to be able to learn about their own genetics"
They are hardly perfect.
Well, they're also bastards who don't consider pain relief to be something worthy of consideration; no amount of pain relief can balance even the smallest risk of shortening life. And thus the COX 2 inhibitors were banned and millions with arthritis lived slightly longer lives which felt a whole lot longer. But that's another story.
Any kid of mine would be expected to disconnect, disable, spoof, cloak, or otherwise render useless any such device. I'd be disappointed in a child who did not at least make a good try at doing so, and even more disappointed if they actually followed the restrictions.
And if 23&Me does work, then it is in their own best interest for the FDA to enforce these requirements. Otherwise they will be driven out of the market by somebody who makes similar claims at a lower cost, by providing a shoddy and unreliable product. This isn't an area where consumers are able to judge quality for themselves.
Except that there's no way in hell that the FDA is going to approve 23&Me as a Class III medical device. And even if they could, it would end up costing $999 instead of $99 and you'd have to get a doctor's prescription to be able to use it.
Come now, there's plenty of selfish jerkass behavior in the geek community, we see it here all the time.
There's selfish jerkassery everywhere, but I disagree that being a geek is correlated with being a jerkass.
I see it all the time on Slashdot.
Nobody but you used that phrase or the Ferengi accent in this thread. Google search shows it isn't particular common when referring to women.
Why is it bizarre? It's your basic "Stop Being Stereotypical" rant. I don't mind some of the old slashdot culture, but "The Females", Natalie Portman memes and misogyny has got to go.
"Stop Being Stereotypical" rants are bizarre in themselves. Geek culture really is different from mainstream culture, and ranting against it on a place known for geek culture is bizarre. It's like a speaker telling an audience at an SF convention to "Get a life!".
But I'm not ignorant and culturally blind enough to not realize that there is a major gender gap in things like STEM subjects/fields and wages.
No one is arguing that a gender gap in STEM and especially IT and software development does not exist; only about the cause. Also note that Simpson's paradox abounds in statistical treatments.
On the other hand, if you're fairly confident in your ability to perform in the job then "might turn into a full-time job" is more or less "will almost certainly turn into a full-time job".
Only if it's an honest "might" as opposed to a "we only need a short contract but we know it's hard to get good people for that so we'll pretend there's a full time position available."
There is something wrong with some geek men, they simply are socially inept and simply are selfish jerks who don't realize they've benefited from male privilege and most likely socio-economic privilege all their lives.
Socially inept, at least in terms of the mainstream, is certainly a common characteristic of geeks. But you seem to be using "selfish jerk" as "person who does not agree with me", which I'm afraid is a nonstandard (though common) definition.
Of course they don't use the term "aspies" because that might put the men in a protected class also, which would make those PC brains explode."Near-aspies" is a good one for the less bleeding-heart of the PC set, though; it implies the men are socially inept while not giving them the excuse of a medical condition.
It's quite possible to be diagnosed with Asperger features without actually getting the full diagnosis. Also we see quite a few self-diagnosed people on Slashdot making various claims and using their "Aspergers" as an excuse for social ineptitude and general asshattery, as in "I'm blunt and do not understand why the hew-mon females are complaining because I have Aspergers"
Thank you for demonstrating my point so well.
Normally I'm fairly tolerant of socially inept speech, but that goddamned "the females" just really ticks me off.
Nobody used that phrase (or the Ferengi accent) but you. And while the term is "females" (no "the") is somewhat unusual in that context, being offended by it makes you look like a pedantic asshole. Seriously complaining that someone sounds like a basement-dwelling geek on Slashdot is just plain bizarre.
Yes, but as a nerd you probably weren't that interested in social status, being more interested in your computer. While the jocks might mess around with you a little, they won't usually dedicate themselves to making your life hell.
You don't think? Here, let me clue you in: you are mistaken.
Ah, but if you believe the whole "white male privilege" thing, or as John Scalzi puts it, white male being "the easiest difficulty level in the RPG called Real Life"
I do, it's fairly accurate, with modifications for socio-economic status/sexual identity/etc etc. For example Bill Gates is playing on Easy mode with Money cheat and God mode on. while some Poor guy is playing Easy Mode with his Loot setting turned down. While Poor guy has it harder than Bill Gates, his game is still easier than Poor Woman, Poor Black Guy and much much easier than Poor Black Woman.
It's worth noting that Scalzi doesn't consider wealth to be part of the difficulty level, only the starting condition. But the whole idea is crap anyway. Take the major quest of "obtaining a career in early childhood education"... much easier for men, right? Oh, wait, any man who enters such a field is suspected of being a pedophile. How about the minor quest of "getting out of a speeding ticket"... much easier for men there, too, right? No? My point isn't that there aren't plenty of areas where men have it easier, only that it's not a global difficulty level.
My actual studio is Sony Pictures. You guys are cool with Sony, right? =D
Is that the Sony of Sony v. Universal, who along with establishing the idea that time-shifting of television programs was fair use, also defeated the idea that manufacture and sale any device which might enable an infringing use was itself a secondary infringement?
Or is that the Sony which put rootkits on their CDs as a copy protection scheme?
Well, if they were really interested in having girls program, and they wanted people with nothing to do with programming, they should have had e.g. Beyonce and Miley Cyrus instead of will.i.am and Chris Bosh. But no, it's do as we say and not as we do.
On the other hand, as a chick whose favorite class in high school was programming it would have been nice to have more âoeculturalâ support when choosing my degree/career.
"Cultural" support for choosing computer programming as a career, for either gender, is relatively new. Certainly when I was in high school, interest in computers merely cemented my status as a geek and a nerd, before either one had any positive connotations.
Slashdot Mirror
Beauregard claims ought to be thrown out on patentability grounds, but I don't think this case is about them.
"Unpatentable set of instructions stored on patentable but non-novel machine-readable medium" should remain unpatentable.
If they simply take the raw 23&me test results and provide the analysis, there's no "device" for the FCC to use to assert jurisdiction.
Yeah, like I'm going to pay $9.99 to read about what a heel I am. Plenty of places I can get that for free.
OK, I'll feed the troll. The autonomous car is neither an initially in-house project nor a failure. Dodgeball was an acquisition. Gmail was not an acquisition. "Labs" wasn't a product at all. Also you seem to have left out Search, Docs, and Drive.
Ah, so these cars are a way of teaching the wealthy (or their never-to-be-conceived descendants) that they can't buy their way out of the laws of physics. Sounds good to me.
So while China is putting robots on the moon, the US has had robots on Mars for some time now. China declared an air defense zone, the US military sent B52s over to pointedly ignore it. (The Japanese and South Korean militaries have also sent flights through the zone without following China's rules). As for the debt, there's a saying that if you owe the bank $100 you have a problem; if you owe the bank $100 million the bank has a problem.
Yeah, the "fine" fails on so many levels. A contract term added after the formation of the contract, enforced based on a contract that KlearGear breached (by not delivering), enforced on someone who was not the contracting party (the person posting the review was not the person who made the purchase), and unconscionable to boot.
Based on all this and my knowledge of the integrity of the legal system, my bet is the Palmers will lose their suit and KlearGear's fine will be upheld, with the Palmers paying KlearGear's attorney fees.
"Computer Scientists and Statisticians Demonstrate That Computer Models Can Demonstrate Anything You Like"
I think it's actually translated from the German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit -- the Stasi. Fortunately they lost the Stasi's competence in translation, unfortunately they kept the evil.
Only if they bought the company whole. If the company goes bankrupt and Toshiba buys "substantially all the assets of" the company, they may not get the obligations.
Try to pick up a few things on the way home from work in bag-free areas. Oops, damn, have the wrong car, the bags are in the other car. Fuck. Or you go into the supermarket and realize halfway through you forgot the bags. Or you get all the way up to the checkout and realize you have no bags (or if you're from out of area, learn about this shit the first time).
It's just one of the little things that demonstrate how much government is micromanaging people's lives.
The idea that you should be able to control other's behavior which might have a deleterious effect on your health insurance premiums is not even a slippery slope to tyranny, it's tyranny in a single step.
As is this one, though less so.
I mean "worse" in all the ways sexual harrassment indoctrination tells you are worse. They make off-color jokes all the time, they hit on women brazenly, they discuss female co-workers physical attributes and how much they'd like to (or not like to) have sex with them, they refer to women in sex-specific derogatory ways (e.g. "bitch"), etc.
I would speculate that they intend to claim that their product is NOT a diagnostic device, and therefore does not fall under the purview of the FDA. If that's their claim, any co-operation with the FDA would tend to undermine it.
Yeah, don't really need a nanny protecting me from dangerous information. Might even be a first amendment issue there.
"Hey Ms Wojcicki, could you shut down your company for 10 or 15 years while we decide whether it's OK for the public to be able to learn about their own genetics"
Well, they're also bastards who don't consider pain relief to be something worthy of consideration; no amount of pain relief can balance even the smallest risk of shortening life. And thus the COX 2 inhibitors were banned and millions with arthritis lived slightly longer lives which felt a whole lot longer. But that's another story.
They are power-mad lying scum, however.
Any kid of mine would be expected to disconnect, disable, spoof, cloak, or otherwise render useless any such device. I'd be disappointed in a child who did not at least make a good try at doing so, and even more disappointed if they actually followed the restrictions.
Except that there's no way in hell that the FDA is going to approve 23&Me as a Class III medical device. And even if they could, it would end up costing $999 instead of $99 and you'd have to get a doctor's prescription to be able to use it.
There's selfish jerkassery everywhere, but I disagree that being a geek is correlated with being a jerkass.
Nobody but you used that phrase or the Ferengi accent in this thread. Google search shows it isn't particular common when referring to women.
"Stop Being Stereotypical" rants are bizarre in themselves. Geek culture really is different from mainstream culture, and ranting against it on a place known for geek culture is bizarre. It's like a speaker telling an audience at an SF convention to "Get a life!".
No one is arguing that a gender gap in STEM and especially IT and software development does not exist; only about the cause. Also note that Simpson's paradox abounds in statistical treatments.
Only if it's an honest "might" as opposed to a "we only need a short contract but we know it's hard to get good people for that so we'll pretend there's a full time position available."
Socially inept, at least in terms of the mainstream, is certainly a common characteristic of geeks. But you seem to be using "selfish jerk" as "person who does not agree with me", which I'm afraid is a nonstandard (though common) definition.
Thank you for demonstrating my point so well.
Nobody used that phrase (or the Ferengi accent) but you. And while the term is "females" (no "the") is somewhat unusual in that context, being offended by it makes you look like a pedantic asshole. Seriously complaining that someone sounds like a basement-dwelling geek on Slashdot is just plain bizarre.
You don't think? Here, let me clue you in: you are mistaken.
It's worth noting that Scalzi doesn't consider wealth to be part of the difficulty level, only the starting condition. But the whole idea is crap anyway. Take the major quest of "obtaining a career in early childhood education"... much easier for men, right? Oh, wait, any man who enters such a field is suspected of being a pedophile. How about the minor quest of "getting out of a speeding ticket"... much easier for men there, too, right? No? My point isn't that there aren't plenty of areas where men have it easier, only that it's not a global difficulty level.
Now there's some Hollywood accounting for you.
(BTW, I obtained The Hurt Locker legally, so no checks for $0.00 from me)
Is that the Sony of Sony v. Universal, who along with establishing the idea that time-shifting of television programs was fair use, also defeated the idea that manufacture and sale any device which might enable an infringing use was itself a secondary infringement?
Or is that the Sony which put rootkits on their CDs as a copy protection scheme?
Well, if they were really interested in having girls program, and they wanted people with nothing to do with programming, they should have had e.g. Beyonce and Miley Cyrus instead of will.i.am and Chris Bosh. But no, it's do as we say and not as we do.
"Cultural" support for choosing computer programming as a career, for either gender, is relatively new. Certainly when I was in high school, interest in computers merely cemented my status as a geek and a nerd, before either one had any positive connotations.