You are in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on his back in the hot sun. You recognize his plight but do nothing to help. Why?
1. Tortoises and turtles can bite. 2. Tortoises are generally quite capable of recovering from being flipped on their back. Natural selection and all that.
A few ways to crack biometric scanners: 1. Create a physical duplicate of the biometric info good enough to fool the machine, e.g. a rubber thumbprint. 2. Attack not the scanner, but the wire that runs from the scanner to the computer that will analyze the results: Copy the data sent down the wire on a successful scan, and send that data down the same wire to get in. 3. Attack the software that analyses the biometrics to always report "pass".
You apparantly can't tell the difference between war crimes and ordinary crimes. There's even a mechanism, the International Criminal Court, which most civilized countries (the big exception being the US) have signed on to, that says that anybody can pick up people that appear to have committed war crimes and send them to the court for trial if the country where they committed those crimes refuses to do anything about it.
So yes, people like Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosovic, and Augusto Pinochet get different treatment than an ordinary criminal, because they aren't ordinary criminals.
If a guy joins a group of previously all women, do they have to stifle themselves, go to mixed workplace training, etc? And really...if the women started making double entendre comments and the like...does anyone think the typical man entering that group would get upset in the least bit?
Well, imagine this if you would: Pretend that instead of going into a heavily male profession like IT, you'd gone into a heavily female profession, nursing. You go out, get a job, move to a new town, you show up for your first day of work and what you hear all day from other nurses is comments not about nursing but about the apparant size of your dick and your presumed sex life or lack thereof. And your ugly hag of a boss is deciding whether you'll be promoted or not based on how nicely you smile when she looks you up and down with clear sexual intent (or in more extreme cases whether you agree to sleep with her).
Think about how you'd really truly react in that kind of scenario, and you might understand the problem.
1. Create a policy, in writing, about what is and what is not acceptable behavior in the workplace when it comes to sexual harassment. 2. If somebody violates that policy, reprimand them privately at first, and then publicly if they still don't get it. And keep a record of doing that. 3. If somebody continues to violate the policy, fire them. If you're not willing to fire people to make a non-harassing culture happen, then you aren't really serious about putting a stop to it. And these are exactly the kind of steps you need to have taken if your company gets sued over your guys' behavior.
Some other things you can do: 1. Lead by example. Treat her like a professional, because that's what she is. Treat your guys the same way if you aren't already, and make it clear that you expect them to act the same way. When you're working, you're working, not hanging out with your buddies at the bar. 2. Nip it in the bud. Don't wait for the second comment, or there will be a third. 3. Make it clear that you're putting a stop to it because if you don't, your boss will (They should back you up on this, if they don't give up, it's a lost cause) 4. Tell 'em (truthfully) you may be able to loosen things up if things go well at first. If your new employee makes it totally clear that she's fine with this sort of thing, then you can let the guys go with it.
The point was that GP was not so subtly accusing most Slashdotters of hypocracy by supporting a guy who extradited Pinochet and opposing the people who want to extradite Assange, implying that those two positions were inconsistent. My argument was simply that the two situations are vastly different, and thus treating them differently is in no way inconsistent (and in fact would be in keeping with international law).
Assange is accused of rape and espionage. Pinochet was accused and convicted of ordering the torture of over 40,000 people and murder of over 3000 (not even counting his violent overthrow of a democratically elected government). Assange's crimes, whatever they may be, are in no way equivalent to Pinochet's crimes against humanity.
It's always interesting to me to notice how many of the anti-public-transit arguments are cultural rather than practical. It seems to go something like this: "Public transit systems are for poor people. Nobody who's capable of driving should ever use public transit. Also, if I use public transit systems there's a chance I may come in contact with bad or scary people, so to avoid them I shouldn't go near a bus or train."
What's interesting about this argument is that it's unaffected by anything the public transit authority could possibly do. If you hold this cultural view, making it cheaper or faster just means that poor people get where they're going more easily. Adding more security and policing reinforces the belief that there are lots of serious crimes on public transit (otherwise, why would police be necessary?). And adding convenient routes doesn't matter, because this person is going to drive regardless.
What does seem to make a difference is having a city where public transit has always been a regular part of civic life: New York, Boston, and Chicago all have public transit systems widely used by people of all stripes since before cars were popular.
Counterexamples off the top of my head: - Sparta pretty much invented the concept of a uniform, and won quite a few wars, including beating the non-uniformed Athenians. - Invasion of Gaul under Julius Caesar: The Romans had fairly stylish uniforms, the Gauls had no uniform, and the Romans won. Most armies in the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Renaissance didn't wear uniforms. - European invasions of the Americas: Uniformed Europeans beat non-uniformed natives regularly. - Napoleonic Wars: The British army under Wellington were pretty spit-and-polish, and kicked the French's butts in Spain and later at Waterloo. Not that the French uniforms were particularly ugly or anything. Granted, they had the more rag-tag Prussians to help them. - The American Civil War: The Union troops typically had reasonably stylish dark blue uniforms, the Confederates frequently had no uniforms. - Spanish Civil War: Again, you had a Nationalist army with uniforms versus mostly non-uniformed Republicans, anarchists, etc.
More likely is that the fanciness of uniforms have pretty much no effect on military effectiveness, and that wins and losses were due to unrelated factors.
It should also be pointed out that Ike got elected primarily on the promise to fight the Commies in Korea. His attitude towards war seems to have been seeing it as necessary when faced with opponents like the Nazis and the USSR.
His opponent Adlai Stevenson, on the other hand, really did advocate peaceful foreign relations. He lost handily to Ike in 1952 and 1956.
The current state of the art is offered by pirates: here's the file and it Just Works, with whatever software you want to use, on any box that you want to play it on, to be played at any time of day that you want.
Why would that surprise you?
Free market economies only work when something is scarce - for example, there's no market for breathable air, nor is there a market for seawater on a coast. Sequences of bits aren't naturally scarce, because computers are really good at copying sequences of bits for very very low cost. So in order to make something that is not scarce scarce, there's a giant legal and technological mechanism put in place. That technology and law must by necessity cripple the normal abilities of computers to prevent them from doing what they normally can do.
Because doing something useful instead would make Obama more likely to win the upcoming election. Another way of looking at the insanity of it: 1. There are millions of people desperately looking for work. 2. There are millions of jobs that desperately need doing (e.g. fixing bridges that are close to collapsing). 3. There's a political system that refuses to move small green pieces of paper to get the people who need work doing the jobs that need doing, because that would make the economy look like it was getting better.
Remember what Mitch McConnell said: The Republican Party's primary goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president, not to improve the economy.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
You might think it's some liberal peace activist type speaking to a bunch of hippie protesters. But you'd be wrong: it's Dwight D Eisenhower.
From a rational standpoint, yes, the elderly don't produce much and consume a great deal.
On the other hand, what price would you accept to kill your grandmother or mother (depending on your age) if there were no legal consequences for doing so? Because that's ultimately what you're talking about is a situation where Grandma is dead, and you get more money. Us humans have a strong moral aversion to killing people, especially blood relatives, and for most of us profit isn't motivation enough.
A few other reasons to not kill people once they retire: 1. Some people continue to work professionally even if they're officially semi-retired. For instance, my 86-year-old grandmother is still doing research as a professor emeritas that's well regarded in her field. Retired Supreme Court Justices often fill in for lower court judges. Retired CEOs will frequently serve on corporate boards.
2. Even those who don't work professionally often help out in the community in other ways. They help take care of their grandkids, or volunteer for charitable and religious groups, or get involved in neighborhood improvement.
3. The prospect of retirement motivates people to work towards the end of their careers.
Sure, the work sucks, but it is the work that customers are willing to pay for.
Probably not. If Amazon is like most companies, if you doubled the money spent on all hourly workers (either doubling wages, or spending money on improved working conditions, or hiring more workers, etc) involved in the product, it would probably make a difference of maybe $0.20 per item (I can't provide exact estimates here since Amazon refuses to tell anyone how many workers they have, but that's not an unreasonable guess). The effects of this would probably amount to each item being on average $0.10 more expensive, while EPS might be down $0.01 to account for the other $0.10.
The real story is this: It's possible to make decent money while paying and treating your work force well, and many companies do just that. It's possible to make more money while paying your work force peanuts and treating them like crap. Wall St and upper management don't care about whether they're people end up sick or injured or dead because of poor working conditions so long as (a) there are a bunch of desperate unemployed people to hire, and (b) the cost of doing something to improve things is greater than the cost of the lawsuits, fines, and workers comp premium changes. The difference between the profitability of good guys versus bad guys is built on the backs of lives destroyed. Could you sleep at night knowing you made lots of money by inflicting human suffering on other people?
studios seem to think that people want nothing more than brainless Bay-esque explosion festivals
I'm actually an advocate for taking the action film to its logical conclusion: a film entitled Blowing Stuff Up, about nothing at all, that features at least 90 minutes of well-known stars in a world of explosions, car chases, gun fights, etc doing what they're doing for no particular reason. Hey, at least it wouldn't pretend to be something sophisticated.
Not really what gbjbannb is alluding to: There's pretty good evidence out there that programmers over age 40 are regularly discriminated against in the field, regardless of their level of skill, due to a perception that the ideal programmer is a young easily exploited kid who wants to work 100 hours a week fuelled by caffeine and sugar. Give me a team of people those bosses have decided were 'dinosaurs' any day of the week.
The problem I have with the term is that it suggests that there's something morally wrong with offering somebody more salary / benefits / perks to change jobs, or with that somebody choosing to make the move to greener pastures.
Employment is a 2-way street: My boss can choose to fire me at any time, I can choose to quit and do something else at any time. I understand that many employers would not like employees to be able to do that, but they can, and that's because they're your employees rather than your slaves.
But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.
That's still not true. Take Social Security: They pay out to 61 million people spending less than 0.5% on overhead. Or Medicare, which despite its many flaws provides health care to 47 million people with less than 5% overhead (the private insurers were upset with the rule that they couldn't have higher than 20%).
Some possible answers to your "food stamps but nice cars" situation: 1. They bought a car when they had a good job, but took out a loan to do it. If they sell the car, they lose the car, but the entire value of the car goes to the bank, so they'd have no more to buy food than they did before and now have no car. That means that they're better off (in the short run at least) continuing to use the car they have (whether or not they're paying for it), but still may need food stamps to have enough to eat. 2. The car isn't as valuable as it appears to be. A 15-year-old Caddy isn't anywhere close to the same price as a brand new Caddy. 3. The car isn't theirs - they're borrowing it from somebody.
Here's the situation, according to the whistleblowers: 1. The law and the Constitution say they can only wiretap foreigners without a warrant. 2. The law also says that they never have to prove that their targets are actually foreigners. 3. According to the whisteblowers, what they do is target US citizens but claim they're foreigners. 4. Everything is classified, so the NSA employees can't talk about it without risking serious jail time or worse for espionage. 5. Because of the FISA Amendments Act, AT&T isn't allowed to talk about what they did to cooperate with this.
The clear goal is the NSA being able to spy on everybody without ever having to justify their actions to anybody.
Tell that to gay people in the military. Or to people getting unemployment that otherwise wouldn't. Or the people who got a job due to the stimulus package. Or the people who have health insurance now that couldn't get it a couple of years ago.
I get that the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not as big as their similarities (FWIW, I'm voting for a third party candidate this year), but there are some real differences that change people's lives for better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
You are in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on his back in the hot sun. You recognize his plight but do nothing to help. Why?
1. Tortoises and turtles can bite.
2. Tortoises are generally quite capable of recovering from being flipped on their back. Natural selection and all that.
A few ways to crack biometric scanners:
1. Create a physical duplicate of the biometric info good enough to fool the machine, e.g. a rubber thumbprint.
2. Attack not the scanner, but the wire that runs from the scanner to the computer that will analyze the results: Copy the data sent down the wire on a successful scan, and send that data down the same wire to get in.
3. Attack the software that analyses the biometrics to always report "pass".
They're useful, but they aren't unbeatable.
You apparantly can't tell the difference between war crimes and ordinary crimes. There's even a mechanism, the International Criminal Court, which most civilized countries (the big exception being the US) have signed on to, that says that anybody can pick up people that appear to have committed war crimes and send them to the court for trial if the country where they committed those crimes refuses to do anything about it.
So yes, people like Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosovic, and Augusto Pinochet get different treatment than an ordinary criminal, because they aren't ordinary criminals.
Some would:
http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/07/mens-sexual-harassment-claims-on-the-rise.html
According to most of the news Google could find on the subject, men file approximately 15% of all sexual harassment suits, and that number is growing.
If a guy joins a group of previously all women, do they have to stifle themselves, go to mixed workplace training, etc? And really...if the women started making double entendre comments and the like...does anyone think the typical man entering that group would get upset in the least bit?
Well, imagine this if you would: Pretend that instead of going into a heavily male profession like IT, you'd gone into a heavily female profession, nursing. You go out, get a job, move to a new town, you show up for your first day of work and what you hear all day from other nurses is comments not about nursing but about the apparant size of your dick and your presumed sex life or lack thereof. And your ugly hag of a boss is deciding whether you'll be promoted or not based on how nicely you smile when she looks you up and down with clear sexual intent (or in more extreme cases whether you agree to sleep with her).
Think about how you'd really truly react in that kind of scenario, and you might understand the problem.
1. Create a policy, in writing, about what is and what is not acceptable behavior in the workplace when it comes to sexual harassment.
2. If somebody violates that policy, reprimand them privately at first, and then publicly if they still don't get it. And keep a record of doing that.
3. If somebody continues to violate the policy, fire them.
If you're not willing to fire people to make a non-harassing culture happen, then you aren't really serious about putting a stop to it. And these are exactly the kind of steps you need to have taken if your company gets sued over your guys' behavior.
Some other things you can do:
1. Lead by example. Treat her like a professional, because that's what she is. Treat your guys the same way if you aren't already, and make it clear that you expect them to act the same way. When you're working, you're working, not hanging out with your buddies at the bar.
2. Nip it in the bud. Don't wait for the second comment, or there will be a third.
3. Make it clear that you're putting a stop to it because if you don't, your boss will (They should back you up on this, if they don't give up, it's a lost cause)
4. Tell 'em (truthfully) you may be able to loosen things up if things go well at first. If your new employee makes it totally clear that she's fine with this sort of thing, then you can let the guys go with it.
IANAL, TINLA, etc.
The point was that GP was not so subtly accusing most Slashdotters of hypocracy by supporting a guy who extradited Pinochet and opposing the people who want to extradite Assange, implying that those two positions were inconsistent. My argument was simply that the two situations are vastly different, and thus treating them differently is in no way inconsistent (and in fact would be in keeping with international law).
Assange is accused of rape and espionage. Pinochet was accused and convicted of ordering the torture of over 40,000 people and murder of over 3000 (not even counting his violent overthrow of a democratically elected government). Assange's crimes, whatever they may be, are in no way equivalent to Pinochet's crimes against humanity.
It's always interesting to me to notice how many of the anti-public-transit arguments are cultural rather than practical. It seems to go something like this: "Public transit systems are for poor people. Nobody who's capable of driving should ever use public transit. Also, if I use public transit systems there's a chance I may come in contact with bad or scary people, so to avoid them I shouldn't go near a bus or train."
What's interesting about this argument is that it's unaffected by anything the public transit authority could possibly do. If you hold this cultural view, making it cheaper or faster just means that poor people get where they're going more easily. Adding more security and policing reinforces the belief that there are lots of serious crimes on public transit (otherwise, why would police be necessary?). And adding convenient routes doesn't matter, because this person is going to drive regardless.
What does seem to make a difference is having a city where public transit has always been a regular part of civic life: New York, Boston, and Chicago all have public transit systems widely used by people of all stripes since before cars were popular.
So riddle me this: Why are manufacturers making new vehicles that get 25mpg when we know how to make ones that get over 60mpg?
I agree that running out and replacing perfectly good cars is dumb. But replacing bad cars with more bad cars is also dumb.
Almost always?
Counterexamples off the top of my head:
- Sparta pretty much invented the concept of a uniform, and won quite a few wars, including beating the non-uniformed Athenians.
- Invasion of Gaul under Julius Caesar: The Romans had fairly stylish uniforms, the Gauls had no uniform, and the Romans won.
Most armies in the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Renaissance didn't wear uniforms.
- European invasions of the Americas: Uniformed Europeans beat non-uniformed natives regularly.
- Napoleonic Wars: The British army under Wellington were pretty spit-and-polish, and kicked the French's butts in Spain and later at Waterloo. Not that the French uniforms were particularly ugly or anything. Granted, they had the more rag-tag Prussians to help them.
- The American Civil War: The Union troops typically had reasonably stylish dark blue uniforms, the Confederates frequently had no uniforms.
- Spanish Civil War: Again, you had a Nationalist army with uniforms versus mostly non-uniformed Republicans, anarchists, etc.
More likely is that the fanciness of uniforms have pretty much no effect on military effectiveness, and that wins and losses were due to unrelated factors.
I'm curious; is it widely accepted that banning women from front-line combat is a good idea?
Short answer: No. The point of that ban was to convince male chauvinists go along with having women in the military in any role other than nursing.
It should also be pointed out that Ike got elected primarily on the promise to fight the Commies in Korea. His attitude towards war seems to have been seeing it as necessary when faced with opponents like the Nazis and the USSR.
His opponent Adlai Stevenson, on the other hand, really did advocate peaceful foreign relations. He lost handily to Ike in 1952 and 1956.
The current state of the art is offered by pirates: here's the file and it Just Works, with whatever software you want to use, on any box that you want to play it on, to be played at any time of day that you want.
Why would that surprise you?
Free market economies only work when something is scarce - for example, there's no market for breathable air, nor is there a market for seawater on a coast. Sequences of bits aren't naturally scarce, because computers are really good at copying sequences of bits for very very low cost. So in order to make something that is not scarce scarce, there's a giant legal and technological mechanism put in place. That technology and law must by necessity cripple the normal abilities of computers to prevent them from doing what they normally can do.
(yes, "engratin" is a perfectly cromulent word)
Wait, are you saying we should put ourselves in a dish with cheese, cream, and breadcrumbs and bake at 350F for about an hour?
So, why should the government save money?
Because doing something useful instead would make Obama more likely to win the upcoming election. Another way of looking at the insanity of it:
1. There are millions of people desperately looking for work.
2. There are millions of jobs that desperately need doing (e.g. fixing bridges that are close to collapsing).
3. There's a political system that refuses to move small green pieces of paper to get the people who need work doing the jobs that need doing, because that would make the economy look like it was getting better.
Remember what Mitch McConnell said: The Republican Party's primary goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president, not to improve the economy.
Take a guess as to who said this in 1960:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
You might think it's some liberal peace activist type speaking to a bunch of hippie protesters. But you'd be wrong: it's Dwight D Eisenhower.
From a rational standpoint, yes, the elderly don't produce much and consume a great deal.
On the other hand, what price would you accept to kill your grandmother or mother (depending on your age) if there were no legal consequences for doing so? Because that's ultimately what you're talking about is a situation where Grandma is dead, and you get more money. Us humans have a strong moral aversion to killing people, especially blood relatives, and for most of us profit isn't motivation enough.
A few other reasons to not kill people once they retire:
1. Some people continue to work professionally even if they're officially semi-retired. For instance, my 86-year-old grandmother is still doing research as a professor emeritas that's well regarded in her field. Retired Supreme Court Justices often fill in for lower court judges. Retired CEOs will frequently serve on corporate boards.
2. Even those who don't work professionally often help out in the community in other ways. They help take care of their grandkids, or volunteer for charitable and religious groups, or get involved in neighborhood improvement.
3. The prospect of retirement motivates people to work towards the end of their careers.
Sure, the work sucks, but it is the work that customers are willing to pay for.
Probably not. If Amazon is like most companies, if you doubled the money spent on all hourly workers (either doubling wages, or spending money on improved working conditions, or hiring more workers, etc) involved in the product, it would probably make a difference of maybe $0.20 per item (I can't provide exact estimates here since Amazon refuses to tell anyone how many workers they have, but that's not an unreasonable guess). The effects of this would probably amount to each item being on average $0.10 more expensive, while EPS might be down $0.01 to account for the other $0.10.
The real story is this: It's possible to make decent money while paying and treating your work force well, and many companies do just that. It's possible to make more money while paying your work force peanuts and treating them like crap. Wall St and upper management don't care about whether they're people end up sick or injured or dead because of poor working conditions so long as (a) there are a bunch of desperate unemployed people to hire, and (b) the cost of doing something to improve things is greater than the cost of the lawsuits, fines, and workers comp premium changes. The difference between the profitability of good guys versus bad guys is built on the backs of lives destroyed. Could you sleep at night knowing you made lots of money by inflicting human suffering on other people?
studios seem to think that people want nothing more than brainless Bay-esque explosion festivals
I'm actually an advocate for taking the action film to its logical conclusion: a film entitled Blowing Stuff Up, about nothing at all, that features at least 90 minutes of well-known stars in a world of explosions, car chases, gun fights, etc doing what they're doing for no particular reason. Hey, at least it wouldn't pretend to be something sophisticated.
Not really what gbjbannb is alluding to: There's pretty good evidence out there that programmers over age 40 are regularly discriminated against in the field, regardless of their level of skill, due to a perception that the ideal programmer is a young easily exploited kid who wants to work 100 hours a week fuelled by caffeine and sugar. Give me a team of people those bosses have decided were 'dinosaurs' any day of the week.
The problem I have with the term is that it suggests that there's something morally wrong with offering somebody more salary / benefits / perks to change jobs, or with that somebody choosing to make the move to greener pastures.
Employment is a 2-way street: My boss can choose to fire me at any time, I can choose to quit and do something else at any time. I understand that many employers would not like employees to be able to do that, but they can, and that's because they're your employees rather than your slaves.
But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.
That's still not true. Take Social Security: They pay out to 61 million people spending less than 0.5% on overhead. Or Medicare, which despite its many flaws provides health care to 47 million people with less than 5% overhead (the private insurers were upset with the rule that they couldn't have higher than 20%).
Some possible answers to your "food stamps but nice cars" situation:
1. They bought a car when they had a good job, but took out a loan to do it. If they sell the car, they lose the car, but the entire value of the car goes to the bank, so they'd have no more to buy food than they did before and now have no car. That means that they're better off (in the short run at least) continuing to use the car they have (whether or not they're paying for it), but still may need food stamps to have enough to eat.
2. The car isn't as valuable as it appears to be. A 15-year-old Caddy isn't anywhere close to the same price as a brand new Caddy.
3. The car isn't theirs - they're borrowing it from somebody.
Here's the situation, according to the whistleblowers:
1. The law and the Constitution say they can only wiretap foreigners without a warrant.
2. The law also says that they never have to prove that their targets are actually foreigners.
3. According to the whisteblowers, what they do is target US citizens but claim they're foreigners.
4. Everything is classified, so the NSA employees can't talk about it without risking serious jail time or worse for espionage.
5. Because of the FISA Amendments Act, AT&T isn't allowed to talk about what they did to cooperate with this.
The clear goal is the NSA being able to spy on everybody without ever having to justify their actions to anybody.
Tell that to gay people in the military. Or to people getting unemployment that otherwise wouldn't. Or the people who got a job due to the stimulus package. Or the people who have health insurance now that couldn't get it a couple of years ago.
I get that the differences between Democrats and Republicans are not as big as their similarities (FWIW, I'm voting for a third party candidate this year), but there are some real differences that change people's lives for better or worse.