My wife's a mathematician but isn't on/., she's answered that question to me a few times. She (of course) describes it as a numbers game.
It should be on merit in this case, but in cases where it really is a problem then an "affirmative action" can help fix problems whenever systemic problems actually exist.
In software engineering the field is about 20-25% female. Compared with many fields that is relatively balanced. Pulling up US labor statistics, look at gender distribution in nursing, childcare, education, HR, social services, event planning, civil engineering, construction, librarians, therapists, speech pathologists, hairstylists, secretaries, tailoring and sewing, painting... all these fields have stronger gender bias than software engineering. People tend to only complain about the industries with high pay and few physical requirements; nobody seems to care that construction workers are near-universally male, nor that early childcare workers are nearly all female.
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women. Anyone smart enough to read Slashdot should see problems with that; Google is hiring 50% over the general programmer population, plus taking efforts to hire even more than are available. That can be even worse than underhiring; they've got about 7000 more women than stats say they should. Apple similarly has thousands more than they statistically should. By overhiring they are preventing many other companies from reaching parity with the industry's gender distribution, causing even worse stigma because so many other smaller companies have no women in the applicant pool.
Gender is only one concern, but no matter the topic if the numbers are too high or too low, people should ask why that is the case. Gender, race, age, political party, and every other stat could be examined. If the company's demographics don't match the broader environment then there is a concern. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, but it should still be understood if the numbers aren't similar.
Google has two glaringly obvious demographics mismatches. First, women are over-represented; they're flooding the news with "31% female" statistics instead of the 20% that is expected for the field. Second, youth are over-represented with a median age of 29 instead of the industry median age of 43. All the major mismatches should be investigated.
Why the but? These two clauses are causally unrelated.
The executives do not care if the shows are leaked. A few of the fans will see it early, they'll still watch it when it airs, they'll watch it again on the HBO web site, and they'll buy the season on BluRay.
But email, that's another matter entirely. Email has details about weekend getaways with the secretaries. Email has discussions about which stars need coke deliveries to their trailer (not the soda). Email includes salary negotiations and how one actor did something with somebody that explains their massive pay difference.
Emails are the thing many executives fear. Leaking the product is nothing to them. That is why the executives wrote what they did. They got 1.5TB of video? That's okay, as long as the emails are safe.
That 'mediocre ass-time video' had 10.1 million viewers last episode. You may not think it is, but it's kind of a big deal.
That's just the thing. Maybe a few hundred thousand of the fans will watch it, but they'll also watch it when it airs, and they'll watch it again online in the HBO site, and they'll buy the entire season again on BluRay. People who watch it early will talk about it and generate buzz for more views as well.
The amount they could lose on the episode specifically is a tiny drop in the bucket and may even increase total ad revenue. The executives are more worried about dirt on the people, the incriminating emails like bosses running away with the secretary for a weekend, than they are worried about show views.
Many fields are dominated by a specific gender. In software it is about an 80/20 split, buy software is mild compared to other fields. There are many documentaries, books, and reports decrying how this is biased and unfair.
Firefighters, bricklayers, road construction, these are 99.9% male. Somehow there is no social plea for women to be pipelayers, or for more women to hang drywall.
On the flip side, women make up about 90%-95% of various nursing occupations, 97% of dental hygienists, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 95% of childcare workers, 90% of diatitians and nutritionists. I've heard a few cries for men to enter some of these fields, but generally these are socially accepted as well. When men express an interest in childcare or teaching young children they're socially accused of being pedophiles or creeps.
The gender balance in software development is in line with the variation across most fields. People who say they want the fields to be balanced 50/50 should consider why they aren't going after other fields that are far more imbalanced.
In that regard, I thing the person with the original manifesto has some points, the writeup against the manifesto also has some points, but both need to realize that the distribution is still well within bounds that are typical for many fields. People have preferences, including gender preferences brought on both by nature and society.
In colloquial speech, yes, anything can be addictive.
For people going on medical definitions, no. People can experience compulsions around nearly anything, but generally behaviors don't cause addiction, except for things like a runner's high. Many professionals have started explaining compulsions as "behavioral addictions" since many people don't understand the terms that well.
Compulsive behaviors can include nearly anything that a person does where they develop a life-impacting urge to do things, usually followed by no reward. Gambling disorder, eating disorders, people who become "couch potatoes", binge watchers, "video game addicts", compulsive shoppers, hoarders, all can become compulsive behaviors.
Some medical dictionaries are updating their definitions of addiction to include compulsion, but most of the big ones are unwilling to do it.
Did the investigators get proper warrants? Did they present accurate probable cause statements to magistrates? Did they follow the rules and procedures of law, and ensure the rights of the individuals were protected during the process?
If so then I agree: Good. The people were accused of some severe vandalism and destruction of property, and people who smash windows and damage vehicles deserve suitable legal consequences.
However, if the investigators did not follow the rule of law, did not follow the rules protecting individual rights, or otherwise violated the rights of citizens, then the investigators deserve to not only have their entire investigation dumped by the courts but to be fired from their jobs for incompetence. They have had over six full months to ensure they took the relatively simple steps to follow the law, and if they didn't do them they deserve to be blocked from the profession.
Either the old nations were primitives that deserved to be destroyed and conquered, or the invaders should be punished to the furthest generations.
Most people pick somewhere in the middle. For most of us that means recognizing the acts of the past were harmful in several ways, try to find some ways to correct the wrongs (like making an effort to treat people fairly and not discriminate), then move on with life trying to do the best you can. Then hopefully we won't screw up the world too badly for our children.
That was a LONG time ago and different situation...the lands of the world were all up for grabs.
They're talking about Aboriginal and Native American populations. The lands weren't vacant and up for grabs. They had existing nations with unique cultures, trade routes, economic structure, social structure, political structure, and military.
The lands were already populated. In both cases the native people were less able to defend themselves and consequently lost a war against invaders. One of the spoils of war is writing the history books. In both of these cases the invaders said the land was not owned by anyone else so they claimed it for themselves.
Now we have decided who has what land and civilizations formed....and now we have people just blowing up and shooting people, and slashing them...for theological reasons.
That has been the case for several thousand years. These brief periods of mild peace are the rare exception in world history, not the rule.
It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that...
It is like many things, not just that. You are right that it is a luxury device, and a toy. But the same can be said of your PlayStation and XBox, your television, and your smart phone.
The luxury device is part of the reason they're lowering the price. You still need a high-end computer, something around $1500 and far beyond what most people have. They lowered the price from about $800 at launch to $400, but by the time you get a few games and the computer you are still paying two grand. If you already own the high end computer that meets the hardware requirements --- a luxury -- then the extra $400 won't be a painful addition.
Stereoscopic displays are a product that has been tried with many options over the years. None have taken off yet, but eventually it is one will. It may not be this generation of 3D devices, or next generation, or the generation after that. Or it may be this set, as the latest round are quite impressive.
For another thing, it is a technology that has a chicken-and-egg problem. There needs to be enough good products (in this field it is generally games and porn) to encourage hardware sales. And there needs to be enough hardware out there to ensure products get built. Without good products the hardware doesn't sell, and without enough devices the software cannot generate a profit.
Eventually stereoscopic tech will take off, there is little doubt of that. I've used many of the devices, including Oculus, Vive, PSVR, all the way down to Cardboard. I've tried 3D games all the way back to the VirtualBoy, and enjoyed trying Vectrex 3D with a game collector friend who could probably start a museum. I played a few shutter glasses games and stereoscopic arcade games back in the 80's. With all of that, I know that sooner or later the tech will take off eventually. Most failed because of the chicken-and-egg problem of needing both hardware and software. 3D TV never had any must-have products. 3DS has a good set of games and is still viable for steroscopic 3D. Both Oculus and Vive have some amazing position tracking hardware and have an ever-expanding library of software. They're gaining must-have products as AAA games are starting to include options for 3D play; Bethesda and EA have talked about several, such as Fallout and The Sims. Even existing games like Minecraft, GTA V, Half Life 2, Doom 3, people are creating 3D mods for Vive and Oculus.
I think this is the generation of hardware that will bring stereoscopic 3D to the masses, but if it isn't, we are extremely close to that critical tipping point.
Of course those same orgnizations could fight it if they chose.
Banning known members of the committe from their services could be quite painful and within their rights. Suddenly no support for their Apple devices includeing iPhones or iTunes. Google is blocked along with YouTube and gmail and docs. Websites may give "Service denied becuse your policies harmed us. We do not support you as a customer." Neflix and Hulu stop working if the companies don't want the extra CPU costs of encrypting all their content.
Many companies got behind the SOPA protests, blacking out much of the 'useful' web to show that they may go dark because of the concerns.
I imagine if suddenly a huge portion of the useful web were denied to the committee they'd quickly rethink their decision.
It's going to cost about $160k to get my kid through college
Put away the silver spoon if you don't like the costs.
The bulk of universities in the US charge around $8K-$12K per year. Google's top result says the average was $9650 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and $33480 average at private universities. It's even cheaper to start at a community college then transfer to a bigger school after the associate's degree. Don't complain about the $160K for-profit private school when there is the $40K option that can be paid with scholarships, grants, and subsidized loans.
Some people are ironically stupid about education when it comes to quality and cost. Quite a few studies have shown difference between the $140K education and the $40K education is only the cost. For one link of many, there is no significant difference between the choice of school attended. While attending the school gives an enormous boost, the difference between cheap public schools and big-name private schools are, in the words of that one report, "generally indistinguishable from zero". I've seen plenty of other reports with the same conclusion. The cheapest schools yield the same career results as the most expensive.
If you want it yet cannot budget the costs of the private for-profit school then don't go there. As parallels, don't buy the porterhouse or lobster dinner when your budget is better suited for the cheeseburger, and don't buy a Lamborghini as your commuter vehicle if your budget is better suited for a Honda Accord.
If Canada thinks that Canadian courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world, then the same argument says Chinese courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world.
That's a reason many global corporations use national subordinate companies, and the global umbrella serves as a shell.
The Canadian subordinate follows Canadian laws, the US subordinate follows US laws, the others in Germany and France and Spain and other nations all follow their own respective laws, and we all get along nicely.
The borderless Internet certainly complicates legal matters. Whatever the activity, some aspect of it is probably illegal somewhere in the world.
Sounds like you had some nutter that decided to just convert the system into microservices without much thought other than...
That is the thing that misleads so many people, both the non-technical bosses AND many of the technical people. We want this because it is hip and trendy, and we want it because the large companies are using it so it must be good.
Think about the headline. Walmart -- the world's largest retailer that spends more money on IT infrastructure in a single day than most companies make in annual revenue -- has switched to a product that saves their specific enormous needs a bit of resources. There are other headlines like it. Redis let's Twitter handle a million requests per second. Some large organization publishes how their enormous tech problems only experienced by the world's largest companies get some benefit. Hadoop clusters, Kubernetes, Hazelcast, memcached, Cassandra, Kafka, and more. They're great solutions if you actually have those problems the tools help with. If you're in an organization that spends a million on infrastructure then the costs of having a few of the programmers spend a few months implementing the solution can be cost effective.
Very few companies in the world have those needs, yet headlines like this make CEOs and CTOs and beancounters think they save money, and everyday tech guys want to jump in to the latest high-end technology. It doesn't matter if the database rarely hits 100 requests per minute and runs easily on a single machine, the groups decide the organization must bring in the same high-capacity infrastructure because it scales up to support the world's largest organizations. Hadoop clusters, Kubernetes, Hazelcast, memcached, Cassandra, Kafka, and more. They're great solutions if you actually have those problems the tools help with.
While some solutions are good solutions for specific needs, far too often the solutions brought in are completely wrong for the organization's actual problems.
A few companies back they had a huge internal developer group, everything was built around microservices, tiered architectures where every service , autoscaling groups, and multiple database arrays, all connected through distributed memory tools. All that for a roughly 4TB database where nearly all transactions were single-row reads; the peak was around 10,000 requests per minute (166/sec) serving out roughly 150 megabytes per minute (2.5MBps). There performance was slow, and a bit of profiling (part of my job to make things faster) revealed abysmal practices. Warnings from Sonar said strings shouldn't be reused, so in less than a second there were a million copies of the string "true". Carefully composed SQL commands were placed in interned strings, then had copies made, and copies of copies made. In several cases I found the overhead was enormous; some simple requests to generate a 50KB response would allocate 5+ MB of memory. All of it because tools suggested something might be more secure, and new-and-shiny saved massive organizations like Amazon or Twitter or Walmart a bunch of money.
When I was newly brought on and looked at the numbers, I asked my boss about it, who said they wanted to scale big just in case. A while later I had some chats with the CTO, and that was his reason as well; bring in all the latest high-end technology because when they used smaller technologies they were too slow. At that point they were looking at even bigger technologies, adding even more memory caches and renting even more expensive VM systems with terabytes of memory. As mentioned, that was one of my former employers. As the poster says: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
I grew up in a majority conservative area thinking... I got older, earned money and traveled more, discovering that the liberals I met...
Take a wider view, insted of denigrating an entire ideology because of its loudest, stupidest perpetrators.
This is a universal truth. When people start throwing around labels of liberal or conservative, or political labels of democrat or republican, or anything else, they have just set themselves up for being those loud, stupid people. The extreme people who refuse to see the other side, and take viewpoints of 'my way or death', that complicates the issues.
Most people want reasonably intelligent things. While there is always a bit of natural greed, and everyone is certainly due their rewards for successes, collectively as humans we still are willing to show compassion when we know details. Your comparison of the priest versus the people in the pews is good. When it comes to societal issues, the people in the pews vocally decry the 'bad' things because they come with generic ideological labels; people hate taxes generally, people hate when taxes go up, people hate crime generally and some want heavy sentences to punish people who hurt others, people hate healthcare costs. But when pressed for details the same people will admit to the opposite side; we love having great schools, we love having reliable safe roads without potholes, and infrastructure that means power outages and network downtime are newsworthy, we love having police and fire services that respond almost instantly, we want secure high paying jobs for ourselves and our family and friends, we want the fallback of social programs when we lose our jobs or become injured we can keep our homes and family support until we get back on our feet, when diagnosed with a medical problem we want medical care that is the best in human history, when someone we know and love is accused of a crime we want mercy and really don't want extreme punishments because if you only knew them you'd see otherwise. When we drop the labels and make it real, people are generally kind and generous and thoughtful.
When people look only at the labels, it is generic conservative or generic liberal, it is the generic political party, it is generic taxes, it is generic crime, it is generic whatever, we see them as bad for us. But once you know the details, once you see the person who is suffering, once you see the benefits of helping and learning and understanding, suddenly they become positive again.
It is certainly easy to throw up the labels. It is easier to blame problems on the political party, or to blame it on the left/right. It is easier to claim that people in my own group are good and people in other groups are bad. Sadly the extreme groups, even extreme politicians, have gained a large pulpit. Too many take the lazy route; my party proposed it so I support it, my opponent proposed it so I oppose it, rather than both sides looking at details and seeing what helps the most people across the board. I cheer for my team and against your team, the losing team burns cars, instead of both groups watching for the best plays regardless of who made them, cheering their opponents for the hard-fought process.
Oops. She chose poorly. The even bigger issue is that she is now toxic. If she loses her case, it'll be a very hard sell to get hired again a la Ellen Pao.
Possibly, or maybe not. Certainly being in the news makes her name show up on searches, but that doesn't necessarily kill her career, especially if the courts agree with her on one or both lawsuits. And based on what both sides have publicly released so far, she has incredibly strong lawsuits.
The earlier harassment filings have some paper trails within the company. Under the law there are a few things that need to be satisfied, but the biggest is a clear communication that the actions are unwanted. Since she made sure there was a documented history, that will be very hard to fight if they actually reach the court. Yes, the company is in the process of putting her and her family through the wringer for that, but she did the absolute best thing she could: She left a paper trail with HR at the company, and she collected a ton of evidence while she was there.
The company then did what companies do. Even though they aren't supposed to fire in retaliation, they will make up other excuses and make the employee miserable. Bonuses were denied (and documented), she was not paid for overtime (which were documented as violating company policy) denied rest breaks and meal times. Then she was told her performance was unacceptably bad, a common tactic to get rid of employees companies don't like but can't readily fire. Still, she didn't leave.
But then the company finished it off and fired her. Unfortunately for Tesla, they opened their big mouth and made press statements.
The unlawful firing aspect has become an open-and-shut case thanks to Tesla's PR department. The press releases and spokespeople have clearly stated to multiple news outlets that they reviewed the complaints for the pending lawsuit, claimed they have no merit, and that was the reason they fired her. Not poor performance, not policy violations, but because the company didn't want to be sued for the alleged violations. The quote to The Guardian is right there in the story: "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla." Under both federal law and California law, that action is illegal. I'm guessing the company's legal team is furious at the PR team right now, but it is out there in many public statements.
So at this point it doesn't matter if her harassment lawsuit is dismissed or not, that is irrelevant for unlawful firing. With the collection of public statements, there is no way any judge would find against her, Tesla's media statements are a textbook definition of an illegal retaliation.
Doubtless some companies won't hire her because she filed lawsuits, but if in the end the judge says she was right, or if they reach a settlement where Tesla is seen as losing, most employers won't care. It changes from being a troublemaker to someone who will stand up to bullies, which can be an asset in management, at least in smarter companies.
You get paid what you negotiate for when you get hired. Want more? Ask for more at the start.
Generally that is true and I have said it to many people. It is a sadly common reason women frequently are paid less than men, and I recommend books like "Women Don't Ask" and "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office" when women short-change themselves. But that isn't what the lawsuit is about.
After she had the job she was harassed both sexually and generally, including cat-calling and proposition, and she make sure to get the complaints documented so they have been confirmed. She says she was passed over for bonuses and got less than her peers which is illegal in her state. She says she was passed over for promotions, which is also potentially illegal but generally hard to convince a judge.
The most damning thing here is the case of the termination. The company spokespeople have now said to multiple news outlets that they fired her because they didn't think her discrimination case had merit. That is illegal under both federal law and California law, even if a lawsuit is dismissed the law absolutely forbids companies for firing over it. If a person sues or claims there was a safety violation and investigators can't confirm it, or a person claims there was harassment or discrimination and it can't be confirmed, the company is still forbidden for firing over it. But here their PR machine is telling the media they fired over something illegal to fire over.
Those are very different from negotiating wages. Negotiating wages and asking for more are legal and proper. The other things that are described in the lawsuit and even items in the public statements by the company are illegal and prohibited.
Yes, at will employment (which is the default in every US state, unless the employee signs away the rights) means both sides can end at any time; employers can fire at any time for "any reason or for no reason". Employees can also quit at any time for "any reason" or "no reason". Laws and lawyers are tricky in the details. The "any reason" and "no reason" actually have some limits that make it illegal. The law allows for several reasons which people cannot be fired.
Even if the company gives a totally different reason or gives no reason, people cannot be fired based on several factors:
* Discrimination of various protected classes. This is by far the most common. If a mass layoff had an unexpectedly high percentage of a protected group they could probably convince a judge it was discriminatory. On the individual scale, a job termination of an individual due to discrimination like pregnancy or childbirth, or a person becoming too old and slowing down at work, or becoming disabled, etc, are also subject to discrimination protections. (Unprotected classes can generally be used for discrimination so things like physical appearance and body weight, political views, and credit history, although some states are slowly adding protected classes.)
* Retaliation for lawsuits. It is unfortunately rather common. Federal laws make this an illegal firing, even if the claims fail in the courts. A person has the legal right to sue their employer if they suspect wrongdoing. Retaliation rules strongly favor employees and they don't require intent; for example if there is a harassment claim so the person being harassed gets moved from day shift to night shift because that's what the company thinks is the best way to separate the two, if the harassed person doesn't want to work night shift that is retaliation against the employee and can result in enormous fines and penalties against the company. This is the reason Tesla is going to lose this fight and pay a huge settlement. Their public press releases keep stating it was because of the lawsuit. The one in the article stated "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden’s claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla." That action is absolutely forbidden under federal law. If the PR person talked with the company lawyers first they probably would not have said it.
* Similarly, complaining and reporting about safety violations and OSHA requirements are an illegal reason to fire people. The right to a safe workplace is legally guaranteed.
* No firing for employees refusing to commit an illegal act, such as refusing to lie to the police/courts to protect the company, refusing to commit fraud, refusing to intentionally harm someone, etc. Just like contracts, you cannot hire someone to break the law for you, no murder contracts, robbery contracts, prostitution contracts, etc.
* No firing for the person exercising legal rights and responsibilities. Employers MUST allow a person time to vote on election day, they MUST allow for medical leave, they MUST allow for jury duty, they MUST allow for someone with a summons to court. Most employers follow these, but when a company says a worker must to choose between jury duty and their jobs, or choose between going to the hospital or their jobs, government agencies are quick to intervene and the courts show no mercy to those companies. In some states this is extremely severe, a few states like New York if a company actively prevents even a single worker from voting the company can lose their business license in the state.
* No firing for a person called to military service, allowing for up to five years of absence from the company. It is surprising to many companies, but someone may come back from service in Iraq or Afghanistan after several years and their job must be restored.
* Refusal to take a lie detector test, except for certain government jobs. Science proved
This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.
This is also how you teach your kids to be lazy and not work for anything.
Work ethic can be taught while enjoying a nice life. The two are not mutually exclusive. You don't need poverty to teach how to work.
Some parents pass along a strong work ethic through modeling (showing the kids how to work) and by parents requiring and expecting work from the kids. Some rich kids are hard workers, so are some middle-class kids, so are some poor kids. Yes it may be easier to teach if the only choice is work or die, but the value of work can be taught under less dire circumstances.
It is best if the family can help with both. The rising generation can be taught the value of work, and the family can help buffer against life's everyday bruises to uplift their children to heights the parents were unable to reach. Sadly we're in a decline cycle where children are unlikely to reach the same levels their parents had, but we can still try.
The intelligence services were politicized under Obama... Just look at all the domestic spying that has been uncovered, admitted to, and simply resumed without anything being done about it.
This goes back far beyond 8 years. It goes back farther than 80 years. It has nothing to do with the letters behind a politician's name.
Look back to the 1920's, a time when Hoover's FBI was repeatedly challenged for illegal wiretapping, and newspapers and other agencies were constantly leaking information. They had both of the major problems we have today. Ours have scaled up thanks to computers, but the nature of the issues are unchanged.
Today is almost impossible to find a political news article that doesn't contain lines like their "anonymous source was not authorized to speak to the press". This is not a new problem, remember the slogan "Loose Lips Sink Ships" was chanted 75 years ago because of exactly the same intelligence leaks. There were a few people who at least gave lip service to the idea of keeping secrets, but headlines in the newspaper war were more real than stories from across the ocean. For the illegal secret gathering, there has been a non-stop series of lawsuits since almost their inception.
We've had 15 presidents who in theory could have addressed the issues, and plenty of rounds of congressional elections over the years. The problem is not who is the current president or sitting in congress. The problem is built in to humanity. Humans working in governments or working for secret-gathering organizations are not immune to the problems common to humanity.
The article is right about several things. There are abuses, there is discrimination, and there is harassment. Those absolutely should be identified and eliminated.
However, we are talking about humans who have actual preferences. Even if opportunities are equal, people have preferences. When offered a formal dinner with plate choices of Steak, Fish, and Veggie entrees, the general popularity for steak isn't because of a "bias in the system".
Nobody seems to care that 99.6% of drywall installers are male, there aren't documentaries about how the drywall installation business is biased against women, or research how women have no chance to succeed in their drywall career. Same thing about 99.9% of bricklayers and stonemasons are male. There is a little discussion about how 99.5% of firefighters are male, there are a few more women in the ranks, but generally people accept that these are going to be male-dominated fields.
Similarly, there isn't much anger about how 91.1% of registered nurses are female, no outcry about how men don't want to be nurses. In fact it is the opposite, I know a few men who are nurses at a nearby hospital, and they talk about discrimination and bias the opposite way, against the males. Where is the outcry that 94.1% of childcare workers are women? Instead the outcry is about how men getting into child care must be quietly pedophiles and are potential rapists. Just like above, people accept that these are currently female-dominated fields. (150 years ago nursing was male dominated, but it shifted during the big wars a century ago. Shifts happen.)
Even though it is gender biased, computer programmers have been gradually drifting away from male dominated fields, from about 91% in 2007 down to about 82% today based on US DoL statistics. Some schools even report equalization of women to men graduating in CS and engineering, and a small number have seen it cross over completely with more women graduating than men.
The article includes discussion of LGBQ groups. The groups make up about 3.5% of Americans so it shouldn't be any surprise that they make up a tiny minority of scientists. The group makes up a tiny percent of the general population, so it would be quite surprising indeed if they were clustered into a specific career field.
So yes, I agree in general with the article that abuses, discrimination, and harassment need to be addressed. But like the grandparent post mentions, equal opportunity doesn't mean equal outcome. Some careers are more attractive to different genders, hence the male bricklayers and female childcare workers. Many science fields seem to be more attractive to certain groups and not to others, that is not inherently a problem.
There are a few short works that have been fought in the courts. It is clearly a literary work, and it would probably qualify for originality. The question here is mostly about length.
The law doesn't specify a minimum length. Courts have ruled for coverage on works with only a few hundred words. There are children's books with under a hundred words that no lawyer would challenge over copyright protection. Daft Punk's lyrics to "Around the World" have registered copyright protection even though it is only three words repeated, although who knows if the courts would accept it.
Assuming this survives a trial, it would be interesting to see how it ends up. My guess is that judges would ultimately base decisions on the nature of the original creative work and the nature of the reuse, with the length being mostly irrelevant.
Damages in this case would be quite low as there is minimal economic harm and the joke probably was not subject to a registered copyright. But if the protections were allowed and many people registered copyrights on small jokes, they could be little landmines, which is the fear people (especially lawyers) have.
Even if they do pay, it's unlikely to make a difference to their behavior.
Agreed. $515,000 / 100,000,000 calls is about a half cent per call.
On a global market, cheap telemarketers are around 50 cents per call, or more expensive billed on a per-minute basis for longer calls; more again if you don't use the global market and focus locally instead.
The fine won't make any difference to the company. It may sting slightly to pay it, but the practice will continue.
That's the difficult thing. It is all about the relationship and the environment.
In bad environments asking for a raise gets you fired. Asking for training (even if the company says they encourage it) gets you fired. Doing anything ambitious gets you fired, or have the things taken without credit. This type of company also fires people immediately if they make a mistake that has a cost.
In good environments asking for a raise starts a discussion that can get you money. Asking for training (even when the company has never encouraged it) can get one person or even a team of people some training. Being ambitious is rewarded openly and and given cautious praise: that in addition to doing the regular duties you also did the thing on the side. This type of company generally retains people who make costly mistakes who are also contrite and appear to learn the lesson; leaders know the company pays for the learning experience either way, the question is if they will retain the student of life's hard lessons.
The first type of company is the one to flee. The second is the type to cherish. If you don't know what to look for it is easy to miss the signs when finding the job.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife's a mathematician but isn't on /., she's answered that question to me a few times. She (of course) describes it as a numbers game.
It should be on merit in this case, but in cases where it really is a problem then an "affirmative action" can help fix problems whenever systemic problems actually exist.
In software engineering the field is about 20-25% female. Compared with many fields that is relatively balanced. Pulling up US labor statistics, look at gender distribution in nursing, childcare, education, HR, social services, event planning, civil engineering, construction, librarians, therapists, speech pathologists, hairstylists, secretaries, tailoring and sewing, painting ... all these fields have stronger gender bias than software engineering. People tend to only complain about the industries with high pay and few physical requirements; nobody seems to care that construction workers are near-universally male, nor that early childcare workers are nearly all female.
Google is shouting from the rooftops that they are seeking gender diversity with 31% women, plus trying to hire even more women. Anyone smart enough to read Slashdot should see problems with that; Google is hiring 50% over the general programmer population, plus taking efforts to hire even more than are available. That can be even worse than underhiring; they've got about 7000 more women than stats say they should. Apple similarly has thousands more than they statistically should. By overhiring they are preventing many other companies from reaching parity with the industry's gender distribution, causing even worse stigma because so many other smaller companies have no women in the applicant pool.
Gender is only one concern, but no matter the topic if the numbers are too high or too low, people should ask why that is the case. Gender, race, age, political party, and every other stat could be examined. If the company's demographics don't match the broader environment then there is a concern. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, but it should still be understood if the numbers aren't similar.
Google has two glaringly obvious demographics mismatches. First, women are over-represented; they're flooding the news with "31% female" statistics instead of the 20% that is expected for the field. Second, youth are over-represented with a median age of 29 instead of the industry median age of 43. All the major mismatches should be investigated.
Why the but? These two clauses are causally unrelated.
The executives do not care if the shows are leaked. A few of the fans will see it early, they'll still watch it when it airs, they'll watch it again on the HBO web site, and they'll buy the season on BluRay.
But email, that's another matter entirely. Email has details about weekend getaways with the secretaries. Email has discussions about which stars need coke deliveries to their trailer (not the soda). Email includes salary negotiations and how one actor did something with somebody that explains their massive pay difference.
Emails are the thing many executives fear. Leaking the product is nothing to them. That is why the executives wrote what they did. They got 1.5TB of video? That's okay, as long as the emails are safe.
That 'mediocre ass-time video' had 10.1 million viewers last episode. You may not think it is, but it's kind of a big deal.
That's just the thing. Maybe a few hundred thousand of the fans will watch it, but they'll also watch it when it airs, and they'll watch it again online in the HBO site, and they'll buy the entire season again on BluRay. People who watch it early will talk about it and generate buzz for more views as well.
The amount they could lose on the episode specifically is a tiny drop in the bucket and may even increase total ad revenue. The executives are more worried about dirt on the people, the incriminating emails like bosses running away with the secretary for a weekend, than they are worried about show views.
96% of child molesters are male
There you go. Another example of gender gaps.
Those looking for equality should demand more women break into that. /s
Sourced?
It isn't just this field, and my source is the US federal government's BLS, here.
Many fields are dominated by a specific gender. In software it is about an 80/20 split, buy software is mild compared to other fields. There are many documentaries, books, and reports decrying how this is biased and unfair.
Firefighters, bricklayers, road construction, these are 99.9% male. Somehow there is no social plea for women to be pipelayers, or for more women to hang drywall.
On the flip side, women make up about 90%-95% of various nursing occupations, 97% of dental hygienists, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 95% of childcare workers, 90% of diatitians and nutritionists. I've heard a few cries for men to enter some of these fields, but generally these are socially accepted as well. When men express an interest in childcare or teaching young children they're socially accused of being pedophiles or creeps.
The gender balance in software development is in line with the variation across most fields. People who say they want the fields to be balanced 50/50 should consider why they aren't going after other fields that are far more imbalanced.
In that regard, I thing the person with the original manifesto has some points, the writeup against the manifesto also has some points, but both need to realize that the distribution is still well within bounds that are typical for many fields. People have preferences, including gender preferences brought on both by nature and society.
It depends on who you're talking to.
In colloquial speech, yes, anything can be addictive.
For people going on medical definitions, no. People can experience compulsions around nearly anything, but generally behaviors don't cause addiction, except for things like a runner's high. Many professionals have started explaining compulsions as "behavioral addictions" since many people don't understand the terms that well.
Compulsive behaviors can include nearly anything that a person does where they develop a life-impacting urge to do things, usually followed by no reward. Gambling disorder, eating disorders, people who become "couch potatoes", binge watchers, "video game addicts", compulsive shoppers, hoarders, all can become compulsive behaviors.
Some medical dictionaries are updating their definitions of addiction to include compulsion, but most of the big ones are unwilling to do it.
Maybe good.
Did the investigators get proper warrants? Did they present accurate probable cause statements to magistrates? Did they follow the rules and procedures of law, and ensure the rights of the individuals were protected during the process?
If so then I agree: Good. The people were accused of some severe vandalism and destruction of property, and people who smash windows and damage vehicles deserve suitable legal consequences.
However, if the investigators did not follow the rule of law, did not follow the rules protecting individual rights, or otherwise violated the rights of citizens, then the investigators deserve to not only have their entire investigation dumped by the courts but to be fired from their jobs for incompetence. They have had over six full months to ensure they took the relatively simple steps to follow the law, and if they didn't do them they deserve to be blocked from the profession.
Seems to be only the extremes with you.
Either the old nations were primitives that deserved to be destroyed and conquered, or the invaders should be punished to the furthest generations.
Most people pick somewhere in the middle. For most of us that means recognizing the acts of the past were harmful in several ways, try to find some ways to correct the wrongs (like making an effort to treat people fairly and not discriminate), then move on with life trying to do the best you can. Then hopefully we won't screw up the world too badly for our children.
That was a LONG time ago and different situation...the lands of the world were all up for grabs.
They're talking about Aboriginal and Native American populations. The lands weren't vacant and up for grabs. They had existing nations with unique cultures, trade routes, economic structure, social structure, political structure, and military.
The lands were already populated. In both cases the native people were less able to defend themselves and consequently lost a war against invaders. One of the spoils of war is writing the history books. In both of these cases the invaders said the land was not owned by anyone else so they claimed it for themselves.
Now we have decided who has what land and civilizations formed....and now we have people just blowing up and shooting people, and slashing them...for theological reasons.
That has been the case for several thousand years. These brief periods of mild peace are the rare exception in world history, not the rule.
It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that...
It is like many things, not just that. You are right that it is a luxury device, and a toy. But the same can be said of your PlayStation and XBox, your television, and your smart phone.
The luxury device is part of the reason they're lowering the price. You still need a high-end computer, something around $1500 and far beyond what most people have. They lowered the price from about $800 at launch to $400, but by the time you get a few games and the computer you are still paying two grand. If you already own the high end computer that meets the hardware requirements --- a luxury -- then the extra $400 won't be a painful addition.
Stereoscopic displays are a product that has been tried with many options over the years. None have taken off yet, but eventually it is one will. It may not be this generation of 3D devices, or next generation, or the generation after that. Or it may be this set, as the latest round are quite impressive.
For another thing, it is a technology that has a chicken-and-egg problem. There needs to be enough good products (in this field it is generally games and porn) to encourage hardware sales. And there needs to be enough hardware out there to ensure products get built. Without good products the hardware doesn't sell, and without enough devices the software cannot generate a profit.
Eventually stereoscopic tech will take off, there is little doubt of that. I've used many of the devices, including Oculus, Vive, PSVR, all the way down to Cardboard. I've tried 3D games all the way back to the VirtualBoy, and enjoyed trying Vectrex 3D with a game collector friend who could probably start a museum. I played a few shutter glasses games and stereoscopic arcade games back in the 80's. With all of that, I know that sooner or later the tech will take off eventually. Most failed because of the chicken-and-egg problem of needing both hardware and software. 3D TV never had any must-have products. 3DS has a good set of games and is still viable for steroscopic 3D. Both Oculus and Vive have some amazing position tracking hardware and have an ever-expanding library of software. They're gaining must-have products as AAA games are starting to include options for 3D play; Bethesda and EA have talked about several, such as Fallout and The Sims. Even existing games like Minecraft, GTA V, Half Life 2, Doom 3, people are creating 3D mods for Vive and Oculus.
I think this is the generation of hardware that will bring stereoscopic 3D to the masses, but if it isn't, we are extremely close to that critical tipping point.
Of course those same orgnizations could fight it if they chose.
Banning known members of the committe from their services could be quite painful and within their rights. Suddenly no support for their Apple devices includeing iPhones or iTunes. Google is blocked along with YouTube and gmail and docs. Websites may give "Service denied becuse your policies harmed us. We do not support you as a customer." Neflix and Hulu stop working if the companies don't want the extra CPU costs of encrypting all their content.
Many companies got behind the SOPA protests, blacking out
much of the 'useful' web to show that they may go dark because of the concerns.
I imagine if suddenly a huge portion of the useful web were denied to the committee they'd quickly rethink their decision.
So he's traveling from Sweden ... why does the article keep mentioning the travel ban?
Because like many people the Gizmodo editors are probably geography-impaired.
I imagine a thought process like: Iran, Sudan, Yemen ... Sweden... they all end in N... flight denied... must be the travel ban!
It's going to cost about $160k to get my kid through college
Put away the silver spoon if you don't like the costs.
The bulk of universities in the US charge around $8K-$12K per year. Google's top result says the average was $9650 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and $33480 average at private universities. It's even cheaper to start at a community college then transfer to a bigger school after the associate's degree. Don't complain about the $160K for-profit private school when there is the $40K option that can be paid with scholarships, grants, and subsidized loans.
Some people are ironically stupid about education when it comes to quality and cost. Quite a few studies have shown difference between the $140K education and the $40K education is only the cost. For one link of many, there is no significant difference between the choice of school attended. While attending the school gives an enormous boost, the difference between cheap public schools and big-name private schools are, in the words of that one report, "generally indistinguishable from zero". I've seen plenty of other reports with the same conclusion. The cheapest schools yield the same career results as the most expensive.
If you want it yet cannot budget the costs of the private for-profit school then don't go there. As parallels, don't buy the porterhouse or lobster dinner when your budget is better suited for the cheeseburger, and don't buy a Lamborghini as your commuter vehicle if your budget is better suited for a Honda Accord.
If Canada thinks that Canadian courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world, then the same argument says Chinese courts can order Google to delete results everywhere in the world.
That's a reason many global corporations use national subordinate companies, and the global umbrella serves as a shell.
The Canadian subordinate follows Canadian laws, the US subordinate follows US laws, the others in Germany and France and Spain and other nations all follow their own respective laws, and we all get along nicely.
The borderless Internet certainly complicates legal matters. Whatever the activity, some aspect of it is probably illegal somewhere in the world.
Sounds like you had some nutter that decided to just convert the system into microservices without much thought other than ...
That is the thing that misleads so many people, both the non-technical bosses AND many of the technical people. We want this because it is hip and trendy, and we want it because the large companies are using it so it must be good.
Think about the headline. Walmart -- the world's largest retailer that spends more money on IT infrastructure in a single day than most companies make in annual revenue -- has switched to a product that saves their specific enormous needs a bit of resources. There are other headlines like it. Redis let's Twitter handle a million requests per second. Some large organization publishes how their enormous tech problems only experienced by the world's largest companies get some benefit. Hadoop clusters, Kubernetes, Hazelcast, memcached, Cassandra, Kafka, and more. They're great solutions if you actually have those problems the tools help with. If you're in an organization that spends a million on infrastructure then the costs of having a few of the programmers spend a few months implementing the solution can be cost effective.
Very few companies in the world have those needs, yet headlines like this make CEOs and CTOs and beancounters think they save money, and everyday tech guys want to jump in to the latest high-end technology. It doesn't matter if the database rarely hits 100 requests per minute and runs easily on a single machine, the groups decide the organization must bring in the same high-capacity infrastructure because it scales up to support the world's largest organizations. Hadoop clusters, Kubernetes, Hazelcast, memcached, Cassandra, Kafka, and more. They're great solutions if you actually have those problems the tools help with.
While some solutions are good solutions for specific needs, far too often the solutions brought in are completely wrong for the organization's actual problems.
A few companies back they had a huge internal developer group, everything was built around microservices, tiered architectures where every service , autoscaling groups, and multiple database arrays, all connected through distributed memory tools. All that for a roughly 4TB database where nearly all transactions were single-row reads; the peak was around 10,000 requests per minute (166/sec) serving out roughly 150 megabytes per minute (2.5MBps). There performance was slow, and a bit of profiling (part of my job to make things faster) revealed abysmal practices. Warnings from Sonar said strings shouldn't be reused, so in less than a second there were a million copies of the string "true". Carefully composed SQL commands were placed in interned strings, then had copies made, and copies of copies made. In several cases I found the overhead was enormous; some simple requests to generate a 50KB response would allocate 5+ MB of memory. All of it because tools suggested something might be more secure, and new-and-shiny saved massive organizations like Amazon or Twitter or Walmart a bunch of money.
When I was newly brought on and looked at the numbers, I asked my boss about it, who said they wanted to scale big just in case. A while later I had some chats with the CTO, and that was his reason as well; bring in all the latest high-end technology because when they used smaller technologies they were too slow. At that point they were looking at even bigger technologies, adding even more memory caches and renting even more expensive VM systems with terabytes of memory. As mentioned, that was one of my former employers. As the poster says: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
I grew up in a majority conservative area thinking ... I got older, earned money and traveled more, discovering that the liberals I met...
Take a wider view, insted of denigrating an entire ideology because of its loudest, stupidest perpetrators.
This is a universal truth. When people start throwing around labels of liberal or conservative, or political labels of democrat or republican, or anything else, they have just set themselves up for being those loud, stupid people. The extreme people who refuse to see the other side, and take viewpoints of 'my way or death', that complicates the issues.
Most people want reasonably intelligent things. While there is always a bit of natural greed, and everyone is certainly due their rewards for successes, collectively as humans we still are willing to show compassion when we know details. Your comparison of the priest versus the people in the pews is good. When it comes to societal issues, the people in the pews vocally decry the 'bad' things because they come with generic ideological labels; people hate taxes generally, people hate when taxes go up, people hate crime generally and some want heavy sentences to punish people who hurt others, people hate healthcare costs. But when pressed for details the same people will admit to the opposite side; we love having great schools, we love having reliable safe roads without potholes, and infrastructure that means power outages and network downtime are newsworthy, we love having police and fire services that respond almost instantly, we want secure high paying jobs for ourselves and our family and friends, we want the fallback of social programs when we lose our jobs or become injured we can keep our homes and family support until we get back on our feet, when diagnosed with a medical problem we want medical care that is the best in human history, when someone we know and love is accused of a crime we want mercy and really don't want extreme punishments because if you only knew them you'd see otherwise. When we drop the labels and make it real, people are generally kind and generous and thoughtful.
When people look only at the labels, it is generic conservative or generic liberal, it is the generic political party, it is generic taxes, it is generic crime, it is generic whatever, we see them as bad for us. But once you know the details, once you see the person who is suffering, once you see the benefits of helping and learning and understanding, suddenly they become positive again.
It is certainly easy to throw up the labels. It is easier to blame problems on the political party, or to blame it on the left/right. It is easier to claim that people in my own group are good and people in other groups are bad. Sadly the extreme groups, even extreme politicians, have gained a large pulpit. Too many take the lazy route; my party proposed it so I support it, my opponent proposed it so I oppose it, rather than both sides looking at details and seeing what helps the most people across the board. I cheer for my team and against your team, the losing team burns cars, instead of both groups watching for the best plays regardless of who made them, cheering their opponents for the hard-fought process.
Oops. She chose poorly. The even bigger issue is that she is now toxic. If she loses her case, it'll be a very hard sell to get hired again a la Ellen Pao.
Possibly, or maybe not. Certainly being in the news makes her name show up on searches, but that doesn't necessarily kill her career, especially if the courts agree with her on one or both lawsuits. And based on what both sides have publicly released so far, she has incredibly strong lawsuits.
The earlier harassment filings have some paper trails within the company. Under the law there are a few things that need to be satisfied, but the biggest is a clear communication that the actions are unwanted. Since she made sure there was a documented history, that will be very hard to fight if they actually reach the court. Yes, the company is in the process of putting her and her family through the wringer for that, but she did the absolute best thing she could: She left a paper trail with HR at the company, and she collected a ton of evidence while she was there.
The company then did what companies do. Even though they aren't supposed to fire in retaliation, they will make up other excuses and make the employee miserable. Bonuses were denied (and documented), she was not paid for overtime (which were documented as violating company policy) denied rest breaks and meal times. Then she was told her performance was unacceptably bad, a common tactic to get rid of employees companies don't like but can't readily fire. Still, she didn't leave.
But then the company finished it off and fired her. Unfortunately for Tesla, they opened their big mouth and made press statements.
The unlawful firing aspect has become an open-and-shut case thanks to Tesla's PR department. The press releases and spokespeople have clearly stated to multiple news outlets that they reviewed the complaints for the pending lawsuit, claimed they have no merit, and that was the reason they fired her. Not poor performance, not policy violations, but because the company didn't want to be sued for the alleged violations. The quote to The Guardian is right there in the story: "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla." Under both federal law and California law, that action is illegal. I'm guessing the company's legal team is furious at the PR team right now, but it is out there in many public statements.
So at this point it doesn't matter if her harassment lawsuit is dismissed or not, that is irrelevant for unlawful firing. With the collection of public statements, there is no way any judge would find against her, Tesla's media statements are a textbook definition of an illegal retaliation.
Doubtless some companies won't hire her because she filed lawsuits, but if in the end the judge says she was right, or if they reach a settlement where Tesla is seen as losing, most employers won't care. It changes from being a troublemaker to someone who will stand up to bullies, which can be an asset in management, at least in smarter companies.
You get paid what you negotiate for when you get hired. Want more? Ask for more at the start.
Generally that is true and I have said it to many people. It is a sadly common reason women frequently are paid less than men, and I recommend books like "Women Don't Ask" and "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office" when women short-change themselves. But that isn't what the lawsuit is about.
After she had the job she was harassed both sexually and generally, including cat-calling and proposition, and she make sure to get the complaints documented so they have been confirmed. She says she was passed over for bonuses and got less than her peers which is illegal in her state. She says she was passed over for promotions, which is also potentially illegal but generally hard to convince a judge.
The most damning thing here is the case of the termination. The company spokespeople have now said to multiple news outlets that they fired her because they didn't think her discrimination case had merit. That is illegal under both federal law and California law, even if a lawsuit is dismissed the law absolutely forbids companies for firing over it. If a person sues or claims there was a safety violation and investigators can't confirm it, or a person claims there was harassment or discrimination and it can't be confirmed, the company is still forbidden for firing over it. But here their PR machine is telling the media they fired over something illegal to fire over.
Those are very different from negotiating wages. Negotiating wages and asking for more are legal and proper. The other things that are described in the lawsuit and even items in the public statements by the company are illegal and prohibited.
Yes, at will employment (which is the default in every US state, unless the employee signs away the rights) means both sides can end at any time; employers can fire at any time for "any reason or for no reason". Employees can also quit at any time for "any reason" or "no reason". Laws and lawyers are tricky in the details. The "any reason" and "no reason" actually have some limits that make it illegal. The law allows for several reasons which people cannot be fired.
Even if the company gives a totally different reason or gives no reason, people cannot be fired based on several factors:
This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.
This is also how you teach your kids to be lazy and not work for anything.
Work ethic can be taught while enjoying a nice life. The two are not mutually exclusive. You don't need poverty to teach how to work.
Some parents pass along a strong work ethic through modeling (showing the kids how to work) and by parents requiring and expecting work from the kids. Some rich kids are hard workers, so are some middle-class kids, so are some poor kids. Yes it may be easier to teach if the only choice is work or die, but the value of work can be taught under less dire circumstances.
It is best if the family can help with both. The rising generation can be taught the value of work, and the family can help buffer against life's everyday bruises to uplift their children to heights the parents were unable to reach. Sadly we're in a decline cycle where children are unlikely to reach the same levels their parents had, but we can still try.
The intelligence services were politicized under Obama ... Just look at all the domestic spying that has been uncovered, admitted to, and simply resumed without anything being done about it.
This goes back far beyond 8 years. It goes back farther than 80 years. It has nothing to do with the letters behind a politician's name.
Look back to the 1920's, a time when Hoover's FBI was repeatedly challenged for illegal wiretapping, and newspapers and other agencies were constantly leaking information. They had both of the major problems we have today. Ours have scaled up thanks to computers, but the nature of the issues are unchanged.
Today is almost impossible to find a political news article that doesn't contain lines like their "anonymous source was not authorized to speak to the press". This is not a new problem, remember the slogan "Loose Lips Sink Ships" was chanted 75 years ago because of exactly the same intelligence leaks. There were a few people who at least gave lip service to the idea of keeping secrets, but headlines in the newspaper war were more real than stories from across the ocean. For the illegal secret gathering, there has been a non-stop series of lawsuits since almost their inception.
We've had 15 presidents who in theory could have addressed the issues, and plenty of rounds of congressional elections over the years. The problem is not who is the current president or sitting in congress. The problem is built in to humanity. Humans working in governments or working for secret-gathering organizations are not immune to the problems common to humanity.
Equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
This is a key that is so often overlooked.
The article is right about several things. There are abuses, there is discrimination, and there is harassment. Those absolutely should be identified and eliminated.
However, we are talking about humans who have actual preferences. Even if opportunities are equal, people have preferences. When offered a formal dinner with plate choices of Steak, Fish, and Veggie entrees, the general popularity for steak isn't because of a "bias in the system".
Nobody seems to care that 99.6% of drywall installers are male, there aren't documentaries about how the drywall installation business is biased against women, or research how women have no chance to succeed in their drywall career. Same thing about 99.9% of bricklayers and stonemasons are male. There is a little discussion about how 99.5% of firefighters are male, there are a few more women in the ranks, but generally people accept that these are going to be male-dominated fields.
Similarly, there isn't much anger about how 91.1% of registered nurses are female, no outcry about how men don't want to be nurses. In fact it is the opposite, I know a few men who are nurses at a nearby hospital, and they talk about discrimination and bias the opposite way, against the males. Where is the outcry that 94.1% of childcare workers are women? Instead the outcry is about how men getting into child care must be quietly pedophiles and are potential rapists. Just like above, people accept that these are currently female-dominated fields. (150 years ago nursing was male dominated, but it shifted during the big wars a century ago. Shifts happen.)
Even though it is gender biased, computer programmers have been gradually drifting away from male dominated fields, from about 91% in 2007 down to about 82% today based on US DoL statistics. Some schools even report equalization of women to men graduating in CS and engineering, and a small number have seen it cross over completely with more women graduating than men.
The article includes discussion of LGBQ groups. The groups make up about 3.5% of Americans so it shouldn't be any surprise that they make up a tiny minority of scientists. The group makes up a tiny percent of the general population, so it would be quite surprising indeed if they were clustered into a specific career field.
So yes, I agree in general with the article that abuses, discrimination, and harassment need to be addressed. But like the grandparent post mentions, equal opportunity doesn't mean equal outcome. Some careers are more attractive to different genders, hence the male bricklayers and female childcare workers. Many science fields seem to be more attractive to certain groups and not to others, that is not inherently a problem.
There are a few short works that have been fought in the courts. It is clearly a literary work, and it would probably qualify for originality. The question here is mostly about length.
The law doesn't specify a minimum length. Courts have ruled for coverage on works with only a few hundred words. There are children's books with under a hundred words that no lawyer would challenge over copyright protection. Daft Punk's lyrics to "Around the World" have registered copyright protection even though it is only three words repeated, although who knows if the courts would accept it.
Assuming this survives a trial, it would be interesting to see how it ends up. My guess is that judges would ultimately base decisions on the nature of the original creative work and the nature of the reuse, with the length being mostly irrelevant.
Damages in this case would be quite low as there is minimal economic harm and the joke probably was not subject to a registered copyright. But if the protections were allowed and many people registered copyrights on small jokes, they could be little landmines, which is the fear people (especially lawyers) have.
Even so, there is no clear answer.
Even if they do pay, it's unlikely to make a difference to their behavior.
Agreed. $515,000 / 100,000,000 calls is about a half cent per call.
On a global market, cheap telemarketers are around 50 cents per call, or more expensive billed on a per-minute basis for longer calls; more again if you don't use the global market and focus locally instead.
The fine won't make any difference to the company. It may sting slightly to pay it, but the practice will continue.
That's the difficult thing. It is all about the relationship and the environment.
In bad environments asking for a raise gets you fired. Asking for training (even if the company says they encourage it) gets you fired. Doing anything ambitious gets you fired, or have the things taken without credit. This type of company also fires people immediately if they make a mistake that has a cost.
In good environments asking for a raise starts a discussion that can get you money. Asking for training (even when the company has never encouraged it) can get one person or even a team of people some training. Being ambitious is rewarded openly and and given cautious praise: that in addition to doing the regular duties you also did the thing on the side. This type of company generally retains people who make costly mistakes who are also contrite and appear to learn the lesson; leaders know the company pays for the learning experience either way, the question is if they will retain the student of life's hard lessons.
The first type of company is the one to flee. The second is the type to cherish. If you don't know what to look for it is easy to miss the signs when finding the job.