First, its important to know exactly what the shirt said. Neither the summary nor the article quote it, but the image printed on the shirt seems to say:
BOMBS ZOMG ZOMG TERRORISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE
Now, it's always been pretty clear to me that just saying the word "bomb" in an airpot is a recipe for trouble. Lots of signs are posted everywhere saying that all statements must be taken seriously, even if they're said in a joking manner. In other words, you just don't joke about bombs in an airport.
Secondly, the summary doesn't make it clear that it wasn't the TSA who took issue with things, and ultimately kicked him off the plane, but that it was a guy from Delta. It seems completely plausible to me that some of the other passengers saw his shirt and really were "very uncomfortable". Maybe they shouldn't have been, but nonetheless they were. Given that there were customers who were uncomfortable, and the fact that this guy really should have known better than wear a shirt with "bomb" on it in the airpot, I can see why the Delta rep kicked the guy off the flight.
Furthermore, it is a medical procedure being performed on someone who is not you, therefore you have no say in the matter.
Funny, when I first read this I thought you were making a pro-life argument: That the abortion is a medical procedure performed on the child in the womb, and since the child in the womb isn't the woman in whose womb the child resides, the woman doesn't have a say in the matter.
I'll bet most of you won't get in line to begin with - bunch of hypocrites mostly, who just want to control women, with no consequences to themselves.
I would, totally. I completely agree with your sentiment -- if someone actually cares about the life of the child who is being aborted, this is the inescapable logical conclusion.
Back in the days of the Roman Emprie, "abortion" worked like this: if a woman had a child she didn't want, she left it on the city walls to die of exposure. This was not a crime, because children were not considered human beings with rights until they could talk. Early Chrisitans had this weird belief though, that these masses of cells that couldn't do anything by eat, cry, and defecate, were actually valuable human beings; and so they had this peculiar habit -- they would go around the walls and rescue the children, raising them as their own.
I'm sure you'd find plenty of Christians today who would do the same thing.
I didn't mean to compare the two experiences. What I was getting at was that a person might think I'd be utterly at home in that environment, and I'm not, even though I am obviously not going to be targeted that way.
OK, I think I understand. The thing is, I don't think this really has anything to do with geeks in particular. The same kind of "this is acceptable here" micro-culture can get out of control in fraternities, business societies, sports teams, or whatever. Heck, even whole countries can go that route -- every woman I know who's spent time in some Arabic countries say that you have to prepare yourself to be groped on the street on a regular basis.
The author of the article, Valerie Aurora, has done kernel development work and attended numerous confernces with hard-core geeks where there isn't this kind of ugly micro-culture. In fact, I'd say the Slashdot headline and summary completely mis-represent her article. The whole point is that at lots of conferences, there is *not* this ugly micro-culture; but at conferences like DEFCON there are; she is advocating some simple, well-tested changes that would change the atmosphere, and arguing why that is a good thing. She clearly sees this micro-culture as an unfortunate anomaly, not something fundamental to hacker culture.
I have to say that when I find myself surrounded by really hardcore geeks, I feel put off.
Is that because hard-core geeks randomly grab your crotch or come up and lick you? If not, comparing your discomfort to that of women at DEFCON is like telling someone who is currently being threatened with death by the Mafia that sometimes your boss threatens to fire you. Not the same thing.
OK, actual laws are important. But the problem with harping on them like this, is that it's going to make everyone all the time have to double-check everything they say, to make sure it doesn't constitute "harrassment". What do you think that's going to do to office morale when this one woman is around? Everyone's going to be on edge, being very careful, and not very friendly and open. And she will be able to sense that. She won't have anyone dare to do anything offensive; but she won't have anyone dare to just be open and friendly either. And she probably won't know it's because they've all been "scared straight" with threats of dismissal and lawsuits, she'll think it's because people don't like her, or don't think she's a very good coder, or whatever. She won't get as much positive vibe from others as a guy would, and she won't get as much positive vibe; she won't be able to forge the same connections as a guy in the same situation would. And so she won't be as good as she could be, thus reinforcing the idea, in both her mind and those around her, that women aren't very good coders.
Just stating the policy and the potential consequences once should be enough; after that, try to help people understand what it's like to be a girl in a mostly-guy field. Having a room full of guys who are genuinely trying to be considerate and encouraging will go a lot farther towards keeping her happy (and keeping the lawyers away) then having a room full of guys afraid to say anything lest they be fired for sexual harrassment.
The point of terrorism is to cause terror. Denying its existence would not be in the Taliban's interests if they were behind the attacks. Still, it's possible that they have just backed out.
Terrorism has a target. As long as the people who were meant to be terrorized believe the source and motivation behind the attack, it doesn't matter what everyone else believes. An abusive husband can tell everyone else that his wife tripped and fell without reducing the effectiveness of his violence, because she knows what really happened. If the goal of the Taliban (or some subgroup thereof) was to scare girls away from going to school, and they know that Afghan girls will believe that was the purpose, they could deny it to the international community without reducing the effectiveness of the attack.
(Not saying that's what happened, just pointing out the possibility.)
Which results in the very thing that it claims to not want. GPL3 code is RESTRICTIVE license. It is an anathema to FREEDOM. True freedom includes some not so nice things
Freedom for some people means restricting freedom from other people. For instance, to make sure you can enjoy your right to "life, liberty, an the pursuit of happiness", we take away other people's rights to beat you up and take your stuff. To make sure that customers can enjoy their right to buy things at a fair price, we set restrictions on what sellers can do -- e.g., monopolies can't abuse their position, people who sell stuff can't make an agreement on setting a price, &c.
In any case, the guy who wrote the software chose the license; it's already a heck of a lot less restrictive than proprietary software. No one's making you use their software. If you don't like it, write your own.
They will try to get a promotion by implementing a slightly different version of this which will have about the same results.
And probably the first year, they'll get a huge boost in performance / cost by getting rid of dead weight, making it seem like it was a really good idea.
Consider the intent of Facebook's email service: To remove people's need or desire to use Google services (Gmail, in this case).
Well they could start by making their mail interface not completely suck. I'm already annoyed enough that people send me messages from within Facebook instead of e-mailing me, because I just hate dealing with their messaging system so much.
A x C x D x E x F x G x H x I x J x K x L x M x N x O x P x Q x R x S x T x U x V x W x X x Y x Z = B
In this equation, A is correlated with B. If you know what A is and how to influence it, you'd be pretty stupid to not use it or even ignore it.
The damage done in a fire is positively correlated with the number of firefighters at a fire -- the fires that caused the highest damage had the highest number of firefighters. So obviously what we should do is only send one team of firefighters to any fire, right?
Unless of course, it's not the firefighters which cause the damage, but the size of the fire which causes both a high number of firefighters and a high amount of damage.
The fact that it has taken 6 years to migrate this vulnerability to other systems is somewhat discouraging.
To be honest, I think it's because Intel screwed up but didn't own up. If you look at the description of the 2006 Linux fix, it makes it sound like it was somehow Linux's fault; when Linux's code works just fine to the AMD specs. Intel's instruction was supposed to be a copy of the AMD instruction. If every single operating system vendor, independently, managed to "not properly handle uncanonical return addresses on Intel EM64T CPUs", it's hard not to conclude that it was a mistake on Intel's part (at very least in documentation). They should have gone around to all the operating system vendors and told them about the vulnerability when it was first discovered in 2006, and put a note in the instruction manual stating that it's important to check the return address.
It's complicated, which is why so many systems missed it. I did a write-up here with the gory details.
In short, the instruction is executed by the OS to return to user mode. Under certain conditions, this may throw a general protection fault. In AMD this fault happens in user mode. Happening in user mode is safe, so many OSes, designing to the AMD spec and assuming Intel's was the same, weren't checking boundary conditions to make sure that what the user was giving it was OK. But in Intel, the fault happens in privileged mode, with OS privileges but a guest stack pointer. So if the OS doesn't check for boundary conditions (and most didn't), the guest can set the stack pointer anywhere in OS memory and cause the fault handler scribble over it.
It sounds very exciting until you look at the code. Then you realise that the quality in the project is entirely in the marketing, and there's nothing of worth code-wise at all.
In may ways, it's the opposite of Linux. Linux was started by a lone programmer who had *something that worked*. That something attracted other people to work on it, and eventually became the massive development project it is today. But from then until now it has worked on the "benevolent dictator" model, where a single person has the final say. The success of any such project depends heavily on the character and abilities of said dictator.
From what I can tell, OpenStack was started by a bunch of companies who have had all kinds of grand visions for the future, but whose ideas have far exceeded what they actually had working. I'm not sure what the development model is, but given its roots, it's doubtful it will every go to the "benevolent dictator" model. So it's not the same at all.
I think "cloud" has to do more with the separation of managing the physical aspect of things from managing the software. Think about it: What does IT involve? It invovles both managing the physical aspect of things -- monitoring disks as they wear out, sorting out physical places to put servers, power and cooling, plugging in cables, configuring network switches and KVMs / serial consoles, &c &c. It also involves managing the software aspect -- installing operating systems, configuring servers, users, and so on. But if you think about it, those are completely distinct tasks; there's no reason they need to be done by the same person, and it's actually probably a bit uncommon for one person will enjoy and be good at doing both.
So as far as I'm concerned, any time you have one person working on the physical layer, and someone else working on the software layer, with one having no necessary knowledge of the other, you have a cloud.
being an athiest (or better yet, simply rejecting the bullshit that religion tries to force on us) means you are able to THINK on your own and not be swayed by fear of authority figures.
You can think just as well as a religious person. The whole point of the Protestant Reformation was to say, "Read the Bible for yourself, and figure out what it says." Jesus challenged authority figures and encouraged people to think for themselves too. I don't have any fear of some authority figure. There are a wide variety of churches and religions out there; chances are if you're attending one that has a view that's just incompatibile with yours, you can find another one that will accept you. (Not that I'm recommending this; I'm just saying, you don't need to live in fear of an authority figure.)
The only fear you might have about having non-standard beliefs is that you may be rejected socially by the church. But that's got nothing to do with religion; all social groups have ways of enforcing certain levels of conformity. I assume you have a number of atheist friends; if you suddenly became a Christian and changed your life as a result, I'm sure there would be similar social consequences for you.
Look, I know you said that you don't want to teach English. But the value, to other people, of your native English ability is really high. Why don't you just give it a try? You can always try to split 50/50 between teaching English and learning Mandarin. After a year or so, when you're functional in Mandarin, look for a job in programming again.
Be wary about the company you work for, though. I've some friends (and heard a lot of stories) about people who go to China promised certain pay and certain benefits, only to find the company offering them something very different once they're there. Shouldn't be as big a deal if you're already there, and if you have connections (through your fiancee's university) to people who can help you navigate the system in an emergency. But just keep an eye open and listen to your instincts: if something seems a bit fishy or too good to be true, go somewhere else.
Of course, the piece-of-crap "modern" couch my wife bought 7 years ago that I thought was the most uncomfortable thing ever was burned at last year's bonfire party.....
...thus contributing to "survivor bias", reinforcing the future's views that things made in the 2000's are a heck of a lot better than the things made in 2045.
Not saying the new couch wasn't crap; just saying, you didn't see couches of that quality made in 1965 because they were all burned by 1972.:-)
Not only are universities infested with FOREIGN spies, they're also infested with CORPORATE spies! Yes, these evil corporations often find that unviersities are the "ideal place...to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn and even steal research data, or place trainees". This must be STOPPED!
Either that, or the universities are doing exactly what they are intended to do, and it should be encouraged.
Perhaps because raising the national debt limit instead of reducing spending is fiscally irresponsible?
Whether it is or not, that's not the primary thing that prompted the downgrade:
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.
To be fair, having a black president and having our credit rating subsequently drop doesn't exactly help Obama's case.
Except that the credit rating agency explicitly said that the reason they reduced the credit rating was because of the grandstanding Republicans did against raising the national debt limit.
The really neat thing about brain teasers or puzzles or the bizarre questions you sometimes encounter like "How many pigeons are there is Manhattan" is that they are a very good way to judge someone's unstructured problem solving ability.
This reminds me of a story I heard about an engineering professor who was really keen on encouraging his students to do "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, and to think about the results of their calculations to see if they made sense. On one of his exams, along with the normal material, he had a bonus question: "Estimate the combined volume of all humans in the world". One of his students did some calculations and came up with the answer of 3 cubic centimeters. Not only did he not get the bonus, but he got a 10 point penalty.
Slashdot Mirror
First, its important to know exactly what the shirt said. Neither the summary nor the article quote it, but the image printed on the shirt seems to say:
Now, it's always been pretty clear to me that just saying the word "bomb" in an airpot is a recipe for trouble. Lots of signs are posted everywhere saying that all statements must be taken seriously, even if they're said in a joking manner. In other words, you just don't joke about bombs in an airport.
Secondly, the summary doesn't make it clear that it wasn't the TSA who took issue with things, and ultimately kicked him off the plane, but that it was a guy from Delta. It seems completely plausible to me that some of the other passengers saw his shirt and really were "very uncomfortable". Maybe they shouldn't have been, but nonetheless they were. Given that there were customers who were uncomfortable, and the fact that this guy really should have known better than wear a shirt with "bomb" on it in the airpot, I can see why the Delta rep kicked the guy off the flight.
Funny, when I first read this I thought you were making a pro-life argument: That the abortion is a medical procedure performed on the child in the womb, and since the child in the womb isn't the woman in whose womb the child resides, the woman doesn't have a say in the matter.
I would, totally. I completely agree with your sentiment -- if someone actually cares about the life of the child who is being aborted, this is the inescapable logical conclusion.
Back in the days of the Roman Emprie, "abortion" worked like this: if a woman had a child she didn't want, she left it on the city walls to die of exposure. This was not a crime, because children were not considered human beings with rights until they could talk. Early Chrisitans had this weird belief though, that these masses of cells that couldn't do anything by eat, cry, and defecate, were actually valuable human beings; and so they had this peculiar habit -- they would go around the walls and rescue the children, raising them as their own.
I'm sure you'd find plenty of Christians today who would do the same thing.
OK, I think I understand. The thing is, I don't think this really has anything to do with geeks in particular. The same kind of "this is acceptable here" micro-culture can get out of control in fraternities, business societies, sports teams, or whatever. Heck, even whole countries can go that route -- every woman I know who's spent time in some Arabic countries say that you have to prepare yourself to be groped on the street on a regular basis.
The author of the article, Valerie Aurora, has done kernel development work and attended numerous confernces with hard-core geeks where there isn't this kind of ugly micro-culture. In fact, I'd say the Slashdot headline and summary completely mis-represent her article. The whole point is that at lots of conferences, there is *not* this ugly micro-culture; but at conferences like DEFCON there are; she is advocating some simple, well-tested changes that would change the atmosphere, and arguing why that is a good thing. She clearly sees this micro-culture as an unfortunate anomaly, not something fundamental to hacker culture.
Is that because hard-core geeks randomly grab your crotch or come up and lick you? If not, comparing your discomfort to that of women at DEFCON is like telling someone who is currently being threatened with death by the Mafia that sometimes your boss threatens to fire you. Not the same thing.
Sigh.
OK, actual laws are important. But the problem with harping on them like this, is that it's going to make everyone all the time have to double-check everything they say, to make sure it doesn't constitute "harrassment". What do you think that's going to do to office morale when this one woman is around? Everyone's going to be on edge, being very careful, and not very friendly and open. And she will be able to sense that. She won't have anyone dare to do anything offensive; but she won't have anyone dare to just be open and friendly either. And she probably won't know it's because they've all been "scared straight" with threats of dismissal and lawsuits, she'll think it's because people don't like her, or don't think she's a very good coder, or whatever. She won't get as much positive vibe from others as a guy would, and she won't get as much positive vibe; she won't be able to forge the same connections as a guy in the same situation would. And so she won't be as good as she could be, thus reinforcing the idea, in both her mind and those around her, that women aren't very good coders.
Just stating the policy and the potential consequences once should be enough; after that, try to help people understand what it's like to be a girl in a mostly-guy field. Having a room full of guys who are genuinely trying to be considerate and encouraging will go a lot farther towards keeping her happy (and keeping the lawyers away) then having a room full of guys afraid to say anything lest they be fired for sexual harrassment.
Terrorism has a target. As long as the people who were meant to be terrorized believe the source and motivation behind the attack, it doesn't matter what everyone else believes. An abusive husband can tell everyone else that his wife tripped and fell without reducing the effectiveness of his violence, because she knows what really happened. If the goal of the Taliban (or some subgroup thereof) was to scare girls away from going to school, and they know that Afghan girls will believe that was the purpose, they could deny it to the international community without reducing the effectiveness of the attack.
(Not saying that's what happened, just pointing out the possibility.)
Freedom for some people means restricting freedom from other people. For instance, to make sure you can enjoy your right to "life, liberty, an the pursuit of happiness", we take away other people's rights to beat you up and take your stuff. To make sure that customers can enjoy their right to buy things at a fair price, we set restrictions on what sellers can do -- e.g., monopolies can't abuse their position, people who sell stuff can't make an agreement on setting a price, &c.
In any case, the guy who wrote the software chose the license; it's already a heck of a lot less restrictive than proprietary software. No one's making you use their software. If you don't like it, write your own.
And probably the first year, they'll get a huge boost in performance / cost by getting rid of dead weight, making it seem like it was a really good idea.
Well they could start by making their mail interface not completely suck. I'm already annoyed enough that people send me messages from within Facebook instead of e-mailing me, because I just hate dealing with their messaging system so much.
The damage done in a fire is positively correlated with the number of firefighters at a fire -- the fires that caused the highest damage had the highest number of firefighters. So obviously what we should do is only send one team of firefighters to any fire, right?
Unless of course, it's not the firefighters which cause the damage, but the size of the fire which causes both a high number of firefighters and a high amount of damage.
To be honest, I think it's because Intel screwed up but didn't own up. If you look at the description of the 2006 Linux fix, it makes it sound like it was somehow Linux's fault; when Linux's code works just fine to the AMD specs. Intel's instruction was supposed to be a copy of the AMD instruction. If every single operating system vendor, independently, managed to "not properly handle uncanonical return addresses on Intel EM64T CPUs", it's hard not to conclude that it was a mistake on Intel's part (at very least in documentation). They should have gone around to all the operating system vendors and told them about the vulnerability when it was first discovered in 2006, and put a note in the instruction manual stating that it's important to check the return address.
It's complicated, which is why so many systems missed it. I did a write-up here with the gory details.
In short, the instruction is executed by the OS to return to user mode. Under certain conditions, this may throw a general protection fault. In AMD this fault happens in user mode. Happening in user mode is safe, so many OSes, designing to the AMD spec and assuming Intel's was the same, weren't checking boundary conditions to make sure that what the user was giving it was OK. But in Intel, the fault happens in privileged mode, with OS privileges but a guest stack pointer. So if the OS doesn't check for boundary conditions (and most didn't), the guest can set the stack pointer anywhere in OS memory and cause the fault handler scribble over it.
In may ways, it's the opposite of Linux. Linux was started by a lone programmer who had *something that worked*. That something attracted other people to work on it, and eventually became the massive development project it is today. But from then until now it has worked on the "benevolent dictator" model, where a single person has the final say. The success of any such project depends heavily on the character and abilities of said dictator.
From what I can tell, OpenStack was started by a bunch of companies who have had all kinds of grand visions for the future, but whose ideas have far exceeded what they actually had working. I'm not sure what the development model is, but given its roots, it's doubtful it will every go to the "benevolent dictator" model. So it's not the same at all.
I think "cloud" has to do more with the separation of managing the physical aspect of things from managing the software. Think about it: What does IT involve? It invovles both managing the physical aspect of things -- monitoring disks as they wear out, sorting out physical places to put servers, power and cooling, plugging in cables, configuring network switches and KVMs / serial consoles, &c &c. It also involves managing the software aspect -- installing operating systems, configuring servers, users, and so on. But if you think about it, those are completely distinct tasks; there's no reason they need to be done by the same person, and it's actually probably a bit uncommon for one person will enjoy and be good at doing both.
So as far as I'm concerned, any time you have one person working on the physical layer, and someone else working on the software layer, with one having no necessary knowledge of the other, you have a cloud.
You can think just as well as a religious person. The whole point of the Protestant Reformation was to say, "Read the Bible for yourself, and figure out what it says." Jesus challenged authority figures and encouraged people to think for themselves too. I don't have any fear of some authority figure. There are a wide variety of churches and religions out there; chances are if you're attending one that has a view that's just incompatibile with yours, you can find another one that will accept you. (Not that I'm recommending this; I'm just saying, you don't need to live in fear of an authority figure.)
The only fear you might have about having non-standard beliefs is that you may be rejected socially by the church. But that's got nothing to do with religion; all social groups have ways of enforcing certain levels of conformity. I assume you have a number of atheist friends; if you suddenly became a Christian and changed your life as a result, I'm sure there would be similar social consequences for you.
Look, I know you said that you don't want to teach English. But the value, to other people, of your native English ability is really high. Why don't you just give it a try? You can always try to split 50/50 between teaching English and learning Mandarin. After a year or so, when you're functional in Mandarin, look for a job in programming again.
Be wary about the company you work for, though. I've some friends (and heard a lot of stories) about people who go to China promised certain pay and certain benefits, only to find the company offering them something very different once they're there. Shouldn't be as big a deal if you're already there, and if you have connections (through your fiancee's university) to people who can help you navigate the system in an emergency. But just keep an eye open and listen to your instincts: if something seems a bit fishy or too good to be true, go somewhere else.
...thus contributing to "survivor bias", reinforcing the future's views that things made in the 2000's are a heck of a lot better than the things made in 2045.
Not saying the new couch wasn't crap; just saying, you didn't see couches of that quality made in 1965 because they were all burned by 1972. :-)
Not only are universities infested with FOREIGN spies, they're also infested with CORPORATE spies! Yes, these evil corporations often find that unviersities are the "ideal place...to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn and even steal research data, or place trainees". This must be STOPPED!
Either that, or the universities are doing exactly what they are intended to do, and it should be encouraged.
Whether it is or not, that's not the primary thing that prompted the downgrade:
--Standards and Poor's, quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_credit-rating_downgrade,_2011
Except that the credit rating agency explicitly said that the reason they reduced the credit rating was because of the grandstanding Republicans did against raising the national debt limit.
And here's the reference, for those who want to take a look for themselves: Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal The brief article contains a link to both the letter written by the National Academy of Sciences, and the WSJ.
I really enjoy my job as a programmer, and even if I didn't have to work, I'd probably spend 20-30 hrs a week doing something similar anyway.
The USPTO doesn't overturn patents; courts do.
This reminds me of a story I heard about an engineering professor who was really keen on encouraging his students to do "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, and to think about the results of their calculations to see if they made sense. On one of his exams, along with the normal material, he had a bonus question: "Estimate the combined volume of all humans in the world". One of his students did some calculations and came up with the answer of 3 cubic centimeters. Not only did he not get the bonus, but he got a 10 point penalty.