Perhaps I'm too naive, but I would hope that if this were WW2 then a lot of the rather eyebrow-raising stuff he leaked wouldn't have existed in the first place.
The inability to even tell if they're looking at you is particularly weird. I had a meeting with this guy as a student 8 or 10 years ago or so, when he was wearing a heads-up display attached to a computer he kept sort of slung over his shoulder, with a one-handed chording keyboard on the outside of it. It seemed interesting tech-wise, definitely at the time, when it was all DIY'd. But it was slightly weird always being unsure when he was looking through his glasses at me, and when he was looking at his glasses reading the web or something. At least with a smartphone or laptop you can see people look down and look up.
Consumers might be "tolerating" it, and many of them might be suckers who're going to buy this stuff, but I doubt there are really many gamers "enjoying and embracing" it.
Sure, electronic delivery might make it cheaper; I have no particular attachment to ink-and-paper. I'm a bit skeptical of the interactive learning stuff that this article is also pushing, though. Even with electronic delivery, you don't have to delivery fancy e-learning platforms and educational games and whatnot. You can just give the kids access to Wikipedia or similar.
couldn't that be done with books, too?
on
A School in the Cloud
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I learned a ton on my own as a kid by reading random articles out of an encyclopedia, and some of those "How Things Work" series of books. I imagine kids in India could do so, too— except that they don't have access to such books. So it seems overall more a matter of access to knowledge, in any form, than of something new and magical about technology-based learning as a specific form.
They aren't arguing for any of those things. Merely that technical conferences should not gratuitously include sexual or rape-related references when they aren't on-topic to the actual purpose of the conference. If you've been to any technical conferences, you'd realize this is a pervasive problem in a rather male-dominated, frattish industry, though it's been getting somewhat better lately (perhaps with the exception of game-industry conferences).
I don't see them arguing against sex education anywhere, or even entire sex-focused conferences.
The gyro monorail has to be one of my favorite bits of almost-sci-fi technology. Real enough to be prototyped, but not quite practical enough to be deployed (yet).
1. You previously held a stereotype that UIDs are inversely proportional to intelligence, i.e. lower UIDs correlate with greater intelligence. Perhaps this is because old-school Slashdotters are a better breed than the rabble that signs up these days. However, you found my post rather poor, which surprised you, as I have a low UID and you expect posts from low UIDs to typically be of high quality.
2. You previously held a stereotype that UIDs are proportional to intelligence, i.e. higher UIDs correlate with greater intelligence. Perhaps this is because too many years on Slashdot damages one's mind, so low-UID users who are still around can be presumed to have suffered the ill effects of 15 years of Slashdotting. However, you found my post surprisingly excellent, of a calibre you did not think was possible from such a low-UID user.
That's an argument you can make. I think your position is unreasonable position, however, and that intelligent people should not adopt it. In particular, you seem consumed with some emotional anger yourself, and appear more interested in denigrating people who might have post-traumatic reactions, feverishly imagining how they should be committed to asylums, than in rationally analyzing the situation and developing sane conference policies.
Therefore, my personal conclusion is that someone designing a conference policy would be do better to read the Ada Initiative's well-argued opinion, and should not follow your rather poorly, emotionally-argued opinion. It's ultimately up to the conference organizers to decide what policies they wish to have, though.
Someone ranting about "hippies", and angry about the existence of San Francisco, Austin, and Portland (which are presumably grouped together as hippie cities or something) is pretty easy to peg as an idiot.
Oh, an "in San Francisco" sarcastic comment. Are you 50 years old and a Rush Limbaugh fan? The Ada Initiative is headquartered in SF for the same reason that Wikipedia, Twitter, and many other technology organizations are.
If you mean banned by the government, sure, it shouldn't be. The argument, though, is that technical conferences should, in the sense of "the Ada Initiative thinks this is a best practice to follow", minimize triggering PTSD in unnecessary ways, especially those which might also fall disproportionately on some demographic groups. The Ada Initiative is a private organization that publishes some opinions on the subject, and publishes arguments in support of their opinions.
Also bad! But as far as I can tell, the GOP judges are actually more willing to give him that carte blanche than the Democratic judges are. Therefore, when it comes to judges, the existence of GOP appointees is to be discouraged.
I would be happy to have my mind changed by some conservative judges actually voting to enforce constraints on the executive branch's police powers.
Well if you go through the wiretapping, Guantanamo, and surveillance-without-warrant cases of the past 10 years, I think you will find a pattern that spans more than one case.
Oh, my two comments were pretty unrelated. The 911 one was a (possibly dumb) joke about the name of the organization being "Linux Defenders 911", which makes it sound like they're going to race to the scene in minutes to stop a crime in progress... when what they're actually going to do (if it works correctly) is provide assistance in painfully slow litigation, which is sort of the opposite of what you need to call 911 for.
Here I'm attempting to disagree by analogy with someone who's criticizing programmers who "prefer to use patented ideas without paying for them", as if that were a bad thing, by suggesting that's like criticizing shopowners for wanting to avoid protection payments.
I don't actually know whether OIN will work well, but I support their stated goals.
As many in the racketeering community would put it... giving cover to shopowners who prefer to operate in marked territory without paying protection money...
In a situation that is serious but not a time-critical emergency, you should dial your local police number rather than 911; the latter is intended for situations where immediate response is essential. Therefore, metaphorically, when you are sued and have some weeks to prepare a response, you shouldn't dial metaphorical Linux 911 either.
Now you might say, people dial 911 anyway, because nobody answers the non-emergency number, and if you trudge down to the police station and fill out paperwork nobody will do anything for months. That may be. But I assure you things are different with the metaphorical non-emergency number. Please file your concerns in our metaphorical Bugzilla and a developer will triage the report in a timely fashion.
The court noted that in its decision, in a nicely clueful bit of reasoning. They pointed out that it's much like, when asking for Coke at a restaurant that doesn't carry Coke, it is not infringing for the restaurant to offer you Pepsi-Cola or RC Cola as (correctly labeled) alternatives.
Well, it ended up in court because someone filed a lawsuit, formatted their briefs correctly, and paid a filing fee. It was in federal court because it was a claim under federal trademark law. The plaintiff did not, however, actually win.
On the pay, my impression of the UK (never having lived there myself) is that starting pay is pretty good for government jobs, but that it tops out very quickly, so for more skilled people the public-sector pay isn't very appealing. E.g. if you're a good programmer, you'll never get a public-sector offer anywhere near what Microsoft UK or a London bank will pay you.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I'm too naive, but I would hope that if this were WW2 then a lot of the rather eyebrow-raising stuff he leaked wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Only took them ~3 years to get around to scheduling the trial? Seems pretty lethargic even by military-bureaucracy standards.
The inability to even tell if they're looking at you is particularly weird. I had a meeting with this guy as a student 8 or 10 years ago or so, when he was wearing a heads-up display attached to a computer he kept sort of slung over his shoulder, with a one-handed chording keyboard on the outside of it. It seemed interesting tech-wise, definitely at the time, when it was all DIY'd. But it was slightly weird always being unsure when he was looking through his glasses at me, and when he was looking at his glasses reading the web or something. At least with a smartphone or laptop you can see people look down and look up.
Consumers might be "tolerating" it, and many of them might be suckers who're going to buy this stuff, but I doubt there are really many gamers "enjoying and embracing" it.
Sure, electronic delivery might make it cheaper; I have no particular attachment to ink-and-paper. I'm a bit skeptical of the interactive learning stuff that this article is also pushing, though. Even with electronic delivery, you don't have to delivery fancy e-learning platforms and educational games and whatnot. You can just give the kids access to Wikipedia or similar.
I learned a ton on my own as a kid by reading random articles out of an encyclopedia, and some of those "How Things Work" series of books. I imagine kids in India could do so, too— except that they don't have access to such books. So it seems overall more a matter of access to knowledge, in any form, than of something new and magical about technology-based learning as a specific form.
I guess there is some advantage to having a nonprofit organization active in this space...
Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't discuss the topic in public.
They aren't arguing for any of those things. Merely that technical conferences should not gratuitously include sexual or rape-related references when they aren't on-topic to the actual purpose of the conference. If you've been to any technical conferences, you'd realize this is a pervasive problem in a rather male-dominated, frattish industry, though it's been getting somewhat better lately (perhaps with the exception of game-industry conferences).
I don't see them arguing against sex education anywhere, or even entire sex-focused conferences.
The gyro monorail has to be one of my favorite bits of almost-sci-fi technology. Real enough to be prototyped, but not quite practical enough to be deployed (yet).
There are two interpretations of this comment:
1. You previously held a stereotype that UIDs are inversely proportional to intelligence, i.e. lower UIDs correlate with greater intelligence. Perhaps this is because old-school Slashdotters are a better breed than the rabble that signs up these days. However, you found my post rather poor, which surprised you, as I have a low UID and you expect posts from low UIDs to typically be of high quality.
2. You previously held a stereotype that UIDs are proportional to intelligence, i.e. higher UIDs correlate with greater intelligence. Perhaps this is because too many years on Slashdot damages one's mind, so low-UID users who are still around can be presumed to have suffered the ill effects of 15 years of Slashdotting. However, you found my post surprisingly excellent, of a calibre you did not think was possible from such a low-UID user.
That's an argument you can make. I think your position is unreasonable position, however, and that intelligent people should not adopt it. In particular, you seem consumed with some emotional anger yourself, and appear more interested in denigrating people who might have post-traumatic reactions, feverishly imagining how they should be committed to asylums, than in rationally analyzing the situation and developing sane conference policies.
Therefore, my personal conclusion is that someone designing a conference policy would be do better to read the Ada Initiative's well-argued opinion, and should not follow your rather poorly, emotionally-argued opinion. It's ultimately up to the conference organizers to decide what policies they wish to have, though.
Someone ranting about "hippies", and angry about the existence of San Francisco, Austin, and Portland (which are presumably grouped together as hippie cities or something) is pretty easy to peg as an idiot.
Oh, an "in San Francisco" sarcastic comment. Are you 50 years old and a Rush Limbaugh fan? The Ada Initiative is headquartered in SF for the same reason that Wikipedia, Twitter, and many other technology organizations are.
Way to confirm the stereotype that nerds are a bunch of reactionary idiots. Where do you live, Alabama?
If you mean banned by the government, sure, it shouldn't be. The argument, though, is that technical conferences should, in the sense of "the Ada Initiative thinks this is a best practice to follow", minimize triggering PTSD in unnecessary ways, especially those which might also fall disproportionately on some demographic groups. The Ada Initiative is a private organization that publishes some opinions on the subject, and publishes arguments in support of their opinions.
Also bad! But as far as I can tell, the GOP judges are actually more willing to give him that carte blanche than the Democratic judges are. Therefore, when it comes to judges, the existence of GOP appointees is to be discouraged.
I would be happy to have my mind changed by some conservative judges actually voting to enforce constraints on the executive branch's police powers.
Well if you go through the wiretapping, Guantanamo, and surveillance-without-warrant cases of the past 10 years, I think you will find a pattern that spans more than one case.
Every conservative on the court supports unreviewable police power and opposes civil liberties: is anyone surprised?
Oh, my two comments were pretty unrelated. The 911 one was a (possibly dumb) joke about the name of the organization being "Linux Defenders 911", which makes it sound like they're going to race to the scene in minutes to stop a crime in progress... when what they're actually going to do (if it works correctly) is provide assistance in painfully slow litigation, which is sort of the opposite of what you need to call 911 for.
Here I'm attempting to disagree by analogy with someone who's criticizing programmers who "prefer to use patented ideas without paying for them", as if that were a bad thing, by suggesting that's like criticizing shopowners for wanting to avoid protection payments.
I don't actually know whether OIN will work well, but I support their stated goals.
As many in the racketeering community would put it... giving cover to shopowners who prefer to operate in marked territory without paying protection money...
In a situation that is serious but not a time-critical emergency, you should dial your local police number rather than 911; the latter is intended for situations where immediate response is essential. Therefore, metaphorically, when you are sued and have some weeks to prepare a response, you shouldn't dial metaphorical Linux 911 either.
Now you might say, people dial 911 anyway, because nobody answers the non-emergency number, and if you trudge down to the police station and fill out paperwork nobody will do anything for months. That may be. But I assure you things are different with the metaphorical non-emergency number. Please file your concerns in our metaphorical Bugzilla and a developer will triage the report in a timely fashion.
The court noted that in its decision, in a nicely clueful bit of reasoning. They pointed out that it's much like, when asking for Coke at a restaurant that doesn't carry Coke, it is not infringing for the restaurant to offer you Pepsi-Cola or RC Cola as (correctly labeled) alternatives.
Well, it ended up in court because someone filed a lawsuit, formatted their briefs correctly, and paid a filing fee. It was in federal court because it was a claim under federal trademark law. The plaintiff did not, however, actually win.
On the pay, my impression of the UK (never having lived there myself) is that starting pay is pretty good for government jobs, but that it tops out very quickly, so for more skilled people the public-sector pay isn't very appealing. E.g. if you're a good programmer, you'll never get a public-sector offer anywhere near what Microsoft UK or a London bank will pay you.