Evaluate if it's worth the risk of blowing the whistle. Are these "rapists kidnapping kids" level of COPPA violations, or "accidentally picking up a 13 year-old's email once and a while"? I'd blow the whistle on the former regardless of personal risk, and simply quit over the latter if I thought the company would throw me under the bus in case of a lawsuit / criminal charge.
Cover your ass BEFORE you talk to somebody in legal. The legal department is there to protect the company and NOT its employees. A good legal dept will say "hey, this employee is trying to reduce our liability" -- but a bad one will say "this employee is a liability" and shoot the messenger.
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain.
Okay, you seem fairly aware of the issues surrounding mental health and poverty... but you're missing a fairly crucial piece of the puzzle. A large number of people are working at the limit of their abilities. I have a friend who works in a 'special education' program. She stays in contact with most of her students throughout their lives. Many of her students never advance beyond a 5 year-old mental capacity.
Many of our janitors, kitchen staff, assembly line workers, etc. are doing as much as they possibly can. They can all be replaced by robots. They will all be replaced by robots, all in the name of the allmighty buck. These are people who are living happy, productive lives. Take those jobs away from them, and they will become unhappy, agitated... and according to you, the right level of socialism for them is to be institutionalized. That's not 'social'. That's monstrous.
Your honor, the child entered my van of its own volition, and received the free candy that it sought. What did I do wrong?
Sending instructions? Nothing (on the surface) wrong with that... but the content of those instructions is crucial to an ethical evaluation of them. Steal a drone / kidnap a kid? Bad. Make the drone do a little dance upon delivering a package / teach the kid a funny joke? Not bad.
Damned right we do. Go back and re-read the Declaration of Independence and the context in which it was written. Governments rule until their citizens revolt. We collectively allow the police to behave the way we do because a revolution is currently less appealing than the status quo.
Look at it this way: suppose any given gate in a processor has a 1-in-a-billion chance of getting fried by current flowing the wrong way through it. A new car has billions of gates across its thousands of little microprocessors. A single defective gate in a processor, in all likelihood, won't cause obvious problems. But... by the sheer number of gates, there will be some problems here and there. Little problems that aren't obvious.
So if your car was stopped by this thing, it'd still work. Since it was the cops that stopped you, they won't pay for you to get your car checked out (onus is always on the citizen for damage done by police doing 'reasonable' police work, even if they're entirely innocent of the charges under investigation). So you won't get your car checked out. But then, you're driving alone on a rainy road in the dark one night with your high beams on, and a rounding error finally accumulates to a condition that the engineers didn't plan on (because they expected those gates to be intact as they were out of the factory), and you end up dead in a ditch, not to be found until the next morning. The press does some digging, and report "Driver died in an accident last night on I-42. Deceased was known to the police, investigators suspect reckless driving was the cause."
Just because a mistake is common, doesn't make it any less a mistake.
Quite to the contrary. Languages evolve democratically, irregardless* of the desires of linguisic prescriptivists who rail against the trend. Ergo, if a common mistake passes a critical threshold, it does make it less of a mistake. At this point, you're a fool to not recognize this all-too-common 'mistake' as an amusing wrinkle in the organism that is our language.
Usually, dumping random chemicals into people is considered unethical. We can't do proper science on pesticides due to strong chemical lobbies, but thanks to our punish-the-sick attitude towards drug addiction, we have a large body of "volunteers" for human trials of unknown chemicals. This is a strong argument for prohibition: "if the illegal drug market goes away, we can't test financially-protected drugs, and non-criminals might get sick!"
They dies. Your life is in ruins. The mental scars of watching it for a year are far worse than if you just said goodbye and did it. Does that make sense to anybody at all?
Didn't you read* the Book of Job? It's all part of God's plan. Sure, he's just fucking with you for a bet... but who are you to question?
* well, no, I haven't either, but I've heard the cliffnotes version.
Oops, wrong links. Or... maybe the US isn't the country I was brought up to believe in. Like being taught to believe in Santa Claus but having your dad come into your room on Christmas eve to smash all your shit up. And ground you for being such a pantywaist, based on the assumption that you were going to cry.
No, you're wrong. Not everybody has your opinions, despite your insistance to the contrary. There are people that care about other people on bikes. Also, I agree with GP as far as "anybody with some skill on a bike can properly evaluate risks before taking attention away from the road". However, this is for n00bs who want to spend crap to feel like they're more into biking. Not interested.
I just bought a laptop. It had windows on it. It no longer has windows on it. Actually... in 25 years, I've never bought a computer and used the pre-installed OS longer than a day.
Personally, if I ever found myself in possession of child porn, I'd get rid of it as fast as possible. I suggest the same to you. The jackboots come after whoever the fuck they want to, and find evidence of wrongdoing after the fact... if nothing else, "lying to the police during an investigation" will always stick no matter how small the lie. The less child porn you (knowingly or not) distribute, the fewer pretexts the jackboots have to knock down your door and break your server hardware in an "attempt to gather evidence" and shoot the family dog in front of your kids.
You are not mistaken about the legal power of a robots.txt: it's a gentlebot/gentleadmin agreement. But you are mistaken about the implied legal threat behind one. If you want things done the way you want, do it yourself. The only better thing than an archive is two archives maintained by different people in different political climates.
Suppose they archive some kiddie porn. And then they let people download it. And those people make donations to them. And there's more than one person involved in administering the archive. That's conspiracy to distribute child porn for financial gain. No shit they censor the archive, dumbass. For self-preservation, if nothing else.
Well, or I grew up in India and walked daily through poverty that most Americans never see or experience in my blind privilege.
Or, y'know, you're a white dude born March 29, 1955 in Raleigh, North Carolina.. But nice try. I never said anybody got in "only" because of their family's wealth. But stress levels in the first six months of life have a huge impact on brain function. Affluence is strongly correlated to better education at all levels. Worse yet, the study is sampling from profs at US universities. And affluence in the US is strongly correlated to race. Not even bothering to look at institutions in India, Japan, China, Russia, or Korea. There's a huge amount of mathematical talent in these countries that is largely unknown to American mathematicians. Gonna be hard to tease "whitey with a Y-chromosome" out of the data.
Anybody can tell there's something wrong with your car if there's a hole in your muffler. Many will even identify it as a problem with the muffler. But only a small proportion have the training or skill required to weld on a new one. I have not, and will not, propose a better study. I'm a mathematician, and that's not where my training lies. Any idea of mine would be just as bad (or worse, let's be honest) -- but that doesn't mean I can't spot a shit study when I see one.
I assure you, there are not 400 "ramanujans" and "einsteins" alive today. Basic numeracy is a base necessity to for a mathematical talent to present itself. You're blind to your own privilege if you don't understand this. You've played life on 'easy' mode, and you didn't even know it had a hard setting.
I, too, have seen successes from all walks of life. But the overwhelming majority of university students who pursue academic careers are from affluent families. Basic numeracy improves with affluence. Students who lack basic numeracy because of a terrible education (very common in poorer areas... read up on public schooling in LA, NYC, Chicago) will simply not make it into college.
Disclaimer: I'm a mathematician. Great! Let's take a class of people that predominantly arise in highly privileged segments of society, and study their genetics! And only study them, instead doing a broad survey and looking for outliers in the data. Great fucking science, folks.
Slashdot Mirror
The super ability to die in the dark. That's a super power.
FTFY.
Evaluate if it's worth the risk of blowing the whistle. Are these "rapists kidnapping kids" level of COPPA violations, or "accidentally picking up a 13 year-old's email once and a while"? I'd blow the whistle on the former regardless of personal risk, and simply quit over the latter if I thought the company would throw me under the bus in case of a lawsuit / criminal charge.
Cover your ass BEFORE you talk to somebody in legal. The legal department is there to protect the company and NOT its employees. A good legal dept will say "hey, this employee is trying to reduce our liability" -- but a bad one will say "this employee is a liability" and shoot the messenger.
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain.
Okay, you seem fairly aware of the issues surrounding mental health and poverty... but you're missing a fairly crucial piece of the puzzle. A large number of people are working at the limit of their abilities. I have a friend who works in a 'special education' program. She stays in contact with most of her students throughout their lives. Many of her students never advance beyond a 5 year-old mental capacity.
Many of our janitors, kitchen staff, assembly line workers, etc. are doing as much as they possibly can. They can all be replaced by robots. They will all be replaced by robots, all in the name of the allmighty buck. These are people who are living happy, productive lives. Take those jobs away from them, and they will become unhappy, agitated... and according to you, the right level of socialism for them is to be institutionalized. That's not 'social'. That's monstrous.
Obligatory
Your honor, the child entered my van of its own volition, and received the free candy that it sought. What did I do wrong?
Sending instructions? Nothing (on the surface) wrong with that... but the content of those instructions is crucial to an ethical evaluation of them. Steal a drone / kidnap a kid? Bad. Make the drone do a little dance upon delivering a package / teach the kid a funny joke? Not bad.
rofl.. 'we allow'.
Damned right we do. Go back and re-read the Declaration of Independence and the context in which it was written. Governments rule until their citizens revolt. We collectively allow the police to behave the way we do because a revolution is currently less appealing than the status quo.
Look at it this way: suppose any given gate in a processor has a 1-in-a-billion chance of getting fried by current flowing the wrong way through it. A new car has billions of gates across its thousands of little microprocessors. A single defective gate in a processor, in all likelihood, won't cause obvious problems. But... by the sheer number of gates, there will be some problems here and there. Little problems that aren't obvious.
So if your car was stopped by this thing, it'd still work. Since it was the cops that stopped you, they won't pay for you to get your car checked out (onus is always on the citizen for damage done by police doing 'reasonable' police work, even if they're entirely innocent of the charges under investigation). So you won't get your car checked out. But then, you're driving alone on a rainy road in the dark one night with your high beams on, and a rounding error finally accumulates to a condition that the engineers didn't plan on (because they expected those gates to be intact as they were out of the factory), and you end up dead in a ditch, not to be found until the next morning. The press does some digging, and report "Driver died in an accident last night on I-42. Deceased was known to the police, investigators suspect reckless driving was the cause."
Yup. My wife ain't gay, and she's got great aesthetic taste. Or so I'm told.
Just because a mistake is common, doesn't make it any less a mistake.
Quite to the contrary. Languages evolve democratically, irregardless* of the desires of linguisic prescriptivists who rail against the trend. Ergo, if a common mistake passes a critical threshold, it does make it less of a mistake. At this point, you're a fool to not recognize this all-too-common 'mistake' as an amusing wrinkle in the organism that is our language.
* heh.
Usually, dumping random chemicals into people is considered unethical. We can't do proper science on pesticides due to strong chemical lobbies, but thanks to our punish-the-sick attitude towards drug addiction, we have a large body of "volunteers" for human trials of unknown chemicals. This is a strong argument for prohibition: "if the illegal drug market goes away, we can't test financially-protected drugs, and non-criminals might get sick!"
They dies. Your life is in ruins. The mental scars of watching it for a year are far worse than if you just said goodbye and did it. Does that make sense to anybody at all?
Didn't you read* the Book of Job? It's all part of God's plan. Sure, he's just fucking with you for a bet... but who are you to question?
* well, no, I haven't either, but I've heard the cliffnotes version.
Oops, wrong links. Or... maybe the US isn't the country I was brought up to believe in. Like being taught to believe in Santa Claus but having your dad come into your room on Christmas eve to smash all your shit up. And ground you for being such a pantywaist, based on the assumption that you were going to cry.
Naw, I'm pretty sure that parody has received strong legal recognition as funny, and completely harmless. America says "don't be such a pantywaist!"
No, you're wrong. Not everybody has your opinions, despite your insistance to the contrary. There are people that care about other people on bikes. Also, I agree with GP as far as "anybody with some skill on a bike can properly evaluate risks before taking attention away from the road". However, this is for n00bs who want to spend crap to feel like they're more into biking. Not interested.
I just bought a laptop. It had windows on it. It no longer has windows on it. Actually... in 25 years, I've never bought a computer and used the pre-installed OS longer than a day.
Personally, if I ever found myself in possession of child porn, I'd get rid of it as fast as possible. I suggest the same to you. The jackboots come after whoever the fuck they want to, and find evidence of wrongdoing after the fact... if nothing else, "lying to the police during an investigation" will always stick no matter how small the lie. The less child porn you (knowingly or not) distribute, the fewer pretexts the jackboots have to knock down your door and break your server hardware in an "attempt to gather evidence" and shoot the family dog in front of your kids.
You are not mistaken about the legal power of a robots.txt: it's a gentlebot/gentleadmin agreement. But you are mistaken about the implied legal threat behind one. If you want things done the way you want, do it yourself. The only better thing than an archive is two archives maintained by different people in different political climates.
Suppose they archive some kiddie porn. And then they let people download it. And those people make donations to them. And there's more than one person involved in administering the archive. That's conspiracy to distribute child porn for financial gain. No shit they censor the archive, dumbass. For self-preservation, if nothing else.
See... this is why I use computers for my memory. Wtf was I thinking, quoting the Simpsons on slashdot? Bound to fuck that one up.
You mean the Homer equilibrium of "Good ol' rock. Nothin' beats that!"
Well, or I grew up in India and walked daily through poverty that most Americans never see or experience in my blind privilege.
Or, y'know, you're a white dude born March 29, 1955 in Raleigh, North Carolina.. But nice try. I never said anybody got in "only" because of their family's wealth. But stress levels in the first six months of life have a huge impact on brain function. Affluence is strongly correlated to better education at all levels. Worse yet, the study is sampling from profs at US universities. And affluence in the US is strongly correlated to race. Not even bothering to look at institutions in India, Japan, China, Russia, or Korea. There's a huge amount of mathematical talent in these countries that is largely unknown to American mathematicians. Gonna be hard to tease "whitey with a Y-chromosome" out of the data.
Anybody can tell there's something wrong with your car if there's a hole in your muffler. Many will even identify it as a problem with the muffler. But only a small proportion have the training or skill required to weld on a new one. I have not, and will not, propose a better study. I'm a mathematician, and that's not where my training lies. Any idea of mine would be just as bad (or worse, let's be honest) -- but that doesn't mean I can't spot a shit study when I see one.
I assure you, there are not 400 "ramanujans" and "einsteins" alive today. Basic numeracy is a base necessity to for a mathematical talent to present itself. You're blind to your own privilege if you don't understand this. You've played life on 'easy' mode, and you didn't even know it had a hard setting.
I, too, have seen successes from all walks of life. But the overwhelming majority of university students who pursue academic careers are from affluent families. Basic numeracy improves with affluence. Students who lack basic numeracy because of a terrible education (very common in poorer areas... read up on public schooling in LA, NYC, Chicago) will simply not make it into college.
Disclaimer: I'm a mathematician. Great! Let's take a class of people that predominantly arise in highly privileged segments of society, and study their genetics! And only study them, instead doing a broad survey and looking for outliers in the data. Great fucking science, folks.
Small nuclear reactor. Added bonus: a plausible denial to claims that we intentionally nuked Tehran.