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User: david_thornley

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  1. Re: Corrects its own headline in the third sentenc on Electric Cars Are Already Cheaper To Own and Run Than Petrol Or Diesel, Says Study (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Odds are that individual scientists with decent publication records are competent and credible. Science isn't a field you get into for the money. Obviously, there will be exceptions, which is why it's useful to compare what numerous scientists say. If they disagree on something, that's normal. If they agree on something, it's because there has been sufficiently strong evidence to convince everybody.

    I suspect that you have a lot less ability to predict competence in scientific fields than you think you do, and that the average cat or dog are more competent at finding bogus scientific fields than you are.

  2. In what way am I being over-reactionary? You're the one who called it hilarious, and I was just explaining that not everyone may have thought it so, and that at least one state considers the action serious enough to be a gross misdemeanor. You seem to want to gloss over these facts, and blame the person who brings them up.

    I'm rather quiet at parties, but people seem to want me there. It may have something to do with the fact that I don't get invited to parties that involve sexual assault. One advantage of this is that I get attractive young women relaxing and being themselves at parties I'm at, not worrying about being taken advantage of. It's very nice.

    It's hard to know exactly how hard to slap an old, feeble, ex-President. That doesn't mean the woman should have no recourse.

  3. Re: Lack of Property Rights on R.I.P., Cape Wind (bostonglobe.com) · · Score: 1

    I've seen a fair number of companies that don't seem to worry about employee happiness. I suspect that was less true when I was young, and the next quarterly report wasn't as critical in decision-making.

    Civil liability isn't everything. If I lose a leg in a freak compiler accident, I've lost a leg. If I need both legs to do unit tests, I'm out of a job. If I have to worry about losing a leg every time I compile a release build, I'm not going to be happy about it, even if the civil liability is not enough to put the company out of business. Moreover, a company that keeps having compiler accidents is likely to find lawyers to reduce the liability per incident, and I'm not going to have enough money to counter them.

    Moving between companies works until more companies notice that they can get away with taking risks with their workers and save money that way. Lots of people won't be able to move on the speculation that they can get a better job.

  4. Height is fairly simple. Intelligence is not. Moreover, darn few people argue that height is evidence of racial superiority, while lots of people argue that intelligence is, so a stereotype has developed. It's also not at all clear that there are differences of intelligence among populations. It's tricky to assess.

    IQ tests are not helpful here, and we know this because of the Flynn effect, which raised the average IQ of the US by 20 points between 1932 and 1997. Exactly what this means in terms of intelligence is debated, but it shows that IQ tests are not good indicators for potential group intelligence. (IQ tests are renormed frequently to keep the mean at 100 and the standard deviation to about 15, which masks this effect. Instead of people having an average IQ of 120 in 1997, using 1932 as a baseline, the raw test results need to be better to get IQ 100 now than in the 1930s.) As far as I know, we have nothing better than IQ tests to measure intelligence, for all of its flaws. That means that a population that scores an average of 80 today is about the same as the US of the 1930s, which is clearly not evidence of less genetic intelligence.

    I think it's pretty clear that we're not seeing anywhere near sufficient employment discrimination to account for the disparities. The disparities are in the hiring pool, not the employment decisions. TFS was about a way to possibly get more women and minorities into the hiring pool, which is where we should be looking for changes.

  5. In the 1500s Europeans were exploring the world, and the other people's of the world were not.

    Other peoples of the world had already started large-scale exploration. Western Europe was at best the third civilization to do that.

    That seems to indicate some sort of "evolutionarily significant" pressure to develop the brain.

    Nope. Brain development doesn't vary noticeably across the world. Whatever pressures there were worked more or less equally on Homo Sapiens. Obviously, there had been pressure, but it doesn't show significant variations over peoples.

    You're also assuming that complex genetic structures can form in a few dozen generations, which is a very bad bet.

    Centuries earlier the Europeans were living in mud huts, and tents held up by sticks, like much of the rest of the world.

    Well, yes. Centuries is not long enough to push complex evolutionary development. It is long enough to push very simple evolutionary developments, particularly in the case of animals with much shorter generations than humans have.

    Question: What might explain the ability of European males to be superior at computer engineering?

    You're assuming that there is such an ability, and you're working backwards to find a vaguely plausible story as to how it might be. The answer is almost certainly primarily culture. It might have something to do with biological sex differences; we really don't have enough information to come to a definite conclusion. It might be all cultural, for all we know.

    Answer (in one word): Winter.

    Which is why the Siberians and Inuit rule the world, right? Also, consider the Australian outback. Consider that there are people who could live there without technology. Certainly they had to have something going for them.

  6. Re:Does diversity results in better code? on To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Does a problem have to be clear to warrant addressing it in some ways? There are reasons to believe that women and some minorities are not getting a fair shake at some point in the process, and that we're losing out on talent because of that. Certainly some exploration to see if we can get more talent into the field is reasonable.

  7. Re:How to find good workers on To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    At the very least, what you're talking about is far from being a meritocracy, and is almost certain to discriminate against women and minorities. You're going to be discarding a lot of good candidates because you're being paranoid.

  8. Philosophically speaking, your arguments are based on wanting white supremacy. Once I see the explicit racism at the end, it's easy to trace back up into the rest of the post and notice that it's based on racism. I'm sorry (actually, that's a lie) that you were triggered by my pointing out of your horrible premises into thinking I didn't consider and reject the rest of your argument on its own lack of merits.

  9. Re: What specific problem did NN try to solve? on FCC Won't Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters Are 'Desperate' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I was addressing the AC's fear of things like public decency filters on the net like they are on the air. There's no excuse to regulate the net on that basis.

    As far as last mile goes, the last-mile people should be required to run dumb pipes. That's the closest to a fairness doctrine there should be.

  10. Re: Free speech takes courage on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    So what you're saying is that Cloudflare shouldn't hire assassins to kill people they think are Nazis? I can actually agree with that.

  11. Re:Free speech takes courage on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    If Cloudflare is a private entity, and there's competition, Cloudflare should cut off service to neo-Nazi sites if they want to. We have long-standing solutions to these problems, folks.

  12. Re: Yeah, no... on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    My father took part in a large organized extremely volent anti-Nazi demonstration that didn't even get permits. I'm proud of him.

  13. Re:Just because... on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I haven't noticed Nazis being reluctant to punch people.

    There is damn little in this country that is illegal to say, or has any chance of becoming illegal to say. If you want to say something, I have the same right to criticize what you say as you have to say it. Only the paranoid or stupid confuse personal reactions to speech with attempts to make it illegal.

  14. Re:another sjw victory for censorship on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    The majority of the voters did not vote for Trump. The minority that did wanted freedom to be assholes without restraint. They resent being criticized for committing sexual assault and denigrating others.

  15. Re:another sjw victory for censorship on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Similarly, can you produce evidence that you don't periodically rape 5-year-olds? Or would you rather I had some sort of support for such a claim before I was taken seriously?

  16. Re: another sjw victory for censorship on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Feel free to link to studies that prove you're not just talking out of your ass.

  17. Re:So let's see what I've learned on Slashdot toda on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Speaking state secrets to unauthorized persons is a crime.

    I don't think that's true in the US. When you have agreed not to divulge state secrets, doing so is a felony. Once they've been divulged, an individual or private entity can further divulge them. This was tested in the courts way back with the Pentagon Papers, the decision taking into advantage freedom of the press.

  18. Re:So let's see what I've learned on Slashdot toda on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There is no simple, consistent solution.

    Given enough competition among private entities, there's a simple, consistent, workable solution. If you run a web service, have your own terms of service and exclude who you want (as long as that doesn't run afoul of nondiscrimination law). If you need a web service and you're running a racial hatred site, shop around. There's probably someone who doesn't care.

  19. Re:So let's see what I've learned on Slashdot toda on Cloudflare's CEO Has a Plan To Never Censor Hate Speech Again (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    If it's a "private" internet entity, it can decide who it wants to deal with. Only in cases where there is insufficient competition is that going to cause any problems. Whether a website or a private entity is good or evil or bad is a somewhat subjective judgment call, and will have the effect that the people making the judgments give it. Things have been working satisfactorily on this basis for a long, long time.

  20. Re:Irexit next? on Apple To Start Paying Ireland the Billions It Owes In Back Taxes (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    Another advantage is that Ireland is English-speaking, which is a plus for US companies. I'm really wondering what my company is going to do after Brexit.

  21. Re: What specific problem did NN try to solve? on FCC Won't Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters Are 'Desperate' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    That would give the FCC way too much power to regulate the internet if existing regulation of radio under title 2 is any indication.

    There's a vital difference here. The EM spectrum is a limited public resource that must be regulated to be useful at all. Fiber isn't. We can lay more fiber a lot easier than we can add frequencies to the useful bands of the spectrum.

    A company that is transmitting over the air is using a limited public resource, and it makes sense to apply certain requirements (exactly which requirements we can argue about). There is no similar argument for regulating fiber.

  22. Re:What specific problem did NN try to solve? on FCC Won't Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters Are 'Desperate' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    That's a great idea. Too bad the anti-NN people are doing whatever they can to make that legally impossible.

  23. The white identity is being systematically destroyed.

    Which means that any other reasoning in your post is highly suspect at best. If your most heartfelt argument against diversity is that it can lead white women to associate with nonwhite men, you're off-the-charts looney.

  24. Re:How to find good workers on To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Boy, you sure worry about a lot of irrelevant things.

  25. Re:Community colleges are a good place to start on To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Qualifications, skill, and experience are what is going to get you hired in tech, male or female. If you do well in the technical interview, then you will probably get the offer.

    Actually, there's two things to do: not only do good in the technical interview, but also get to the technical interview. If you do both of those things, and don't have white hair (using hair dye increased my offer-to-interview ratio tremendously), you're probably in good shape. Getting to the technical interview isn't nearly as related to competence as acing it is.