Generally it's wise to take care when expressing one's biases or when acting upon them, because if someone is indiscreet then one's indiscretions may lead to consequences. Mr. Damore did not exercise discretion and it has cost him.
Ah, yes. In a company that is supposedly trying be a model of diversity and a leader in improving diversity in the tech sector, trying to discuss matters related to diversity is an indiscretion. Imagine if he had proposed that Google was not using the best algorithm for search or that perhaps they were not choosing optimal locations for their data centers.
Indiscretion implies doing something you are not supposed to do. For example, talking about Fight Club would be an indiscretion. If people really think that trying to raise issues and questions in order to engage in a worthwhile debate (regardless of the topic) is an indiscretion, then I would argue that they are part of the problem.
The situation you describe would be considered rather authoritarian. Perhaps Google should figure out who leaked and sack those individuals and then go on to have an actual discussion about diversity instead of trying to silence the discussion.
Is it better for me that a government bureaucrat with some minimal accountability controls something, or that a multi-billionaire, who is only interested in himself (and perhaps his family) controls something?
That is a false dichotomy. Take healthcare for example. I should be free to buy my healthcare from whomever choose, from whatever state I choose, or even to not buy healthcare if I don't want it. Instead, we have the Affordable Care Act, which actually did nothing to solve any of the real problems that we have with healthcare in the (i.e., lack of primary care physicians, lack of ability to purchase healthcare and health insurances across state lines, and lack of price transparency in healthcare). Instead everybody is forced to buy healthcare and they get little choice in the services they purchase. For example, should a 50 year old woman who has no plans (or is perhaps unable) to have children be required to have a health plan with coverage for pregnancy and pregnancy-related care?
Not everything is "the government or billionaires". For a good portion of things that we deal with in every day life, if it is "the government or me (or possibly me and my community).". Those are the situations I am talking about.
Do you think that the policies that the Koch Brothers and the Mercers push are intended to benefit anyone except the ultra-wealthy?
I think that the policies of the Koch Brothers and the Mercers are intended to benefit the same demographic as the policies of Al Gore and George Soros.
You don't hand government power you hand it tasks.
Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I mean sure, we don't have a problem with corruption or abuse of power by politicians and bureaucrats, because we don't give them power. In fact, the news is not chock-full of stories of precisely that theme. Furthermore, the United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, does not begin with the words The Congress shall have the power, followed by the phrases executive power and he [the president] shall have the power elsewhere in the Constitution.
Not only that, but the actual powers, or tasks, which the federal government can exercise are in fact enumerated in the Constitution. Giving the government a new power is supposed to require a constitutional amendment (like the power to tax income).
Then you use Democracy to make sure those tasks don't turn into power.
As I already pointed out, your premise is flawed. But even if it were not, the electorate has demonstrated itself to be absolutely awful at restraining government power.
Stop to realized you're going to have a government whether you like it or not, and that the only real question is are you going to take part in it...
Well, the whole essence of what I proposed was clearly part of being an active participant in government. Once of the biggest threats we face is apathy, letting someone else decide because I can't be bothered to get involved. I realize that we will always have a government, but the "more government" mantra seems to be counterproductive, but people who espouse it have a hard time accepting that sometimes "more government" is not the answer.
In my mind, the real lesson to draw from this is that every time you think to yourself "the government should [fill-in-the-blank]," you need to stop right there and perform a thought experiment. The procedure is:
Imagine that you got your way and that all the power you wish to grant to the government on the issue at hand gets granted
Now, imagine that after the power is firmly entrenched that those who hold opposing views to yours are put in power (win the election, get appointed, etc.)
Now, imagine that those who have an opposing view to yours twist and use the power granted to them (legally) in the most damaging way possible
Now, imagine that both those who have views congruent with yours and opposed to yours will abuse the law and the power that they have been granted
Now, imagine yourself saying, "maybe the government shouldn't..."
I am not trying to say that we should strive for anarchy, rather that we should very carefully consider the sorts of things that we rope the government into at the federal, state, and local level. Matters in which the government gets involved frequently turn out differently than we expect.
"Hey, Amazon and other companies pay crap salaries and have crap benefits; their employees even live in tents in the office park."
...time passes...
"Hey Amazon is compensating their employees better and they pay lower corporate taxes because of it; the need to stop that right now!"
(BTW, in the entire civilized world employee compensation is a normal business expense and pretty much no matter how you compensate the employee, the business gets to deduct the cost of salary and benefits as operating expenses; the only trickery is the parts that the government ignores for tax purposes, like employer-paid healthcare in the US thanks to the work of unions, until Obamacare started taxing "Cadillac" plans, also thanks to the work of unions.)
Yet more annoying is sites that prevent you from Control-V paste or middle-click paste. Come on! I want to be able to generate a 32 or 64 character gobbledygook password in KeePass and just paste it in there.
Some sites screw it up and prevent either Control-V or middle-click, but not both. But those are rare. Seriously, web developers, it doesn't help anybody to prevent pasting into a password field.
The worst was one financial-related site that I had to use that not only did not allow you paste into the password field, it would not even let you type into the password field. It would present an on-screen keyboard (using JavaScript) with the letters and numbers all scrambled around. Take about practically forcing people to write down their passwords. (To me a decent password is one that I can only enter by muscle memory; as in, I could not actually tell you the password itself even if my life depended on it).
It seems to me that "shut up and soldier" can't always be the response, lest we make little social progress. Maybe you were too severe in your judgement of those folks?
Honestly, Bruce, I look up to you and I am not trying to be belligerent. I struggled for quite some time with how to respond here (more than I have for just about any other comment I have posted to Slashdot).
I do have my view of the world and my way of dealing with things and I realize that others have their own ways. That said, I think my attitude can best be summed up as "if you want to change the world, you cannot let hurt feelings keep you down." Certainly, if someone suffers a personal tragedy, there must be time to grieve and cope. But I have a hard time equating "ideas with which I disagree" to personal tragedy. That said, if they felt that the best thing for them was to stay home Monday, then that is fine and I guess I would say that I would have handled it differently by coming in and focusing on how to actively make things better.
I am sorry for the way your parents suffered. Had we developed a better social conscience and understanding of ethnic discrimination before you parents immigrated, they might have been treated more fairly.
No need to apologize. You did not discriminate. My parents taught me both how things should be and how they are. I work to make things more as they should be while being aware that I have to operate in a world where things are as they are.
Having surmounted that sort of discrimination, it's not a fair expectation for you to demand that everyone else go through the same.
I demand no such thing. What I demand is that we teach people, children in particular, to be more resilient. I was the subject of some bigoted attacks my first year in college. All that did for me was make me want to work harder so that I could make things better for those who came after me. Had I decided to quit and go home, what good would that have done?
This so demoralized a lot of his women co-workers that many stayed home from work on Monday.
This right here is a problem and it sort of reinforces the notion that some people (be they women, liberals, Christians, immigrants, whatever) are so fragile that they cannot abide people around them who think differently.
I teach at a Midwestern university. Last fall after Trump won the election I read about how students at some universities were so overwhelmed by the Trump victory that their professors delayed or canceled exams, that the school had cry ins, and other such nonsense.
What I told my students was that regardless of who you supported, half of the country was terribly disappointed the morning after the election, but that life goes on. The cows still have to get milked, the news papers have to be delivered, the Starbucks have to be open for business, students have to be taught, etc. We have to encourage people to be more resilient, not less.
I come from an immigrant family. My parents didn't sit around and cry when something didn't go their way or someone said something impolite to them. They put on their big boy/big girl pants and worked that much harder. The state of society today has me frequently asking how we become so weak minded.
... Google employees who discriminate against members of protected classes will be terminated.
I am curious: does that include discrimination against those protected classes in the job interview process? Like, say, for example, ageism? I am just saying.
You see, it is easy to visually identify some protected classes and subtly discriminate against them (he is overqualified, or she is not a good fit for the team) in ways that are not obviously discriminatory. But nobody in their right mind talks politics or social justice as part of the interview process. So you hire some people who end being a diversity problem. Don't kid yourself, to Google and similar companies the views expressed which challenge the accepted thinking are not welcomed as part of a healthy and vigorous debate. They are seen as a disease that must be cut out.
We are very tolerant and accepting here. You had better be tolerant and accepting in the same way or we will sack you.
These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com.[emphasis added.]
Look, I get it: fake news, it's a problem. But let's not get carried away. The Onion publishes more factually correct stories than most major media outlets. Plus they are actually entertaining to read. Don't go messing with The Onion.
...many aimed at spreading negative false claims about Hillary Clinton.
Trump and Clinton were arguably the two most hated presidential candidates to run in US presidential election history. They didn't need the "help" of fake news to have material on which to attack each other as there was no shortage of negative true information about them.
The key difference was that every little thing Trump did was held up by the media (and the Republican establishment) as a harbinger of the end of modern civilization if Trump were to get elected.
On the other hand, every thing that Hillary did (and there was lots: evading federal records laws, flipping on "don't ask don't tell", flipping on gay marriage, colluding with the DNC on debate prep, colluding with the DNC on subverting Sanders' campaign, the highly questionable financial arrangements of the Clinton foundation, etc.) was largely treated as non-news by the same media.
So, in summary, there was absolutely no shortage of negative news on Clinton, it was just getting ignored by the news media.
On the one hand we have Bettridges law of headlines telling us that the answer is "no", and on the other the fact that it is rather obvious to pretty much anybody who owns a smart device that the answer is "yes".
Since you're on a roll, why don't you just spread butter on the back of a cat and drop it from the ceiling to watch it float?
The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
Step 1 to protecting democracy:
Don't riot when someone with different political views comes to your campus. For comparison:
Bernie Sanders visits conservative Christian university and gets treated like a human being and is allowed to speak: video
[insert name of conservative politician/pundit] gets invited to [insert name of university] then disinvited after students riot (e.g., UC Berkeley)
Once the universities begin to act like a) they have a role in our democracy (we are actually a representative republic, but I am not going to split hairs), and b) start working constructively to improve it, then we may have something worthwhile.
You can bet that this is for show. The government simply doesn't "get" software development. The understanding has been shifting over the last 10-20 years, but it is a very slow process which is partly frustrated by the loads of laws and regulations that affect government acquisition.
That said, I can share some anecdotes from my own experience dealing with government projects.
One was a while back (03-05 timeframe) and the place where I was at had was pretty small but was important enough that they had their own "computer security" guy on staff. I had a requirement to be able to SSH out to access a research system in a university lab. Of course, this outfit had everyone on Windows 2000 or XP, so I suggested PuTTY since nobody else there was using SSH and I figured it would be easier. As soon as the "computer security" guy found out that you had to download from some server in the UK, he gets all skittish. I tell him that it's fine, I had previously used it on personal, school, and work computers and that it was open source to boot. Well, at that point he about loses it. "Oh No! We can't have open source, plus it is developed in a foreign country!" I explained to him that not all of Microsoft's employees that develop Windows, Office, and whatever other MS software that was in use were located in the US and that even all those in the US were not necessarily US citizens. He was not that interested in the argument, and I might as well have been speaking to him in gibberish. I then explained to him that if he used the Internet that even Windows' network stack was based on open source components. I thought his head might explode.
After going through all that nonsense, that took way more effort than I thought it should, I came across some websites that experienced "difficulty" with rendering in IE. I requested Firefox (it may have still been Firebird or Phoenix at that time) and I thought the "computer security" guy was going to come across his desk at me for even asking. I gave up that fight relatively quickly and just did some of the browsing from my home machine.
Another time I was responsible for managing a network of RHEL servers and workstations that were not connected to the Internet. I had to make sure that when advisories and package updates came out that they were deployed in a timely manner. I would typically do this by downloading them from an Internet connected machine by going to RedHat's FTP site, burning them to CD/DVD and moving them via sneaker net. At some point along the way, they implemented a policy that blocked all FTP sites (including over HTTP if FTP was in the URL; dumb, I know). So, I walked to the helpdesk and requested that they unblock RedHat's FTP server so I could get the updates. They said that the policy was managed by headquarters and that I would have to submit a request listing each URL I would need unblocked (how was I supposed to get that information if they were blocked?). When I asked how long it would take, I was told around 90 days. I asked the guy if there were any other alternatives. He said (and I really wish that this were a joke and not the truth) that I could download them at home, burn them to a CD/DVD there and carry the disk into the building. I pointed out that the public Internet connection in the building had all manner of IDS, virus scanning, etc., while they had no idea what sort of security was on my home Internet connection. Still, he said that the policy allowed for media to be carried in as long as the person doing so initialed a form indicating that it had been properly scanned for viruses. I asked him if he realized how utterly nonsensical the policy was, and he said he did but that he could not do anything about it. So, I started downloading and burning at home then bringing in the CDs/DVDs.
Things are getting better in isolated pockets. Some folks in the government do understand the realities of how software gets developed now, the value of open source, etc. However, it is really an uphill battle and lots of stakeholders (especially contractors that make big $$$$ charging the government for custom development of everything) are threatened by it.
A degree is not merely about demonstrating that you can acquire some minimal base of knowledge to start your career from. It also demonstrates that you can finish what you start, even when it is a long process that requires you to do many things you have no particular interest in doing.
Not only that, but it is entirely different to drop out and start your own company than it is drop out and look for a "normal" job. Basically:
drop out to start a company -> that says "I can create more value by forgoing the rest of my formal education because I see a perishable opportunity that may not be there when I finish" (Microsoft, Google, Facebook are all excellent examples of this; the proof is in your ability to persist and make your idea a success)
drop out to land a regular job -> that says "I can't be bothered to finish my formal education (the reason itself is unimportant, though some people have legitimately good reasons for dropping out) and now I want to come work for you" (most sensible hiring managers would look at that and ask "well, what else are you going to leave only half done?")
The point is that either way someone has to roll the dice on you (that is even true for someone who graduated, though the uncertainty tends to be less) their willingness to do so (either invest in your startup idea or hire you as a dropout) is almost entirely dependent on your ability to articulate the value that you bring to the table. That is decidedly difficult to do with a startup, but if you hustle you can start building up your track record with demos of your idea/product, early sales, etc. I would argue that it is much harder as a dropout to build the sort of track record that will convince someone to take a chance on you. I mean, the guy with the start offers investors the possibility of making enormous returns on their investment (if the idea survives). The dropout looking for a job offers the employer the possibility of doing pretty much what is expected of any employee, of which there are many prospective candidates, lots of whom have finished their degrees.
Unmasking a public or political official who is trying to sell out the country should earn you a $3 fine and a gift certificate to Chili's.
Be very careful what you wish for. The US ability to collect technical intelligence is extraordinarily powerful. It should have very strong restrictions to protect the citizenry it is in place to serve, the violation of which should carry swift and harsh penalties as a deterrent to abuse. The officials in question had no business accessing the identities of any US person caught up in incidental collection, regardless of how bad the appearance of the alleged activity.
Before Obama relaxed the rules the responsibility and authority to deal with collecting intelligence on US persons (whether as part of incidental or targeted collection) was the Attorney General and I am relatively certain that the authority could not be delegated. A proper procedure would be after discovering potential evidence of a serious crime (you don't want to use this sort of thing for minor offenses) the matter should be referred to the intelligence folks at the Department of Justice who have special training and oversight to guard against abuse. They then make the determination on how to proceed and make a recommendation to the AG on whether the individual should be unmasked or not. An exception for something like an imminent terrorist attack or other crime which could result in loss of life should allow for quick action but still require review and adjudication by the Attorney General after the fact.
The kind of "bounty" program you suggest would do nothing more than invite abuse and promote a cavalier attitude among low level intelligence personnel. It is most definitely not in the best interests of the US government, the people in general, and potential victims of that abuse. Does that mean that some people will get away with crimes? Probably. But then our justice system is specifically designed to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, as it should be.
It's because if any company did the same thing in the so called "3rd world", this same activity would be termed as "corruption" as part of "buying off politicians."
It is more like that when they were small and challenging the establishment, people would cheer them on. Sort of like with Lyft and Uber now. However, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (along with others) long ago ceased to be change agents disrupting and challenging the establishment. They are the establishment. Now they are in the mode of protecting and fortifying what they have.
If you want to eliminate corruption, elect people who don't take campaign contributions from large corporations. BTW, we did that with Obama (I know he didn't strictly refuse big donors, but he did brag about how most of his contributions can from small donations by individuals). As far as I can tell, Obama wasn't any more a "man of the people" than Bush was. Also, you are likely to have difficulty finding people who are immune to corruption; it is human nature after all.
Assuming the site/application/whatever supports it, you could go with a longer password and restrict it to the Base32 character set. For me, the best reason to use it is:
The alphabet can be selected to avoid similar-looking pairs of different symbols, so the strings can be accurately transcribed by hand. (For example, the RFC 4648 symbol set omits the digits for one, eight and zero, since they could be confused with the letters 'I', 'B', and 'O'.)
It makes it very nice when dealing storing passwords in such a way that the presentation font makes some of the characters confusing or when having to tell someone the password over the phone.
Yes, replace billions of working C code with billions of lines of code in a new language. What could possibly go wrong?
Not only that, but which standard requires that a system have a rust compiler on it? POSIX and SUS (are they the same now?) require a C compiler. In practice I know that many systems have other environments available, but standards matter in some cases and there will be instances where C is an appropriate choice, if not the best or only choice.
I could understand advocating "choose rust instead of C for new projects" or "if you are considering rewriting major portions of a C project then consider redoing all or part of it in rust." However, advocating replacement of lots of working code sort of ignores a major part of the risk management calculus. In fact, risk management is why the banking and finance industry core still mostly on COBOL and why lots of big companies still have HR systems that were written in COBOL.
Granted if a project has a history of being filled with security issues, then there needs to be a consideration for if it is better to expend the effort on fixing vulnerabilities or rewriting in a more "secure" language. Im looking at you imagemagick and PHP.
Spaces -> the person who writes the code decides how its indentation looks
Tabs -> the person who reads the code decides how the indentation looks
Sometimes I set tabs to be 4 spaces, sometimes 8, sometimes even 2 spaces. However, if the formatting is all done with spaces I don't get that choice. I find tabs more empowering to me personally and I believe that I use them I empower those who read my code.
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
I am guessing that you don't teach or otherwise work in the education sector. Just off the top of my head, here are people or groups would have an incentive to make that claim:
Computer hardware/software makers (as you already pointed out)
Administrators at primary/secondary schools who want larger budgets (in government, bigger budget == more important/influential)
Colleges and universities who want to be perceived as leading edge
Makers of educational support software (e.g., Blackboard, Desire2Learn, etc.)
Textbook publishers trying to go the ebook route (remember, ebooks are nearly free to reproduce/distribute compared to dead tree books)
Parents who want to make themselves believe that because Johnny or Sally is using a computer in class they will get a better education and turn out smarter, more capable, etc.
This whole "computers in the classroom" thing is probably the best example ever of the self licking ice cream cone or the solution in search of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally it's wise to take care when expressing one's biases or when acting upon them, because if someone is indiscreet then one's indiscretions may lead to consequences. Mr. Damore did not exercise discretion and it has cost him.
Ah, yes. In a company that is supposedly trying be a model of diversity and a leader in improving diversity in the tech sector, trying to discuss matters related to diversity is an indiscretion. Imagine if he had proposed that Google was not using the best algorithm for search or that perhaps they were not choosing optimal locations for their data centers.
Indiscretion implies doing something you are not supposed to do. For example, talking about Fight Club would be an indiscretion. If people really think that trying to raise issues and questions in order to engage in a worthwhile debate (regardless of the topic) is an indiscretion, then I would argue that they are part of the problem.
The situation you describe would be considered rather authoritarian. Perhaps Google should figure out who leaked and sack those individuals and then go on to have an actual discussion about diversity instead of trying to silence the discussion.
Is it better for me that a government bureaucrat with some minimal accountability controls something, or that a multi-billionaire, who is only interested in himself (and perhaps his family) controls something?
That is a false dichotomy. Take healthcare for example. I should be free to buy my healthcare from whomever choose, from whatever state I choose, or even to not buy healthcare if I don't want it. Instead, we have the Affordable Care Act, which actually did nothing to solve any of the real problems that we have with healthcare in the (i.e., lack of primary care physicians, lack of ability to purchase healthcare and health insurances across state lines, and lack of price transparency in healthcare). Instead everybody is forced to buy healthcare and they get little choice in the services they purchase. For example, should a 50 year old woman who has no plans (or is perhaps unable) to have children be required to have a health plan with coverage for pregnancy and pregnancy-related care?
Not everything is "the government or billionaires". For a good portion of things that we deal with in every day life, if it is "the government or me (or possibly me and my community).". Those are the situations I am talking about.
Do you think that the policies that the Koch Brothers and the Mercers push are intended to benefit anyone except the ultra-wealthy?
I think that the policies of the Koch Brothers and the Mercers are intended to benefit the same demographic as the policies of Al Gore and George Soros.
You don't hand government power you hand it tasks.
Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I mean sure, we don't have a problem with corruption or abuse of power by politicians and bureaucrats, because we don't give them power. In fact, the news is not chock-full of stories of precisely that theme. Furthermore, the United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, does not begin with the words The Congress shall have the power, followed by the phrases executive power and he [the president] shall have the power elsewhere in the Constitution.
Not only that, but the actual powers, or tasks, which the federal government can exercise are in fact enumerated in the Constitution. Giving the government a new power is supposed to require a constitutional amendment (like the power to tax income).
Then you use Democracy to make sure those tasks don't turn into power.
As I already pointed out, your premise is flawed. But even if it were not, the electorate has demonstrated itself to be absolutely awful at restraining government power.
Stop to realized you're going to have a government whether you like it or not, and that the only real question is are you going to take part in it...
Well, the whole essence of what I proposed was clearly part of being an active participant in government. Once of the biggest threats we face is apathy, letting someone else decide because I can't be bothered to get involved. I realize that we will always have a government, but the "more government" mantra seems to be counterproductive, but people who espouse it have a hard time accepting that sometimes "more government" is not the answer.
In my mind, the real lesson to draw from this is that every time you think to yourself "the government should [fill-in-the-blank]," you need to stop right there and perform a thought experiment. The procedure is:
I am not trying to say that we should strive for anarchy, rather that we should very carefully consider the sorts of things that we rope the government into at the federal, state, and local level. Matters in which the government gets involved frequently turn out differently than we expect.
Or even better:
"Hey, Amazon and other companies pay crap salaries and have crap benefits; their employees even live in tents in the office park."
...time passes...
"Hey Amazon is compensating their employees better and they pay lower corporate taxes because of it; the need to stop that right now!"
(BTW, in the entire civilized world employee compensation is a normal business expense and pretty much no matter how you compensate the employee, the business gets to deduct the cost of salary and benefits as operating expenses; the only trickery is the parts that the government ignores for tax purposes, like employer-paid healthcare in the US thanks to the work of unions, until Obamacare started taxing "Cadillac" plans, also thanks to the work of unions.)
Yet more annoying is sites that prevent you from Control-V paste or middle-click paste. Come on! I want to be able to generate a 32 or 64 character gobbledygook password in KeePass and just paste it in there.
Some sites screw it up and prevent either Control-V or middle-click, but not both. But those are rare. Seriously, web developers, it doesn't help anybody to prevent pasting into a password field.
The worst was one financial-related site that I had to use that not only did not allow you paste into the password field, it would not even let you type into the password field. It would present an on-screen keyboard (using JavaScript) with the letters and numbers all scrambled around. Take about practically forcing people to write down their passwords. (To me a decent password is one that I can only enter by muscle memory; as in, I could not actually tell you the password itself even if my life depended on it).
It seems to me that "shut up and soldier" can't always be the response, lest we make little social progress. Maybe you were too severe in your judgement of those folks?
Honestly, Bruce, I look up to you and I am not trying to be belligerent. I struggled for quite some time with how to respond here (more than I have for just about any other comment I have posted to Slashdot).
I do have my view of the world and my way of dealing with things and I realize that others have their own ways. That said, I think my attitude can best be summed up as "if you want to change the world, you cannot let hurt feelings keep you down." Certainly, if someone suffers a personal tragedy, there must be time to grieve and cope. But I have a hard time equating "ideas with which I disagree" to personal tragedy. That said, if they felt that the best thing for them was to stay home Monday, then that is fine and I guess I would say that I would have handled it differently by coming in and focusing on how to actively make things better.
I am sorry for the way your parents suffered. Had we developed a better social conscience and understanding of ethnic discrimination before you parents immigrated, they might have been treated more fairly.
No need to apologize. You did not discriminate. My parents taught me both how things should be and how they are. I work to make things more as they should be while being aware that I have to operate in a world where things are as they are.
Having surmounted that sort of discrimination, it's not a fair expectation for you to demand that everyone else go through the same.
I demand no such thing. What I demand is that we teach people, children in particular, to be more resilient. I was the subject of some bigoted attacks my first year in college. All that did for me was make me want to work harder so that I could make things better for those who came after me. Had I decided to quit and go home, what good would that have done?
This so demoralized a lot of his women co-workers that many stayed home from work on Monday.
This right here is a problem and it sort of reinforces the notion that some people (be they women, liberals, Christians, immigrants, whatever) are so fragile that they cannot abide people around them who think differently.
I teach at a Midwestern university. Last fall after Trump won the election I read about how students at some universities were so overwhelmed by the Trump victory that their professors delayed or canceled exams, that the school had cry ins, and other such nonsense.
What I told my students was that regardless of who you supported, half of the country was terribly disappointed the morning after the election, but that life goes on. The cows still have to get milked, the news papers have to be delivered, the Starbucks have to be open for business, students have to be taught, etc. We have to encourage people to be more resilient, not less.
I come from an immigrant family. My parents didn't sit around and cry when something didn't go their way or someone said something impolite to them. They put on their big boy/big girl pants and worked that much harder. The state of society today has me frequently asking how we become so weak minded.
age is not a protected class (is it? I doubt it).
It has been, under federal law for the last 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... Google employees who discriminate against members of protected classes will be terminated.
I am curious: does that include discrimination against those protected classes in the job interview process? Like, say, for example, ageism? I am just saying.
You see, it is easy to visually identify some protected classes and subtly discriminate against them (he is overqualified, or she is not a good fit for the team) in ways that are not obviously discriminatory. But nobody in their right mind talks politics or social justice as part of the interview process. So you hire some people who end being a diversity problem. Don't kid yourself, to Google and similar companies the views expressed which challenge the accepted thinking are not welcomed as part of a healthy and vigorous debate. They are seen as a disease that must be cut out.
We are very tolerant and accepting here. You had better be tolerant and accepting in the same way or we will sack you.
These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com.[emphasis added.]
Look, I get it: fake news, it's a problem. But let's not get carried away. The Onion publishes more factually correct stories than most major media outlets. Plus they are actually entertaining to read. Don't go messing with The Onion.
...many aimed at spreading negative false claims about Hillary Clinton.
Trump and Clinton were arguably the two most hated presidential candidates to run in US presidential election history. They didn't need the "help" of fake news to have material on which to attack each other as there was no shortage of negative true information about them.
The key difference was that every little thing Trump did was held up by the media (and the Republican establishment) as a harbinger of the end of modern civilization if Trump were to get elected.
On the other hand, every thing that Hillary did (and there was lots: evading federal records laws, flipping on "don't ask don't tell", flipping on gay marriage, colluding with the DNC on debate prep, colluding with the DNC on subverting Sanders' campaign, the highly questionable financial arrangements of the Clinton foundation, etc.) was largely treated as non-news by the same media.
So, in summary, there was absolutely no shortage of negative news on Clinton, it was just getting ignored by the news media.
The fact checkers can give the signal of whether a story is true or false"
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Good job, guys.
On the one hand we have Bettridges law of headlines telling us that the answer is "no", and on the other the fact that it is rather obvious to pretty much anybody who owns a smart device that the answer is "yes".
Since you're on a roll, why don't you just spread butter on the back of a cat and drop it from the ceiling to watch it float?
The hope is that creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, the project will be able to to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.
Step 1 to protecting democracy:
Don't riot when someone with different political views comes to your campus. For comparison:
Once the universities begin to act like a) they have a role in our democracy (we are actually a representative republic, but I am not going to split hairs), and b) start working constructively to improve it, then we may have something worthwhile.
You can bet that this is for show. The government simply doesn't "get" software development. The understanding has been shifting over the last 10-20 years, but it is a very slow process which is partly frustrated by the loads of laws and regulations that affect government acquisition.
That said, I can share some anecdotes from my own experience dealing with government projects.
One was a while back (03-05 timeframe) and the place where I was at had was pretty small but was important enough that they had their own "computer security" guy on staff. I had a requirement to be able to SSH out to access a research system in a university lab. Of course, this outfit had everyone on Windows 2000 or XP, so I suggested PuTTY since nobody else there was using SSH and I figured it would be easier. As soon as the "computer security" guy found out that you had to download from some server in the UK, he gets all skittish. I tell him that it's fine, I had previously used it on personal, school, and work computers and that it was open source to boot. Well, at that point he about loses it. "Oh No! We can't have open source, plus it is developed in a foreign country!" I explained to him that not all of Microsoft's employees that develop Windows, Office, and whatever other MS software that was in use were located in the US and that even all those in the US were not necessarily US citizens. He was not that interested in the argument, and I might as well have been speaking to him in gibberish. I then explained to him that if he used the Internet that even Windows' network stack was based on open source components. I thought his head might explode.
After going through all that nonsense, that took way more effort than I thought it should, I came across some websites that experienced "difficulty" with rendering in IE. I requested Firefox (it may have still been Firebird or Phoenix at that time) and I thought the "computer security" guy was going to come across his desk at me for even asking. I gave up that fight relatively quickly and just did some of the browsing from my home machine.
Another time I was responsible for managing a network of RHEL servers and workstations that were not connected to the Internet. I had to make sure that when advisories and package updates came out that they were deployed in a timely manner. I would typically do this by downloading them from an Internet connected machine by going to RedHat's FTP site, burning them to CD/DVD and moving them via sneaker net. At some point along the way, they implemented a policy that blocked all FTP sites (including over HTTP if FTP was in the URL; dumb, I know). So, I walked to the helpdesk and requested that they unblock RedHat's FTP server so I could get the updates. They said that the policy was managed by headquarters and that I would have to submit a request listing each URL I would need unblocked (how was I supposed to get that information if they were blocked?). When I asked how long it would take, I was told around 90 days. I asked the guy if there were any other alternatives. He said (and I really wish that this were a joke and not the truth) that I could download them at home, burn them to a CD/DVD there and carry the disk into the building. I pointed out that the public Internet connection in the building had all manner of IDS, virus scanning, etc., while they had no idea what sort of security was on my home Internet connection. Still, he said that the policy allowed for media to be carried in as long as the person doing so initialed a form indicating that it had been properly scanned for viruses. I asked him if he realized how utterly nonsensical the policy was, and he said he did but that he could not do anything about it. So, I started downloading and burning at home then bringing in the CDs/DVDs.
Things are getting better in isolated pockets. Some folks in the government do understand the realities of how software gets developed now, the value of open source, etc. However, it is really an uphill battle and lots of stakeholders (especially contractors that make big $$$$ charging the government for custom development of everything) are threatened by it.
A degree is not merely about demonstrating that you can acquire some minimal base of knowledge to start your career from. It also demonstrates that you can finish what you start, even when it is a long process that requires you to do many things you have no particular interest in doing.
Not only that, but it is entirely different to drop out and start your own company than it is drop out and look for a "normal" job. Basically:
The point is that either way someone has to roll the dice on you (that is even true for someone who graduated, though the uncertainty tends to be less) their willingness to do so (either invest in your startup idea or hire you as a dropout) is almost entirely dependent on your ability to articulate the value that you bring to the table. That is decidedly difficult to do with a startup, but if you hustle you can start building up your track record with demos of your idea/product, early sales, etc. I would argue that it is much harder as a dropout to build the sort of track record that will convince someone to take a chance on you. I mean, the guy with the start offers investors the possibility of making enormous returns on their investment (if the idea survives). The dropout looking for a job offers the employer the possibility of doing pretty much what is expected of any employee, of which there are many prospective candidates, lots of whom have finished their degrees.
Unmasking a public or political official who is trying to sell out the country should earn you a $3 fine and a gift certificate to Chili's.
Be very careful what you wish for. The US ability to collect technical intelligence is extraordinarily powerful. It should have very strong restrictions to protect the citizenry it is in place to serve, the violation of which should carry swift and harsh penalties as a deterrent to abuse. The officials in question had no business accessing the identities of any US person caught up in incidental collection, regardless of how bad the appearance of the alleged activity.
Before Obama relaxed the rules the responsibility and authority to deal with collecting intelligence on US persons (whether as part of incidental or targeted collection) was the Attorney General and I am relatively certain that the authority could not be delegated. A proper procedure would be after discovering potential evidence of a serious crime (you don't want to use this sort of thing for minor offenses) the matter should be referred to the intelligence folks at the Department of Justice who have special training and oversight to guard against abuse. They then make the determination on how to proceed and make a recommendation to the AG on whether the individual should be unmasked or not. An exception for something like an imminent terrorist attack or other crime which could result in loss of life should allow for quick action but still require review and adjudication by the Attorney General after the fact.
The kind of "bounty" program you suggest would do nothing more than invite abuse and promote a cavalier attitude among low level intelligence personnel. It is most definitely not in the best interests of the US government, the people in general, and potential victims of that abuse. Does that mean that some people will get away with crimes? Probably. But then our justice system is specifically designed to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, as it should be.
It's because if any company did the same thing in the so called "3rd world", this same activity would be termed as "corruption" as part of "buying off politicians."
It is more like that when they were small and challenging the establishment, people would cheer them on. Sort of like with Lyft and Uber now. However, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (along with others) long ago ceased to be change agents disrupting and challenging the establishment. They are the establishment. Now they are in the mode of protecting and fortifying what they have.
If you want to eliminate corruption, elect people who don't take campaign contributions from large corporations. BTW, we did that with Obama (I know he didn't strictly refuse big donors, but he did brag about how most of his contributions can from small donations by individuals). As far as I can tell, Obama wasn't any more a "man of the people" than Bush was. Also, you are likely to have difficulty finding people who are immune to corruption; it is human nature after all.
Assuming the site/application/whatever supports it, you could go with a longer password and restrict it to the Base32 character set. For me, the best reason to use it is:
The alphabet can be selected to avoid similar-looking pairs of different symbols, so the strings can be accurately transcribed by hand. (For example, the RFC 4648 symbol set omits the digits for one, eight and zero, since they could be confused with the letters 'I', 'B', and 'O'.)
It makes it very nice when dealing storing passwords in such a way that the presentation font makes some of the characters confusing or when having to tell someone the password over the phone.
Yes, replace billions of working C code with billions of lines of code in a new language. What could possibly go wrong?
Not only that, but which standard requires that a system have a rust compiler on it? POSIX and SUS (are they the same now?) require a C compiler. In practice I know that many systems have other environments available, but standards matter in some cases and there will be instances where C is an appropriate choice, if not the best or only choice.
I could understand advocating "choose rust instead of C for new projects" or "if you are considering rewriting major portions of a C project then consider redoing all or part of it in rust." However, advocating replacement of lots of working code sort of ignores a major part of the risk management calculus. In fact, risk management is why the banking and finance industry core still mostly on COBOL and why lots of big companies still have HR systems that were written in COBOL.
Granted if a project has a history of being filled with security issues, then there needs to be a consideration for if it is better to expend the effort on fixing vulnerabilities or rewriting in a more "secure" language. Im looking at you imagemagick and PHP.
Spaces -> the person who writes the code decides how its indentation looks
Tabs -> the person who reads the code decides how the indentation looks
Sometimes I set tabs to be 4 spaces, sometimes 8, sometimes even 2 spaces. However, if the formatting is all done with spaces I don't get that choice. I find tabs more empowering to me personally and I believe that I use them I empower those who read my code.
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
I am guessing that you don't teach or otherwise work in the education sector. Just off the top of my head, here are people or groups would have an incentive to make that claim:
This whole "computers in the classroom" thing is probably the best example ever of the self licking ice cream cone or the solution in search of a problem.
https://www.google.com/#q=things+i%27ve+seen+students+doing+in+class