No-one has called me racist. I'm just asking why people think that calling someone racist should be taken any more seriously by rational people than some medieval witch-finder claiming that someone has been giving people the 'evil eye'. Knee-jerk 'anti-racism' and 'anti-sexism' is no more rational than that.
"to call into doubt your intelligence."
Well, if you think men and women are identical, I can only presume you've never had a girlfriend (or boyfriend, if you're female).
"someone was trying to do you a favor, by pointing out that racism and sexism are pretty similar."
So are dog turds and chocolate ice cream, to someone who doesn't look very close. So what?
"And basically what you're telling me is along the lines of "underpaid underlings are signifficant too, so it's perfectly ok to force women and minorities into those roles."
Who exactly is 'forcing women and minorities into those underpaid roles'? When I interview people for a job, if I was to end up with two equally qualified candidates, one male, one female, I'd probably either toss a coin or hire the woman. The problem is, the best male candidate I interviewed has always been better than the best female candidate, usually vastly so.
If women are so great at programming, then I don't understand where all the good female programmers are hiding? PC fanatics can continue to rant about evilwhitemaleoppressors keeping women out of programming, but my experience of reality doesn't support your opinion... so unless that experience is wildly unusual, I can only presume that women just aren't as good at the job.
"my guess is that the parent poster was making the comparison between sexism and racism"
Yes, and it was clearly nonsense, which is why I was ignoring that poor attempt at evading the original poster's point. What does black people's programming ability (or lack thereof) have to do with women's programming ability (or lack thereof), unless perhaps you're only talking about black women, and why should saying 'if you replaced that word with the n-word, you'd be a racist' convince anyone of anything?
"you can call me racist if you want, but people with non-white skin just aren't as capable when it comes to disciplines like engineering or Computer Science."
Well, that's blatantly not true: some of the best programmers I've known were Asian.
I can only presume you're a PC fanatic if you think that sane people will disregard someone's opinion just because you call them 'racist'.
Well, I've never seen a woman work for 60 hours non-stop and completely rewrite the core of your software to run twice as fast. Unlike guys, they have a hard time managing to forget to, like, shower and stuff.
More seriously, I've never seen a female programmer who came close to the best male programmers I've worked with. Then again, I've only seen about half a dozen female programmers...
Certainly the idea of trying to encourage women into programming seems bizarre to me, particularly when so many jobs are being outsourced at the moment... if I had kids I wouldn't encourage my son to go into programming now, let alone a daughter. But if a company wants to hire me to run summer computer camps for teenage girls, I'd be more than happy to oblige:).
"A lot of old age problems are basicly a result of your DNA being to old/damaged to be properly copied anymore."
Actually, most of what I've read of aging research in the last few years says that's not true, except to the extent that DNA is stripped off the end of the chain every time it's duplicated (as part of an anti-cancer mechanism to kill cells that begin to duplicate endlessly). 'Old age' seems to be more of a triggered event than an accumulation of genetic damage.
Which makes sense when you consider that most people's mothers are 40 or less when they have kids, so there's little evolutionary pressure to eliminate genes which kill you when you're past 40 (particularly if those same genes have survival benefits when younger).
(Repost due to the stupid default to HTML posting that I can't seem to get rid of)
"I'd be interested to see on what metric you base this assertion."
On having driven in this country for the best part of twenty years. The drop in driving standards in the last three or four years alone has been marked.
"What has happened, is that the rate of falling has slowed"
Well, I don't have time to do your research for you, but let's see: third line down on a quick google search:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2042884.stm
"A total of 3,443 people died on the UK's roads in 2001 - a rise of 1%, according to figures published on Thursday by the Department of Transport."
So, at least, in 2001 road deaths went up by 1%, whereas pretty much every other year since the car was invented, traffic has gone up and deaths have gone down. You were saying?
"I'd be interested to see on what metric you base this assertion."
On having driven in this country for the best part of twenty years. The drop in driving standards in the last three or four years alone has been marked.
"What has happened, is that the rate of falling has slowed"
Well, I don't have time to do your research for you, but let's see: third line down on a quick google search:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2042884.stm
"A total of 3,443 people died on the UK's roads in 2001 - a rise of 1%, according to figures published on Thursday by the Department of Transport."
So, at least, in 2001 road deaths went up by 1%. You were saying?
"...lower insurance rates for those of us that obey traffic laws, aren't the cause of accidents (even in no-fault states) I am all for it."
Slight problem: the only traffic law it will be able to tell if you obey is driving below the speed limit, and it's been well established that the safest drivers are the 85th percentile by speed, which is usually above speed limits on American roads. So if you always stick to speed limits you're probably a significantly more dangerous driver than many people who break them regularly.
But the biggest problem with this rabid attack on speeding is that it's nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with restricting personal mobility. Only a very small fraction of accidents are due to people driving faster than the speed limit, and the concentration on speeding means that people come to think they're safe if they just stick to the number printed on a piece of metal at the side of the road, and provided they drive that slow there's no problem with not indicating, cutting people up at junctions, driving along reading a map or talking on a phone, or any of the other stupid things I see people doing on the road every day. Those morons are being completely ignored here in the UK because there are almost no traffic police left to do anything about them, while speed cameras sprout everywhere.
"Nope, all it should do is contain crash data. I don't see anything wrong with that."
Right, and speed cameras will only ever be used in accident black-spots.
Seriously, you're incredibly naive if you can't see yet that every time the government introduces a 'sensible' measure like this it's just to get their foot in the door to use it to control the population. Have fun a decade or two from now when you're living in a total surveillance, total control police state, brought about by these 'safety' measures.
"The police using technology to prove criminals have broken the law"
99% of drivers break the speed limit at some time, because speed limits are usually set way too low for good conditions in modern cars. So you're saying that you want to turn 99% of people into criminals for driving at a safe speed in good conditions which just happens to be above the number printed on a piece of metal by the side of the road? Yeah, that's a real sensible policy.
"If a black box helped make enforcing that speed limit afordable (i.e. more enforcement without hiring more police) then that'd be great."
Enforcing laws that the majority disagree with using machines merely brings the law into disrepute. There's a reason why we have people enforcing most laws, because they can actually decide when behaviour is dangerous and when it's not, and act accordingly.
A machine can't make any such decision: your 'black box', for example, would happily let people drive at 35mph in a 35mph limit in thick fog on a snowy road, but would stop them from driving at 40mph on the same road in clear weather. That's ludicrous and most people understand that... enforcing laws in such a stupid way will simply convince people of clue (at least those not already convinced) that the law is an ass.
I'd also add that in the last decade we've seen speed cameras almost completely take over from traffic police for traffic law enforcement here in the UK. The end result is that the standard of driving in this country has gone from quite decent to absolutely appalling, and the death rate, which had been dropping for decades, has started to go up.
Penrose is just a carbon chauvinist. A century from now our silicon-based overlords will be reading his books and having a good laugh at how stupid their carbon-based ancestors were.
"The poverty level, especially in children living in it, is alarming. In fact it compares to Third World country levels."
Of course in the Third World, poverty means that kids weigh 40 pounds, and live in a shack with little food and no clean water. In America, 'poverty' means that kids weigh 300 pounds, live in a trailer and their parents only have one car and two TV sets.
And don't forget that a manned mission will be in one place (with maybe a 10km range due to manned rovers: further than that and astronauts couldn't walk back to the lander if the rover broke down). So you'd do more work in one place, but for the same price you could mass-produce hundreds of rovers and send them to hundreds of places across Mars.
Given the choice between the two, hundreds of Rovers seems far more useful to me. Sure, if the rovers find something really interesting, it may be worth sending humans to investigate that particular spot, but humans aren't likely to find that really interesting spot themselves in one mission.
Re:It's a city, and a public place.
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
"If you don't like cameras then move out of the city and move to the country where you'll have more privacy"
This from someone who posts as 'Adolph Hitler'. What exactly do you have to hide, Mr 'Hitler', that you are using a false name in a public place? Or are you just dreaming of the day when you'll be able to use these cameras to round up the Jews and send them to concentration camps?
Seriously, the real Hitler would have loved this kind of surveillance technology, and had the USSR been able to install it decades ago we'd all have been saying how evil it was. Yet it's fine to have in our 'free' nations today?
"Are you planning on doing something you shouldn't?"
Indeed. Only those who've done something wrong, or are misidentified, have anything to fear... and no-one should be worried about a mere few years spent in Cuba because they were misidentified as a criminal. Of course what's legal today might be 'wrong' tomorrow, like, say, trying to cross the border to Canada in order to avoid being drafted to die in Iran or Syria, but as long as you're docile little sheep who do whatever the government tells you to do (and don't get misidentified), you'll probably be OK.
"Is it even possible to live free and untracked anymore? Is this just the price we pay for living in a civilized society?"
If we lived in a civilised society it might be a price worth paying, but we have the worst of both worlds: an uncivilised society and a growing police state.
As I understand it, it was more of a watchdog timer interrupt than a reboot: the 'operating system' would run through the tasks allocated to it in order of priority and if it hadn't finished those tasks in one 'tick', an interrupt would raise the program error and jump back to the start. Low priority tasks like updating the displays would get dropped, but the important stuff like navigation and controlling the engine would be run properly.
Personally, I bought my FIAT when it was 13 years old, it's now coming up to 18, and it hasn't broken down once in that time. They may rust, but provided they're maintained properly they're pretty reliable... unlike the Rover I used to have which trashed its engine every 6,000 miles.
"So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism"
Which means, exactly? For example, how many stories did they print about the non-existence of WMDs before Bush invaded Iraq vs how many reprints of government press releases?
"and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?"
We're doing them a favor by going to their site for information that's probably available on the web for free. Why should we be the ones paying for it?
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think anyone needs to call you a racist"
No-one has called me racist. I'm just asking why people think that calling someone racist should be taken any more seriously by rational people than some medieval witch-finder claiming that someone has been giving people the 'evil eye'. Knee-jerk 'anti-racism' and 'anti-sexism' is no more rational than that.
"to call into doubt your intelligence."
Well, if you think men and women are identical, I can only presume you've never had a girlfriend (or boyfriend, if you're female).
"someone was trying to do you a favor, by pointing out that racism and sexism are pretty similar."
So are dog turds and chocolate ice cream, to someone who doesn't look very close. So what?
"And basically what you're telling me is along the lines of "underpaid underlings are signifficant too, so it's perfectly ok to force women and minorities into those roles."
Who exactly is 'forcing women and minorities into those underpaid roles'? When I interview people for a job, if I was to end up with two equally qualified candidates, one male, one female, I'd probably either toss a coin or hire the woman. The problem is, the best male candidate I interviewed has always been better than the best female candidate, usually vastly so.
If women are so great at programming, then I don't understand where all the good female programmers are hiding? PC fanatics can continue to rant about evilwhitemaleoppressors keeping women out of programming, but my experience of reality doesn't support your opinion... so unless that experience is wildly unusual, I can only presume that women just aren't as good at the job.
"my guess is that the parent poster was making the comparison between sexism and racism"
Yes, and it was clearly nonsense, which is why I was ignoring that poor attempt at evading the original poster's point. What does black people's programming ability (or lack thereof) have to do with women's programming ability (or lack thereof), unless perhaps you're only talking about black women, and why should saying 'if you replaced that word with the n-word, you'd be a racist' convince anyone of anything?
"you can call me racist if you want, but people with non-white skin just aren't as capable when it comes to disciplines like engineering or Computer Science."
Well, that's blatantly not true: some of the best programmers I've known were Asian.
I can only presume you're a PC fanatic if you think that sane people will disregard someone's opinion just because you call them 'racist'.
"Would you care to elaborate on that?"
:).
Well, I've never seen a woman work for 60 hours non-stop and completely rewrite the core of your software to run twice as fast. Unlike guys, they have a hard time managing to forget to, like, shower and stuff.
More seriously, I've never seen a female programmer who came close to the best male programmers I've worked with. Then again, I've only seen about half a dozen female programmers...
Certainly the idea of trying to encourage women into programming seems bizarre to me, particularly when so many jobs are being outsourced at the moment... if I had kids I wouldn't encourage my son to go into programming now, let alone a daughter. But if a company wants to hire me to run summer computer camps for teenage girls, I'd be more than happy to oblige
"A lot of old age problems are basicly a result of your DNA being to old/damaged to be properly copied anymore."
Actually, most of what I've read of aging research in the last few years says that's not true, except to the extent that DNA is stripped off the end of the chain every time it's duplicated (as part of an anti-cancer mechanism to kill cells that begin to duplicate endlessly). 'Old age' seems to be more of a triggered event than an accumulation of genetic damage.
Which makes sense when you consider that most people's mothers are 40 or less when they have kids, so there's little evolutionary pressure to eliminate genes which kill you when you're past 40 (particularly if those same genes have survival benefits when younger).
(Repost due to the stupid default to HTML posting that I can't seem to get rid of)
"I'd be interested to see on what metric you base this assertion."
On having driven in this country for the best part of twenty years. The drop in driving standards in the last three or four years alone has been marked.
"What has happened, is that the rate of falling has slowed"
Well, I don't have time to do your research for you, but let's see: third line down on a quick google search:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2042884.stm
"A total of 3,443 people died on the UK's roads in 2001 - a rise of 1%, according to figures published on Thursday by the Department of Transport."
So, at least, in 2001 road deaths went up by 1%, whereas pretty much every other year since the car was invented, traffic has gone up and deaths have gone down. You were saying?
"I'd be interested to see on what metric you base this assertion." On having driven in this country for the best part of twenty years. The drop in driving standards in the last three or four years alone has been marked. "What has happened, is that the rate of falling has slowed" Well, I don't have time to do your research for you, but let's see: third line down on a quick google search: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2042884.stm "A total of 3,443 people died on the UK's roads in 2001 - a rise of 1%, according to figures published on Thursday by the Department of Transport." So, at least, in 2001 road deaths went up by 1%. You were saying?
"...lower insurance rates for those of us that obey traffic laws, aren't the cause of accidents (even in no-fault states) I am all for it."
Slight problem: the only traffic law it will be able to tell if you obey is driving below the speed limit, and it's been well established that the safest drivers are the 85th percentile by speed, which is usually above speed limits on American roads. So if you always stick to speed limits you're probably a significantly more dangerous driver than many people who break them regularly.
But the biggest problem with this rabid attack on speeding is that it's nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with restricting personal mobility. Only a very small fraction of accidents are due to people driving faster than the speed limit, and the concentration on speeding means that people come to think they're safe if they just stick to the number printed on a piece of metal at the side of the road, and provided they drive that slow there's no problem with not indicating, cutting people up at junctions, driving along reading a map or talking on a phone, or any of the other stupid things I see people doing on the road every day. Those morons are being completely ignored here in the UK because there are almost no traffic police left to do anything about them, while speed cameras sprout everywhere.
"Nope, all it should do is contain crash data. I don't see anything wrong with that."
Right, and speed cameras will only ever be used in accident black-spots.
Seriously, you're incredibly naive if you can't see yet that every time the government introduces a 'sensible' measure like this it's just to get their foot in the door to use it to control the population. Have fun a decade or two from now when you're living in a total surveillance, total control police state, brought about by these 'safety' measures.
"The police using technology to prove criminals have broken the law"
99% of drivers break the speed limit at some time, because speed limits are usually set way too low for good conditions in modern cars. So you're saying that you want to turn 99% of people into criminals for driving at a safe speed in good conditions which just happens to be above the number printed on a piece of metal by the side of the road? Yeah, that's a real sensible policy.
"If a black box helped make enforcing that speed limit afordable (i.e. more enforcement without hiring more police) then that'd be great."
Enforcing laws that the majority disagree with using machines merely brings the law into disrepute. There's a reason why we have people enforcing most laws, because they can actually decide when behaviour is dangerous and when it's not, and act accordingly.
A machine can't make any such decision: your 'black box', for example, would happily let people drive at 35mph in a 35mph limit in thick fog on a snowy road, but would stop them from driving at 40mph on the same road in clear weather. That's ludicrous and most people understand that... enforcing laws in such a stupid way will simply convince people of clue (at least those not already convinced) that the law is an ass.
I'd also add that in the last decade we've seen speed cameras almost completely take over from traffic police for traffic law enforcement here in the UK. The end result is that the standard of driving in this country has gone from quite decent to absolutely appalling, and the death rate, which had been dropping for decades, has started to go up.
You obviously missed the new Microsoft patent: 'A method of writing a program such that it is written in two lines of code or less'.
"It's time for a solution to the P2P conflict that pays artists, not lawyers"
Of course most copyrights are owned by publishers, not artists...
Penrose is just a carbon chauvinist. A century from now our silicon-based overlords will be reading his books and having a good laugh at how stupid their carbon-based ancestors were.
"ATI has a history of underhanded techniques when benchmarking, and sales, and marketing, etc."
I believe you've confused ATI with nvidia.
"The poverty level, especially in children living in it, is alarming. In fact it compares to Third World country levels."
Of course in the Third World, poverty means that kids weigh 40 pounds, and live in a shack with little food and no clean water. In America, 'poverty' means that kids weigh 300 pounds, live in a trailer and their parents only have one car and two TV sets.
And don't forget that a manned mission will be in one place (with maybe a 10km range due to manned rovers: further than that and astronauts couldn't walk back to the lander if the rover broke down). So you'd do more work in one place, but for the same price you could mass-produce hundreds of rovers and send them to hundreds of places across Mars.
Given the choice between the two, hundreds of Rovers seems far more useful to me. Sure, if the rovers find something really interesting, it may be worth sending humans to investigate that particular spot, but humans aren't likely to find that really interesting spot themselves in one mission.
"If you don't like cameras then move out of the city and move to the country where you'll have more privacy"
This from someone who posts as 'Adolph Hitler'. What exactly do you have to hide, Mr 'Hitler', that you are using a false name in a public place? Or are you just dreaming of the day when you'll be able to use these cameras to round up the Jews and send them to concentration camps?
Seriously, the real Hitler would have loved this kind of surveillance technology, and had the USSR been able to install it decades ago we'd all have been saying how evil it was. Yet it's fine to have in our 'free' nations today?
First you say:
"I don't mind cameras in public places"
Then you say:
"People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people."
Am I the only one who can see the obvious reality disconnect here?
"Are you planning on doing something you shouldn't?"
Indeed. Only those who've done something wrong, or are misidentified, have anything to fear... and no-one should be worried about a mere few years spent in Cuba because they were misidentified as a criminal. Of course what's legal today might be 'wrong' tomorrow, like, say, trying to cross the border to Canada in order to avoid being drafted to die in Iran or Syria, but as long as you're docile little sheep who do whatever the government tells you to do (and don't get misidentified), you'll probably be OK.
"Is it even possible to live free and untracked anymore? Is this just the price we pay for living in a civilized society?"
If we lived in a civilised society it might be a price worth paying, but we have the worst of both worlds: an uncivilised society and a growing police state.
As I understand it, it was more of a watchdog timer interrupt than a reboot: the 'operating system' would run through the tasks allocated to it in order of priority and if it hadn't finished those tasks in one 'tick', an interrupt would raise the program error and jump back to the start. Low priority tasks like updating the displays would get dropped, but the important stuff like navigation and controlling the engine would be run properly.
"FIAT was "Fix It Again, Tony"
Personally, I bought my FIAT when it was 13 years old, it's now coming up to 18, and it hasn't broken down once in that time. They may rust, but provided they're maintained properly they're pretty reliable... unlike the Rover I used to have which trashed its engine every 6,000 miles.
"So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism"
Which means, exactly? For example, how many stories did they print about the non-existence of WMDs before Bush invaded Iraq vs how many reprints of government press releases?
"and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?"
We're doing them a favor by going to their site for information that's probably available on the web for free. Why should we be the ones paying for it?
"If people running windows were not so used to running as admin, this would not be a fundemental problem."
If Windows wasn't such a pain in the ass to run as a non-admin user, then this wouldn't be such a fundamental problem.