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User: ATMAvatar

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  1. Re: here we go again on Three Women Suing Microsoft for Bias Want To Add 8,630 Peers (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Furthermore, men need jobs more than women do because if a man doesn't have a job, people look down on him. If a woman doesn't have a job and her husband works, nobody looks down on her. It is time we stop denying qualified man who need work jobs so that less qualified females can get them.

    The obvious response, then, is to change the social conventions that require a man be the primary breadwinner for a family. There are a number of quality-of-life improvements you could make for men once that was done away with.

  2. Re:The essay's critics are missing the point. on Google Engineer's Leaked 'Gender Diversity' Essay Draws Massive Response (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    What makes it valid scientific data is controlling for other confounding variables. Without said controls, you cannot simply take a body of anecdotes and derive any worthwhile conclusions, particularly regarding causal relationships.

  3. Re:Seems like drm should be a PLUGIN to me. on EFF Officially Appeals Tim Berners-Lee Decision On DRM In HTML (techdirt.com) · · Score: 2

    It will finally murder Flash, but we will still have plugins and DRM, so it is only a minuscule victory.

    And it may not be a net victory at all. For all anyone knows, these plugins will end up being worse than Flash was.

  4. Re: Typical on Sci-Hub Ordered To Pay $15 Million In Piracy Damages (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    you can't infringe copyright just because you think those copyrights are being abuse.

    You may want to read about civil disobedience.

  5. Real estate rights are forever, then why not copyright?

    For one reason: neither the buildings nor the land they rest upon can be duplicated, let alone for zero cost. Another is that society obtains greater benefit when ideas and works are spread more widely.

    Intellectual property law exists solely for the purpose of encouraging individuals to share their works by granting a limited monopoly on them so they can gain monetary benefit from doing so. This is done with the understanding that some non-zero fraction of inventors and artists would refrain from doing so in the absence of this protection. The end goal is to maximize the spread of ideas.

    The problem is that people do not all agree as to how long various intellectual property protections should last in order to accomplish this goal.

    When it comes to discoveries and inventions, larger proportions of them now require teams rather than individuals and large amounts of resources. The entities now predominantly holding ownership of these properties are functionally immortal, hold large influence over the lawmaking process, and arguably care little for the societal benefit of eventually releasing ideas into the public domain. This is further complicated by the growing realization that intellectual property protections can also serve to substantially hinder the birth and spread of new ideas.

  6. Re:The solution: the cloud!!! on US Might Ban Laptops On All Flights Into And Out of the Country (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    Thats how google masters know which companies to buy and sell and the government does have to hack your system they force you to use theirs oops I mean Google Drive/OneDrive/Dropbox

    Surely the implication is that the data was encrypted first. You can (and should!) encrypt your data before putting it up in the cloud.

  7. Re:I thought unemployment was in the double digits on WSJ Columnist: Robots Aren't Destroying Enough Jobs (foxbusiness.com) · · Score: 1

    The only thing the BLS job numbers are intended for is tracking the state of the economy, not the state of people's lifestyles. Pundits and politicians (from all parties) like to confuse the issue for their own ends, but that's really all there is to it. The job numbers tell you how many people are able to find jobs. If you want to know whether the jobs are good or not, you'll have to look at other data sets that align with your definition of a "good" job.

    Were every working adult in the country suddenly transitioned to minimum wage jobs overnight, surely you would agree it reflects a change in state of the economy. Arguably, then, using a trinary value such as "has a job", "does not have a job but looking for one", and "does not have a job and not looking for another" is insufficient at tracking the current state of the economy.

  8. Re:486... on How The 1997 'NESticle' Emulator Redefined Retro Gaming (vice.com) · · Score: 3, Funny

    Don't divide: Intel Inside

  9. Why did you change the acronym? IoT works perfectly fine - two different ways, in fact!

    The less obvious one is Internet of Tumors

  10. Re:Very simple on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Make Novice Programmers More Professional? · · Score: 1

    Time for carousel. Renew! Renew! Renew!

  11. Re:There's a money to be made here on Filmmakers Take Dutch State To Court Over Lost Piracy Revenue (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    Why would anyone pay for pirated content?

    Because often times, it's better than the original content: no unskippable ads, no unskippable piracy warnings (lol), and no DRM/malware.

  12. Re:please do this for all places on More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating (qz.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, and eliminating a particular job does not mean "one less job".

    I think you mean that it doesn't necessarily mean one less job. There is a possibility it means that. For example, the business could pocket the extra profit and hoard it rather than reinvest.

    Either way, someone will have more money in their pocket, and will spend that money on other goods, services or investments, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.

    As stated above: there is no requirement that the money saved gets spent anywhere. The business could pocket the profit and do nothing with it.

    This is actually a growing concern of late, as we have seen a number of top businesses start to hoard cash - the best example of which would be Apple, which is sitting on over $200 Billion.

    Dead end make-work jobs are not "good for the economy", and the point of work is to create goods and services, not to "keep people busy".

    It's certainly the ideal that everyone works to create more wealth overall. We can hope that automation starts to open up new markets like technological advances of the past did, but we should prepare for the possibility that it won't.

    If the worst happens, and we end up with a growing group of poor, hungry individuals, then make work projects could be better than inviting future civil unrest. That's somewhat of a moot point, though, as there is plenty of neglected infrastructure that we as a country could start training and paying people to repair.

  13. The deterrent here would probably stem from what I expect to be a pretty high-sum civil case.

  14. Re:...what on FCC Chairman Says His Agency Won't Review AT&T's Time Warner Purchase (engadget.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Approving mergers generally falls under the purview of the FTC (see merger review).

    The only reason the FCC came up is due to the fact that the two companies may have had to transfer FCC licenses as part of the deal. Since it appears no transferal is taking place, the FCC is not involved.

  15. Should have known... on German Government Tells Parents: Destroy This WiFi-Connected Doll (theverge.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The entire point of internet enabled devices is to collect your data. They are all surveillance devices.

  16. Re:Vetting on The US Border Patrol Is Checking Detainees' Facebook Profiles (cnet.com) · · Score: 2

    Parallel construction is about providing a different explanation for how you obtained evidence (which could be true or false) to a judge because you do not want to reveal where it really came from, but "alternative facts" are really just lies given a softer name so that maybe people won't realize they're lies (or accept them anyway because it fits their worldview).

  17. How?

    It limits your options. The company will take your most recent salary and use it to determine the upper and lower bounds to the offers they think you might take.

    If they were going to offer much more than your prior salary, you just screwed yourself out of money. If they were going to offer much less, they''ll show you the door without bothering to find out if you would have accepted anyways (due to other factors like benefits, perks, etc.).

  18. Re:Will it be "Social Justice" content? on Apple Exec Jimmy Iovine Confirms Company's Interest in Making 'Pop Culture' TV Shows (hollywoodreporter.com) · · Score: 2

    We've seen long-established characters changed to a different race or gender or sexual preference or some other trait just to make the content more "inclusive", even if it makes no sense within story lines or established canon. Or we've seen new characters created with a trait like their gender, race, or sexual preference as their main defining characteristic, solely so focus can be put on it, and the rest of the character pretty much ignored.

    To be fair, there's also still a non-trivial amount of white-washing going on, too. The most recent and accessible example for the Slashdot audience would be casting Scarlett Johansson for the Ghost In The Shell movie.

    In fact, I am somewhat curious about this list of movies that fit your criteria, as I can easily rattle off several whitewashing examples from recent movies off the top of my head, but I cannot think of that many where the reverse would be true (though there are some).

  19. Re:Can you say "the american way" ? on Millennials Earn 20 Percent Less Than Boomers Did At Same Stage of Life (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    The intended magic did happen - income inequality started to increase at breakneck speeds.

  20. Re: No shit Sherlock on Why You Shouldn't Trust Geek Squad (networkworld.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you're then given a check by an FBI agent in return for a report on what you found while breaking and entering, are you still just an arbitrary citizen or a de facto agent of the government?

  21. Re: WW3 is going to be a nightmare on Pentagon Successfully Tests Micro-Drone Swarm (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    Things have changed a bit in the last 70 years.

    Not the least of which is the fact that nukes today are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

  22. Re:Let's look at how much they are using/making on A Coal-Fired Power Plant In India Is Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Baking Soda (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    They could probably make quite a hefty profit for designer soap:

    Green soap: clean your body *and* your conscience.

  23. Airlines overbook? on Are Airlines Intentionally Overbooking Their Flights? (popularmechanics.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Next you're going to try and convince me that ISPs oversell bandwidth, hardware stores don't actually give me boards that measure 2"x4" in the cross section, that hard-drive manufacturers don't label drives as their formatted capacity, and printer cartridges don't let you utilize 100% of the ink inside.

  24. Re:There is a legitimate dispute on US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change (cnn.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The true measure of scientific fact is how well it survives the opposition trying to disprove it. Given that the opposition to climate change has given up on producing data disproving that the Earth is getting warmer on aggregate and instead resorted to attacking it politically, I would say it's doing pretty well as scientific theories go.

  25. Re:Good faith purchaser on Apollo 11 Moon Rock Bag Belongs To Buyer, Not NASA, Judge Rules (behindtheblack.com) · · Score: 1

    They could make a good-faith effort to find the owner, or they could auction it and pad yearly revenue. The choice is obvious.

    The real problem here, like with civil forfeiture, is that the police entity that seized the property gets to keep the proceeds. It is in its best interest to sell a seized object as quickly as it can legally do so without finding and notifying the rightful owner.