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User: bickerdyke

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  1. Who? on AI Wins $290,000 in Chinese Poker Competition (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Please be more exact in the headlines... I thought Ai Wei Wei now switched to Poker...

  2. Re:Proxy Variables on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Then instead of height use one of the proxies mentioned above in this thread: Negotiating skills

    Discriminating on those is absolutely legal as for any but blue-collar jobs, it will be part of your job one way or the other.

    If on average male are better at this (maybe due to the fact that slamming their fist on the table is socially accepted and sign of leadership instead of bitchyness), you have your "proxy" variable. And it isn't even completely "proxy" as it is indeed part of most job requirements

  3. Re:Common Sense calling - Women have babies on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Google offers several months' paid leave to both mothers and fathers, and all are strongly encouraged to take it.

    I'm not blaming Google of this, but "encouraging" would technically still cover "encouraging despite the inevitable career drawbacks"

    I've seen enough cases where companies try to encourage a certain kind of behavior through trainings, policies, motivational posters and the usual stuff instead of removing the reward for doing otherwise.

  4. Re:Common Sense calling - Women have babies on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    "a handful of", and many similar terms are all interchangeable in common use, and all mean "3 or more".

    If you're working at a sawmill....

  5. Re:Common Sense calling - Women have babies on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    But to be fair: A certain amount of aggressiveness from a male makes him appear as tough negotiator and therefor a good hire worth the money.

  6. Re:Common Sense calling - Women have babies on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Victim blaming my ass, what the grandparent is saying is that women suck at negotiating, and want a fucking crutch ALONG with the ability to have kids and take time off.

    No, he said that this woman sucked at negotiating and tried to make up for the lack of that skill by complaining

    Many women are not forceful negotiators and acquiesce at the first offer a company gives them. Many men in that situation will tell said company to go fuck themselves and come back with a real offer.

    This shifts the problem to an actual valid point: Should negotiating skills be a such large part of your salary/career? If so, suckage for bad negotiators is an expected outcome. Is it fair? That wasn't part of the original question, but why did we decide on "should" without thinking of fairness?

  7. Re:Common Sense calling - Women have babies on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    And probably even more important: Make use of the heads-up you just got! After that announcement, immediately take care of having a replacement ready for when Jane will be out. I too often saw managers surprised when people left after giving a 4 months notice. Only THEN they started to look for someone who could fill the vacant position

  8. Re: Pay gap is real, but exaggerated on Google Schools US Government About Gender Pay Gap (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    At least they reveal their process to calculate their numbers, while I haven't heard anything so far what makes Gouvernment think there is a paygap at all.

  9. Re:I miss software that works. on Celebrating '21 Things We Miss About Old Computers' (denofgeek.com) · · Score: 1

    or using undocumented system calls

    To their defense: The chances of a kernel update for the C64 that would remove, break or in any way modify those undocumented features were more than slim.

  10. Re:Amber Rudd is dim on London Terrorist Used WhatsApp, UK Calls For Backdoors (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    It would always be the skinhead or the goth guy with the Doc Marten's who has to take their boots off.

    To be fair: Compared to my sneakers, you could hide half an armory in the average Doc Marten's....

  11. Re:governments on London Terrorist Used WhatsApp, UK Calls For Backdoors (yahoo.com) · · Score: 2

    You can go into some "white" American suburb with a bunch of Muslim hate preachers and if - if! - you don't get tossed in prison immediately for running your dog-and-pony show, you'll get a conversion rate of less than .1% from normal citizen to terrorist idiot.

    If we have learned anything from marketing: You have to match your message to the target group. Of course taking a muslim hate preacher to a white suburb won't work. It's hard to convince them that they are the scum of the earth.

    If you want to convert people there into terrorists, you need to tell them ACA is bad for them, that lazy immigrants are stealing their jobs, any president could create jobs or any other staple of the white supremacists idiots and they will be willing to bomb blacks/jews/muslims or at least vote Trump.

    Those "white" suburbs have the same vulnerabilities. You just have to trigger them slightly different.

  12. Re:Why the focus on communication tech? on London Terrorist Used WhatsApp, UK Calls For Backdoors (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    nice idea and sounds like a good compromise for everyday use, but requires the terrorists to play along and put one half of their keys into escrow

  13. Re:Geometry is hard, as is geography on Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Habit.

    Marine navigation was probably the first and most important use case for maps that were exact in one aspect. (for land navigation, rough sketches were as usefull as long as they contained landmarks)

    And when someone wanted an actual map for the first time, they went for the most important and best known map.

  14. For two feet, fly business class. But who needs this? They only can sell that at all because economy became so crappy.

    Just raise the standard again. By those two inces in width, by those two inches in legroom. Give everyone a decent sandwich.

    I'm NOT going to pay extra if an airline wants to divide pasengers further into the poor cattle and the "luxury" of "economy plus" where in the end they charge you $50 for that sandwich and a bag with a towel and a sleeping mask, but I'll pick an airline that offers better basic service if the difference is no more than say, $100.

  15. Re:Hey Buddy I need help to get out of the this ja on You Can Now Send, Request Money In Gmail On Android (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    I would assume that also in future bribes would be payed by a less traceable transaction method.

  16. Re:Brilliant! on You Can Now Send, Request Money In Gmail On Android (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    for example like....?

  17. So what's the problem? on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Solve the Instant Messaging Problem? · · Score: 1

    People desperately need a universal solution which is secure, decentralized, fault tolerant, not attached to your phone number, protects your privacy, supports video and audio chats and sending of files, works behind NATs and other firewalls and has the ability to send offline messages.

    So why don't they flock to XMPP then? Anything that there isn't a at least an extension for it?

  18. Wrong metric on Slashdot Asks: Are Password Rules Bullshit? (codinghorror.com) · · Score: 1

    Do we have to continue having this bullshit debate?

    "password" has an entropy of 28.7 bits and will be cracked more or less instantly

    entropy is the wrong metric here

    hsorgsrx has the same entropy (8 lower case letters), but won't be cracked BEFORE the actual brute force attack (where entropy matters) is launched. Your 10 year old kid would probably try typing "password" manually before even thinking of which automated tool to use....

  19. Re:In your face Betteridge! on Slashdot Asks: Are Password Rules Bullshit? (codinghorror.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Possible? Yes.

    Likely? No.

  20. No. For densly populated areas, adequate infrastructure would be better public transport. ("better" in terms of capacity, price and safety)

  21. Re:Bus downtime; housing cost gradient on Waze and Other Traffic Dodging Apps Prompt Cities To Game the Algorithms (usatoday.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it's selfish people who don't use mass transit

    If you live in a city that doesn't run its buses from 8:45 PM to 5:45 AM (source), and you're given hours at night, you need a car in order not to have to spend the majority of your paycheck on a taxi or lose your job. If you live in a city that doesn't run its buses on Sundays, and you're given hours on Sunday, you need a car in order not to have to spend the majority of your paycheck on a taxi or lose your job.

    And if you're paying for a car anway, you don't want to pay the same amount again for a month pass, even if your usual hours are not at night or on sunday.

  22. Easiest way to gain back control on Waze and Other Traffic Dodging Apps Prompt Cities To Game the Algorithms (usatoday.com) · · Score: 1

    Easiest way to get control back to the traffic planners would be to provide waze with highly dynamic information where traffic planners would like to send the cars to to minimize congestion. And if traffic planners would like them to be stuuck in a traffic jam they should look up their job description or for other jobs.

  23. Re:Good advice to apply in practice on Why Typography Matters -- Especially At The Oscars (freecodecamp.com) · · Score: 1

    The biggest part of the "human error" factor was that the PwC guy who was passed out the envelopes was spending his time on his smartphone, tweeting to his followers. That, more than anything else, led to the mistake.

    You can debate about fonts and typography all you want, but if the person who is responsible for handing out the correct envelope is too busy tweeting "OMG THE OSCARS ARE SO COOL! #iamcooltoo" to pay attention to his job, then mistakes are going to happen.

    Yes, but there are two different things going on here:

    The guy with the envelope screwing up. Yes, that would not have been avoided by any typography.

    But it would have been NOTICED that the guy just screwed up. THAT would have been the advantage of good typography. One more line of defense.

  24. Average sweetener consumption on New Scientific Test Finds Up To 75 Liters of Urine In Public Pools (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Whats the variation of this? I can't imagine sweetener consumption is so uniform that you can get to those 75l without a huge interval of uncertainity.

  25. Re:Interesting story on Software Engineer Detained At JFK, Given Test To Prove He's An Engineer (mashable.com) · · Score: 1

    but a non-programmer (such as a shoe or underwear bomber)

    A real programmer would have noticed that these are NOT mutually exclusive. Why can't a programmer be a shoe bomber?

    You're not a real programmer just because you know a few algorithms*. But that's how bugs happen. Forgetting to test for a 2nd condition after falsely asuming it would be implied by the first validity test and so on....

    * I probably couldn't do a search tree balancing on a whiteboard, but better programmers couldn't, too