In another similar anecdote, a lot of Europeans are extremely puzzled by the concept of an all-way stop intersection. Most also consider the idea badly thought out, since there's no clear rule of who goes first, which supposedly confuses people (and it does, when you're not familiar with it). In Europe (and Russia), you always yield to the right on an unregulated and unmarked intersection - and most intersections that are all-way stop in NA would be unregulated in Europe, so the rule gets exercised very often - again, unlike NA, where most intersections either explicitly identify who has to yield/stop, or you have an all-way stop.
When 4 cars arrive at the same time at a yield-right intersection, then it is effectively an all-way stop, so I don't see the problem. I'm not sure how american stop signs work but around here you always have to stop, even when there is no traffic. Yield-right is more efficient because you don't have to stop when there is no traffic. I suppose an all-way stop makes sense if you don't always have to stop.
Oh, the über-popular hardware meme. BS! Inform yourself, all ARM devices use DSPs for h264 and those can be programmed, you know.
What I've been told is that reprogramming the DSPs isn't trivial, because they're a lot less standardised than the actual CPU, not to mention manufacturers being pretty secretive about the instruction set etc. Not taking away from your main point, but it's important to keep in mind that it's not a slam dunk to get VP8 support on all these phones, though it might well be doable, and people are already doing it for theora, as I recall.
You can say the same the other way around too. Just like GP, you're cherry-picking the incidents that promote your world view. I'm sure there are plenty of protests in China that don't result in violence. As there are plenty of protests in the US that do.
There is of course a difference in what is and what is not acceptable political speech in China. Imagine a Chinese movement trying to organise a rally where they call for the chairman of the communist party to step down. In the US, protests calling for leaders to step down are pretty common, in China, not so much.
And yet there's still a lot of noise coming from the US and the US government about human rights violations in other countries. You don't see Chinese peopel or China making a lot of noise about US waterboarding. And then you have the gall to wonder why people abroad could ever possibly call Americans a bunch of nosy hypocrites.
I am as outraged as you are about the waterboarding, but if you yourself don't have a perfect track record, then that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to criticise other countries. They have just as much an obligation as you to protect human rights. There is also the matter of degree. Waterboarding was a, now abolished practice, that happened in one prison during a certain time. In China, people are still being tortured daily in prisons for any variety of reasons. There's a lot of comments in here comparing the US and China and seemingly not finding a lot of difference. That is just wrong and besides the point.
What is important here is that the US is a major economical power, that at least states it believes in human rights. We want them to speak out about human rights violations around the world. Even if their record isn't that squeaky clean. Or would you rather we all fall back into isolationism and nobody can say anything about anyone's business, on threat of war?
This is the first time Safari has failed me in something geeky like this. Safari is the only browser that render's my brother's URL properly. It's one of the unicode symbols, and Safari shows it that way. Safari shows (snowman).net correctly, but FireFox turns it into xn--n3h.net.
Arguably, firefox is doing it right by converting to the punycode and thus avoiding problems with similar looking character sets.
Yeah I felt real protected when at age 20 I was charged with underage drinking. I faced a mandatory suspension of my license (even though I wasn't within 2 miles of a car) a large fine, mandatory alcohol counselling courses (paid by me) and potential jail time. That charge is open to whomever wants to do a background check on me. I have to report it EVERY TIME UNTIL I DIE whenever my security clearance comes up for renewal (no limitations on alcohol charges/arrests there).
You tell me that it's for my own protection. It is so nice to know that the government is there to control me for my own good.
Well, the GP was talking about being under 18. I think that law is nonsensical ("old enough to kill, but not to drink") but then you were legally an adult at the time of your arrest, so you get none of the protection teenagers enjoy.
I think there's good reason for both limitations and protections for under-18s btw, or perhaps up till 16 year olds, as there's a pretty decent biological basis for stating they are different from adults (still not quite as chemically balanced) and so should be treated differently. The article seems to glance past that completely.
The GP rightly pointed out that the GGP was talking about the wrong thing. It's important to know what you are talking about in any online discussion, otherwise everyone is just going in circles based on flawed assumptions. In other words, he was right and not just in the very technical sense (since the GGP clearly didn't know the difference). Not only that, it's clear from his post that he disagrees with affirmative action. That you have a particular bee in your bonnet about it doesn't excuse you from basic politeness and the need for exercising some reading comprehension.
Last I read that thread, Mike was working really hard to only respond to the obvious trolls in the comments and just ignore any real technical discussion. I also get the distinct impression the linux "team" at adobe is basically him. That post is exactly what put me over the edge from wishy-washy on flash stuff to we-need-to-replace-this-shit-now. Adobe simply has no respect whatsoever for its linux users. Sure they provide a plugin that to this day allows developers to do a lot that is really hard to do natively (i.e. canvas2d+ javascript is often still slower, and there are other hurdles). But HTML5 video is the way to go, even though it means replacing the bad with the ugly (unlicensed h.264 on linux, basically the same situation as we have with dvds).
Having apparently pissed off both Apple and Google, I'm pretty sure they're on the way out when it comes to video anyway.
My bet is there is a simple explanation...namely that scientists outside of computer science are too busy in their respective fields to know anything about code, or even care. The egocentric Slashdot-worldview strikes at the heart of logic yet again.
I think it's worse than that. With some of the focus these days being on doing science in public-private partnerships (because the public money simply isn't there anymore) and generating spinoffs from ongoing research, the actual software often gets labeled "Intellectual Property". You can see where I'm going with this. Suddenly software is an asset, not to be shared openly with the rest of the world. Luckily this is a mindset the actual researchers almost never share and as a result plenty of software is out there in an open source form. In my field (bioinformatics) having freely available software out there is the norm rather than the exception, but that certainly doesn't apply to all research areas everywhere. In any field however I don't think you could get away with publishing results that nobody can verify (by rolling their own) because the basic algorithm is secret. "Trust me" doesn't quite cut it, unless you're publishing in Cranks R Us.
You do come across the occasional result in a paper that is just not well documented enough to reproduce, even if you were to write all the software yourself. Any scientist would agree that this is just plain bad science (though you shouldn't assume it was done intentionally, often isn't). In a decent journal, the review process should catch that, which I think will increasingly be implemented in the future as people are more aware of the issue.
2) CRU was trolled by FOIA requests. They are nuisance to deal with, as far as I was told.
Then hire someone to handle them for you, or have grad students do it.
Grad students? Not a good idea if you don't want to get sued. And hiring someone to handle them for you, yeah, because scientists are really raking in the cash, right?
It's not that I don't think you're right about the basic point but I don't think you thought through this particular comeback very well.
Women are playing more and more video games (flash games count, btw). When I started gaming it was still something that was often for the more geeky/technologically savvy people. On top of that, most of these games are built by tech companies who hire mostly men. So I'd say it really is just the same issue. Now that games are more mainstream, you see more women playing them, but they still suffer from some socially instilled inequalities. The following is just anecdote, not data, but observing women around me I've usually found them to be afraid of being too competitive. A competitive woman puts men off which means they come off as asocial to both men and their own peers. So there is a certain class of games (the hardcore ones) that I think they are just less likely to play precisely because of such impressions.
Added to that though it isn't just that. Many men seem to suffer from the same prejudice that women do, namely that they are bad at tech. You might think this doesn't change things in the tech industry but there's plenty of techies who'll howl twice as hard when a female coworker commits a showstopping bug to the mainline than when a man does.
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
You've not worked in the tech sector very long if you haven't met any men who seem to think women are inferior at science/maths/technology. Prejudice still exists and it's certainly not as pure a meritocracy as you seem to think. Furthermore, how many people (women) don't even try because they've been told (implicitly or explicitly) throughout their lives that they're not good enough? Perhaps you are right that eventually the imbalance will even itself out, but how many generations will that take if we don't signal to young girls and women that there is no reason a woman can't go into technology?
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
Slashdot is 1) full of trolls and kids who don't know any better and 2) not nearly as liberal as you seem to think it is. Read any story on outsourcing.
BTW he is one of the most successful, post WW 2, Italian leaders.
Successful at what ?
You don't evaluate success by the number of underage bimbos you screw, sneak into your government or by the number of trials you weasel your way out of while claiming it's all the fault of the "red judges" and the "communist press" (aka. newspapers he doesn't own).
Italy is going down the drain at such a speed that it's dizzying to watch.
Succesfull politically, i.e. at getting votes, which is the only metric that matters for a politician. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how lousy Berlusconi is at his job because apparently the (largely xenophobic) Italian populace doesn't really care.
And the fact is, nobody is preventing anyone from buying a Kindle. Three universities have stopped promoting it as an alternative to regular books (which, by law, must come in braille editions) If Amazon wants universities to promote its use, they can damn well write the ten lines of code it's going to take to make it read its user interface out loud.
0.3% of the population (~1 million blind vs 300 million Americans) forces the other 99.7%
Your town has been selected for nuclear testing. Total town population is less than 1% of global population. You have 2 days to pack your stuff and leave.
Remember that next time you want to use statistics against some minority. You are less than 0.001% of global population. Statistically you are not important.
What do you think just about every major nuclear power did when they wanted to test their nuclear weaponry?
I think the subtle assumption is there. It's reinforced by the fact that a lot of *identifiable* chick gamers are attention whores. By which I mean: if they are willing to participate in voice chat and be identified as female, they probably want people to pay a lot of attention to them.
By your logic, any female who is identifiable as a girl gamer (comes on voice chat and actually talks OMG) is an attention whore. That's weak sauce even for the logic you usually see on/.
I think the objective was try to make the real beneficiary of open source applications in this case - the government agency - contribute. I'm pretty sure he must know how to contribute himself to the open source programs he uses at home, if any.
Do it during work hours then (after clearing it with your boss). Problem solved.:-)
Given that customs officers are trained to get a vibe off people (by asking questions about your stay etc- they don't give a rat's ass what you say, it's HOW you say it.) Given out righteous some slashdotters get, I can imagine them giving a customs agent a real bad vibe. Just look at any of the threads about laptop confiscations (I agree, those are very evil and I feel they should be illegal.) There's some serious hatred here for customs folks.
This amounts to the "she was asking for it wearing that dress" argument. We agree that one is specious, why don't we take into consideration is equally BS.
It's a strange situation you get into. I mean, if I were to walk into a store and ask the clerk for cocaine is the store manager obligated by law to call the authorities? I'm not sure, but I think searching Google could be along the same lines. You are walking into their lobby and asking for solicitation of illegal activities.
Your analogy is somewhat shaky. It's more along the lines of you walking into a store and asking for cocaine, then a cop coming round the next day saying "I'm conducting an investigation into this guy . He was in here last night, what did he want?". I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that lying or refusing to tell him could be prosecuted as obstruction of justice.
What happens when they decide to change their policy? Or, simply (gasp!) violate their policy? Is there any sort of enforcement of published company policies? Nope. Maybe a small loss of some sort of credibility. Maybe. So I don't see any legal ramifications at all.
This might differ by venue, but consumer protection laws around here would definitely apply.
PR ramifications? Well, maybe. If the major media decided to run with a story there might be some fallout. But far more likely is one stockholder attending the annual meeting gets up and yells about it - and is immediately ejected from the room.
That's a good point. Of course I could take the easy way out and say they were found out, so my point stands, but that's a bit too easy. In truth, it is simply improbable that this data will be misused, and that if it were we would not know within a reasonable timespan (so not 50 years into the future). It's even more improbable that Google would risk tarnishing their own image for data they could simply gather anyway, had they put in a different TOS. They do this for gmail and it's still a popular service, so why not do it for their DNS service?
Slashdot Mirror
Binary sort:
return a < b ? [a b] : [b a];
What?
In another similar anecdote, a lot of Europeans are extremely puzzled by the concept of an all-way stop intersection. Most also consider the idea badly thought out, since there's no clear rule of who goes first, which supposedly confuses people (and it does, when you're not familiar with it). In Europe (and Russia), you always yield to the right on an unregulated and unmarked intersection - and most intersections that are all-way stop in NA would be unregulated in Europe, so the rule gets exercised very often - again, unlike NA, where most intersections either explicitly identify who has to yield/stop, or you have an all-way stop.
When 4 cars arrive at the same time at a yield-right intersection, then it is effectively an all-way stop, so I don't see the problem. I'm not sure how american stop signs work but around here you always have to stop, even when there is no traffic. Yield-right is more efficient because you don't have to stop when there is no traffic. I suppose an all-way stop makes sense if you don't always have to stop.
Oh I see, you were both playing GTA.
Oh, the über-popular hardware meme. BS! Inform yourself, all ARM devices use DSPs for h264 and those can be programmed, you know.
What I've been told is that reprogramming the DSPs isn't trivial, because they're a lot less standardised than the actual CPU, not to mention manufacturers being pretty secretive about the instruction set etc. Not taking away from your main point, but it's important to keep in mind that it's not a slam dunk to get VP8 support on all these phones, though it might well be doable, and people are already doing it for theora, as I recall.
You can say the same the other way around too. Just like GP, you're cherry-picking the incidents that promote your world view. I'm sure there are plenty of protests in China that don't result in violence. As there are plenty of protests in the US that do.
There is of course a difference in what is and what is not acceptable political speech in China. Imagine a Chinese movement trying to organise a rally where they call for the chairman of the communist party to step down. In the US, protests calling for leaders to step down are pretty common, in China, not so much.
And yet there's still a lot of noise coming from the US and the US government about human rights violations in other countries. You don't see Chinese peopel or China making a lot of noise about US waterboarding. And then you have the gall to wonder why people abroad could ever possibly call Americans a bunch of nosy hypocrites.
I am as outraged as you are about the waterboarding, but if you yourself don't have a perfect track record, then that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to criticise other countries. They have just as much an obligation as you to protect human rights. There is also the matter of degree. Waterboarding was a, now abolished practice, that happened in one prison during a certain time. In China, people are still being tortured daily in prisons for any variety of reasons. There's a lot of comments in here comparing the US and China and seemingly not finding a lot of difference. That is just wrong and besides the point.
What is important here is that the US is a major economical power, that at least states it believes in human rights. We want them to speak out about human rights violations around the world. Even if their record isn't that squeaky clean. Or would you rather we all fall back into isolationism and nobody can say anything about anyone's business, on threat of war?
He was talking about ripping and tagging, specifically in the context of video.
This is the first time Safari has failed me in something geeky like this. Safari is the only browser that render's my brother's URL properly. It's one of the unicode symbols, and Safari shows it that way. Safari shows (snowman).net correctly, but FireFox turns it into xn--n3h.net.
Arguably, firefox is doing it right by converting to the punycode and thus avoiding problems with similar looking character sets.
I would have modded it insightful. He makes a great point through parody. Perhaps slashdotters are not as stupid as you think?
Yeah I felt real protected when at age 20 I was charged with underage drinking. I faced a mandatory suspension of my license (even though I wasn't within 2 miles of a car) a large fine, mandatory alcohol counselling courses (paid by me) and potential jail time. That charge is open to whomever wants to do a background check on me. I have to report it EVERY TIME UNTIL I DIE whenever my security clearance comes up for renewal (no limitations on alcohol charges/arrests there).
You tell me that it's for my own protection. It is so nice to know that the government is there to control me for my own good.
Well, the GP was talking about being under 18. I think that law is nonsensical ("old enough to kill, but not to drink") but then you were legally an adult at the time of your arrest, so you get none of the protection teenagers enjoy.
I think there's good reason for both limitations and protections for under-18s btw, or perhaps up till 16 year olds, as there's a pretty decent biological basis for stating they are different from adults (still not quite as chemically balanced) and so should be treated differently. The article seems to glance past that completely.
The GP rightly pointed out that the GGP was talking about the wrong thing. It's important to know what you are talking about in any online discussion, otherwise everyone is just going in circles based on flawed assumptions. In other words, he was right and not just in the very technical sense (since the GGP clearly didn't know the difference). Not only that, it's clear from his post that he disagrees with affirmative action. That you have a particular bee in your bonnet about it doesn't excuse you from basic politeness and the need for exercising some reading comprehension.
Last I read that thread, Mike was working really hard to only respond to the obvious trolls in the comments and just ignore any real technical discussion. I also get the distinct impression the linux "team" at adobe is basically him. That post is exactly what put me over the edge from wishy-washy on flash stuff to we-need-to-replace-this-shit-now. Adobe simply has no respect whatsoever for its linux users. Sure they provide a plugin that to this day allows developers to do a lot that is really hard to do natively (i.e. canvas2d+ javascript is often still slower, and there are other hurdles). But HTML5 video is the way to go, even though it means replacing the bad with the ugly (unlicensed h.264 on linux, basically the same situation as we have with dvds).
Having apparently pissed off both Apple and Google, I'm pretty sure they're on the way out when it comes to video anyway.
My bet is there is a simple explanation...namely that scientists outside of computer science are too busy in their respective fields to know anything about code, or even care. The egocentric Slashdot-worldview strikes at the heart of logic yet again.
I think it's worse than that. With some of the focus these days being on doing science in public-private partnerships (because the public money simply isn't there anymore) and generating spinoffs from ongoing research, the actual software often gets labeled "Intellectual Property". You can see where I'm going with this. Suddenly software is an asset, not to be shared openly with the rest of the world. Luckily this is a mindset the actual researchers almost never share and as a result plenty of software is out there in an open source form. In my field (bioinformatics) having freely available software out there is the norm rather than the exception, but that certainly doesn't apply to all research areas everywhere. In any field however I don't think you could get away with publishing results that nobody can verify (by rolling their own) because the basic algorithm is secret. "Trust me" doesn't quite cut it, unless you're publishing in Cranks R Us.
You do come across the occasional result in a paper that is just not well documented enough to reproduce, even if you were to write all the software yourself. Any scientist would agree that this is just plain bad science (though you shouldn't assume it was done intentionally, often isn't). In a decent journal, the review process should catch that, which I think will increasingly be implemented in the future as people are more aware of the issue.
2) CRU was trolled by FOIA requests. They are nuisance to deal with, as far as I was told.
Then hire someone to handle them for you, or have grad students do it.
Grad students? Not a good idea if you don't want to get sued. And hiring someone to handle them for you, yeah, because scientists are really raking in the cash, right?
It's not that I don't think you're right about the basic point but I don't think you thought through this particular comeback very well.
Women are playing more and more video games (flash games count, btw). When I started gaming it was still something that was often for the more geeky/technologically savvy people. On top of that, most of these games are built by tech companies who hire mostly men. So I'd say it really is just the same issue. Now that games are more mainstream, you see more women playing them, but they still suffer from some socially instilled inequalities. The following is just anecdote, not data, but observing women around me I've usually found them to be afraid of being too competitive. A competitive woman puts men off which means they come off as asocial to both men and their own peers. So there is a certain class of games (the hardcore ones) that I think they are just less likely to play precisely because of such impressions.
Added to that though it isn't just that. Many men seem to suffer from the same prejudice that women do, namely that they are bad at tech. You might think this doesn't change things in the tech industry but there's plenty of techies who'll howl twice as hard when a female coworker commits a showstopping bug to the mainline than when a man does.
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. People who get put in positions that they don't deserve, just because of their skin color or their gender might hold the title, but won't hold the respect or the credibility.
You've not worked in the tech sector very long if you haven't met any men who seem to think women are inferior at science/maths/technology. Prejudice still exists and it's certainly not as pure a meritocracy as you seem to think. Furthermore, how many people (women) don't even try because they've been told (implicitly or explicitly) throughout their lives that they're not good enough? Perhaps you are right that eventually the imbalance will even itself out, but how many generations will that take if we don't signal to young girls and women that there is no reason a woman can't go into technology?
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
Slashdot is 1) full of trolls and kids who don't know any better and 2) not nearly as liberal as you seem to think it is. Read any story on outsourcing.
BTW he is one of the most successful, post WW 2, Italian leaders.
Successful at what ?
You don't evaluate success by the number of underage bimbos you screw, sneak into your government or by the number of trials you weasel your way out of while claiming it's all the fault of the "red judges" and the "communist press" (aka. newspapers he doesn't own).
Italy is going down the drain at such a speed that it's dizzying to watch.
Succesfull politically, i.e. at getting votes, which is the only metric that matters for a politician. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how lousy Berlusconi is at his job because apparently the (largely xenophobic) Italian populace doesn't really care.
And the fact is, nobody is preventing anyone from buying a Kindle. Three universities have stopped promoting it as an alternative to regular books (which, by law, must come in braille editions) If Amazon wants universities to promote its use, they can damn well write the ten lines of code it's going to take to make it read its user interface out loud.
Kindle books still come in braille editions.
Jesus fucking wept.
Indeed.
Your town has been selected for nuclear testing. Total town population is less than 1% of global population. You have 2 days to pack your stuff and leave.
Remember that next time you want to use statistics against some minority. You are less than 0.001% of global population. Statistically you are not important.
What do you think just about every major nuclear power did when they wanted to test their nuclear weaponry?
Great analogy, really.
I think the subtle assumption is there. It's reinforced by the fact that a lot of *identifiable* chick gamers are attention whores. By which I mean: if they are willing to participate in voice chat and be identified as female, they probably want people to pay a lot of attention to them.
By your logic, any female who is identifiable as a girl gamer (comes on voice chat and actually talks OMG) is an attention whore. That's weak sauce even for the logic you usually see on /.
I think the objective was try to make the real beneficiary of open source applications in this case - the government agency - contribute. I'm pretty sure he must know how to contribute himself to the open source programs he uses at home, if any.
Do it during work hours then (after clearing it with your boss). Problem solved. :-)
Given that customs officers are trained to get a vibe off people (by asking questions about your stay etc- they don't give a rat's ass what you say, it's HOW you say it.) Given out righteous some slashdotters get, I can imagine them giving a customs agent a real bad vibe. Just look at any of the threads about laptop confiscations (I agree, those are very evil and I feel they should be illegal.) There's some serious hatred here for customs folks.
This amounts to the "she was asking for it wearing that dress" argument. We agree that one is specious, why don't we take into consideration is equally BS.
It's a strange situation you get into. I mean, if I were to walk into a store and ask the clerk for cocaine is the store manager obligated by law to call the authorities? I'm not sure, but I think searching Google could be along the same lines. You are walking into their lobby and asking for solicitation of illegal activities.
Your analogy is somewhat shaky. It's more along the lines of you walking into a store and asking for cocaine, then a cop coming round the next day saying "I'm conducting an investigation into this guy . He was in here last night, what did he want?". I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that lying or refusing to tell him could be prosecuted as obstruction of justice.
What happens when they decide to change their policy? Or, simply (gasp!) violate their policy? Is there any sort of enforcement of published company policies? Nope. Maybe a small loss of some sort of credibility. Maybe. So I don't see any legal ramifications at all.
This might differ by venue, but consumer protection laws around here would definitely apply.
PR ramifications? Well, maybe. If the major media decided to run with a story there might be some fallout. But far more likely is one stockholder attending the annual meeting gets up and yells about it - and is immediately ejected from the room.
Yeah slashdot wouldn't be all over it, I'm sure.
That's a good point. Of course I could take the easy way out and say they were found out, so my point stands, but that's a bit too easy. In truth, it is simply improbable that this data will be misused, and that if it were we would not know within a reasonable timespan (so not 50 years into the future). It's even more improbable that Google would risk tarnishing their own image for data they could simply gather anyway, had they put in a different TOS. They do this for gmail and it's still a popular service, so why not do it for their DNS service?