Not to be offensive, but you didn't try cutting the cord, your wife tried it, didn't like it, and directed you to fix it. Manager, tech support; her, you.
1) i generally do not make a separate trip to the store, it is on the way to or from something else (usually work). So the environmental impact of my "shopping trip" is more minimal. 2) $10 for the service is a non-starter. Spending >$50 on groceries is rare for me (I'm single). This amounts to a 20%+ markup. Also, I expect in the US there will be a tip expected eventually. 3) Substitution is also a non-starter. I generally would pick the store brand for stuff where that was acceptable. Where isn't not, i would prefer nothing to the store brand, and reducing the purchase order pushes up the effective markup %. Never wait till your out of TP to buy more. 4) Produce purchases (particularly bananas) are dependent on the quality of the produce - requires inspection to ascertain.
but demanded it back after 3 months. It was annoying, and i have real questions about the usefulness in predicting accident rates. It went off when i would back out of the driveway sometimes. My driveway is a bit steep, and if i had to stop while backing out the braking force would trip the device. It would go off sometimes for no reason i could figure.
Before i had the device, i was a pretty enthusiastic supporter of black boxes. This has dimmed my hopes substantially.:-(
I had a similar experience with a Mustang. Ran very well (and efficiently) at 2000 RPM, which was just under 80mph in 5th gear. Tended to lug a bit at lower speeds. I suspect a lot of sports cars have this, as the engine's most efficient speed * gear ratio determines most efficient road speed, and that math comes out well above 55 for cars with powerful engines.
I have had a liver/kidney transplant. The MELD scoring process determines who get the next liver available. Blood type is considered, transplants match blood type, even though this is not strictly technically necessary, because otherwise, type O (universal donor, anyone can use type O) patients would be on longer lists then other blood types - it's a fairness problem. MELD score considers various blood test score indicators for how sick you are. The sicker you are, the higher score you get, and thus higher on the "list". Other factors will be considered, to adjust for "sick" that doesn't show up in the blood tests. Early stage liver cancer will usually move someone up on the transplant list.
Caveats: 1) you have to be well enough to survive the operation, and well enough to have good prospects for reasonable survival beyond the surgery. You'll inactive until you recover sufficiently.
2) you have to have NOT demonstrated mental instability (not attributable to liver disease) that would cause you to be unable to maintain the post-transplant drug regimen - this will get you off the list until such issues are resolved. Attitude, doctor shopping, and any behavior that makes the transplant team unhappy can qualify. Follow your doctors instructions! Note that liver disease does commonly cause mental issues in it's end-stages, so the assumption is that your ok, till you demonstrate otherwise.
3) Cancer: you can have a limited amount of cancer of the liver (since they will replace the liver anyhow). There are specific criteria about how many lesions and how big they can be. Too little gives you a smaller MELD score (and you have to wait till they get bigger). Too much, and your off the list. Other cancers will generally put you off the list entirely, as the immuno-suppressant regimen will cause the cancers to take off like wildfire, resulting in a shorter overall lifespan. In support groups for transplant-list patients, announcing you have been diagnosed with liver cancer can lead to minor celebrations, which is a bit weird, but makes sense given how the system works.
4) Infections must be eliminated, again, because the immuno-suppressant regimen will cause them to take off. Off the list till eliminated.
5) Recreational drugs and alcohol. None. Top 2 causes of liver failure are cirrhosis and hepatitis - primarily brought on from drinking and intravenous drugs. They do blood tests for metabolites monthly, or more often, to ensure that you're behaving. No point in a new organ if you haven't eliminated the habit that destroyed the old organ. Plus, people generally look at that as unfair (see Mickey Mantle, one of the drivers for the MELD reform).
Infrastructure is real, and often controlled by software. You can do insidious, and potentially deadly things with software, from shutting down critical machines, to altering medical records (knee surgery changes from "fixed ligiment" to "amputate"). If you live as a web developer, you may have problems seeing how taking down/defacing websites could be serious. But software does a lot more than that. Critical failures or changes to databases can have life changing impacts for individuals, companies (lots of individual livelyhoods), and cause actual deaths.
So, yeah, hackers should be subject to retaliation, not just in kind. If you manage to kill someone with a computer, you should expect someone's friends/relatives/government to come looking for you, probably willing to do violence to achieve justice. And they shouldn't have to duel you with the weapon of your choice to get justice.
Berkley, aka The Peoples Repulic of Berkley, aka Bezerkly has only kilokooks, so the math really doesn't work until you get to say, $1,000,000/kilokook, or 1 quadrilion dollers per gigakook.
Maybe not meant that way. We've had 2 stoplights installed on a major divided hwy near my house, both driven by the accidents with fatalities at intersections on the hwy (it's not a freeway with limited access). Some people say "it cost us x lives to get that stoplight". Personally, i think they should have just blocked left hand turns onto the highway instead, but no one listens to me.:-(
On the other hand, it would help to identify infected computers and train users to pay more attention to what their computer is doing, and how to avoid the pain of getting a bill voided by avoiding infections and behaviors that lead to infections.
Its ultimately true that if people don't bear any cost for their irresponsibility, you can expect them to continue to be irresponsible. You own a computer, you gotta be responsible for it - or pay someone else to do it for you.
US: ~28,500 SK: ~639,000 active duty
~2,900,000 reserves
~300,000 paramilitary (possibly partially overlapping with reserves) NK: ~1,106,000 active duty
~8,200,000 reserves
So, the US has 1/30 of SK, roughly, and 1/60 of NK, not counting reserves.
The US presence is more a physical manifestation of a guarentee that the US will assist SK in event of war than a serious threat. Its along the lines of the US presence in Europe during the Cold War - not nearly enough to stop a Soviet assult, just there to reassure the people there that the United States was serious about assisting with European defense. The real plan, in both cases, is that the troops in place will delay the advance of invading forces till reinforcements can arrive.
I have a goal of owning my own house, since my mom doesn't own hers, and doesn't have a basement. Open source, open toed sandals, and a long beard seem unlikely to move me meaningfully toward this goal.
Additionally, I have 2 sick brothers - my mom will eventually wind up relying on me. So I pay my own bills or they don't get paid. Dad and 4 grandparents are dead already, leaving nothing. Mom is essentially broke, 2 brothers are both broke and on disability. Some of us have responsibilities and f*ing around with giving away our time for free will not meet those responsibilities. Unless you can get everyone else to work for free too, in which case i'm becoming a full-time gamer.
2.5MT, less than Tunguska, numerous volcanos, etc. Really, would need to hit some population to get attention, and most of the planet is not populated by humans because of excessive standing water.
Thanks, appreciate a serious response. Lots of "unfair, unfair" without meaningful suggestions, except for the guys suggesting that taking advantage of other people really is other people's problem.
Seriously, what do you propose as a penalty, or do you propose no penalty?
At some point, when dealing with a group of people on legal issues, you have to have some comprimise. There are amongst us, people who think selling coffee that is "too hot" is criminally negligent. There are others that assume that hot coffee is hot and the buyer is responsible for taking appropriate care after the sale. The law is going to have to establish a common understanding, so that everyone knows what the rules are, even if they don't agree with them.
Taking this to the computer world, there are people that feel they should be able to use their computer, in peace, without having other using it, scaring them into doing stupid things, etc. And people who think anything online is theirs if they can take it or trick someone into giving them access. Are you taking the position that you must understand every way someone can be tricked into doing things in order to use a computer? This seems to be a pretty high bar.
I personally prefer a more "tricking people is bad" whether it involves dodgy product labeling (as by MS in another article on Slashdot), or by jackasses trying to get women to take off their clothes. In this case, I'm thinking something along the lines of 1 month per violation (given that the extent of the damage is embarassment).
I'd like to hear specific ideas from people - either "what he did should be legal" or "what he did should merit punishment along these lines". People saying they are outraged without making specific suggestions aren't really helping.
Further, if MURDER is the standard (you can't do worse than murder, right?) it severely limits what you can do with financial mismanagement, et.al. After all, surely Bernie Madoff isn't WORSE THAN A MURDERER. And if we're talking ruined lives, how do you judge ruined?
My first day on the job in a very brief career as a firefighter, we responded to a vehicle fire. I backed up the engineer on the hose. The engineer pointed out the magnesium shifter in the cab of the truck - it was throwing sparks as if we were applying a grinder to it rather than 100gpm. Because it was small we could disapate enough heat to put out the fire, but it was kinda cool. We got more of an explanation back at the station.
Although prohibition came first, prohibition was strongly linked to femist movements. Even though women couldn't vote, they were leading the charge to outlaw alcohol, believing it to be a heavy contributing factor to a women's misery overall.
Further, though the 19th amendment gave women the vote nationally, women already had the vote in a number of states.
There is a strong tendency outside the US to assume that states are like provinces, or countys in other countries. My impression of non-american opinion is that the federal government can just do anything it wants, which is far from the rule. Fed definitely runs international relationships (trade, war, alliances, etc), so to any non-american they are going to be the face of the country. But most of the laws for everyday life are state. If you murder someone, 95 times out of 100, there is going to be a state looking for you, not the federal government. You will likely wind up in a state prison, or executed by the state government (if applicable). The feds only become involve under certain circumstances, and most often only provide assistance. Again, the cases you are likely to hear about are the most henious and unusual ones, which is where the fed is most likely to get involved.
There is an idiom in the US: "Don't make a federal case out of it" meaning roughly, don't make this into a big deal.
The better comparison is between the EU and the US government (from a European perspective) with differences - there are national direct elections, national debates, etc. States have pretty wide discretion to go off and do their own things. This is a fundamental debate in the US: should states have more or less rights to do what they want? We had a war over slavery that could have been avoided by guarenteeing the right states to have legal slavery, but that was unacceptable to the northern majority. We have national laws against possessing marajuana, but state laws legalizing the same. The state/national who-makes-the-rules debate crops up all the time here, and there isn't a consistent left/right consensus on it - generally, either side is willing to impose their rules nationally if they can, or by state, if they can.
The Telegraph is a British paper, where Chinese are not Asian, they are Chinese. "Asian" there means Indian, Pakistani, Persian, etc, all the way to apparently include Turkish people. Turkey is asia minor on some maps, and whether is is Europe or Asia or both or neither is disputed by argumentative geographers.
In the US, Asian means generally people from Asia, but usually Indians are called out as specifically Indian (and Sikhs as Sikhs, Pakistanis as Pakistani, Iranians as Iranian and rarely as Persian, etc.) Awkward for some, because American Indians still mostly refer to themselves as Indian as well (I have Navaho cousins living on the rez, don't start with me - Native American is a polictically correct invention that does not have mainstream acceptance amongst actual Indians, who often regard their New Age-y admirers with contempt. For the brits out there, calling them "Red Indians" or such is likely to be met with amusement initially, then with rising disgust if you keep it up).
The vast bulk of serial killers who have been caught have been white. Charles Ng jumps out as an exception, but he was working with a white guy. There are methodological problems with jumping to the conclusion that most serial killers are white however:
1) does not consider police focus on catching perps victimizing white people 2) does not consider some sub-culture resistance to involving police in their issues/reporting crimes 3) does not consider surviability of youth with mental problems into adulthood (remember we are talking a very small population, a few individuals one way or the other would drastically change rates) 4) does not consider variability in instititionalization rates for severely mentally ill (e.g. black would-be serial killers put into the criminal justice system on flimsier charges earlier in a budding career, before being able to do much damage, for example, or white patient getting outpatient treatment and earlier where a minority patient gets committed and stuck in the system)
I wouldn't claim all of these factors make the case for "white people are more likely to be serial killers" more or less valid, just that it is not a particularly well justified conclusion given the unmanaged variables in the available data.
The alternate hypothosis "most serial killers are white" has population issues, of course - in the US, 65-80% of US pop is white (depending on how you count hispanic, mixed race, and "other") you would expect that, given similar rates, white people would be most of anything. ----------------------- On the larger question, I think you should expect villians to be spread across the spectrum of the manufacturing culture. When its always the black guy that did it, that's a problem. When there is always a "good minority" to make sure the audience doesn't think the producer is discriminating, that is a problem too.
I don't think i've seen anything out of Hollywood that had "bad muslims" without making sure to have at least one or two "good muslims" to offset them. The fact that you have to produce a best friend that is if you are going to have a villian of is a problem, in my opinion. You don't have to do that for white sub-cultures, you shouldn't have to for other cultures either (sub or not).
Thinking further, would you have a case if insurers amalgamated data and determined that Browns where x% more or less likely to have some condition? in other words, you can't discriminate on the basis of genetic testing, but could you technically work out a system to bias rates based on surname, and if so, what would be it's legal position?
Yes, already at +5 insightful, but this is the number one thing coders need to understand. You are getting paid to produce stuff people other than you want. Satisfying yourself is #6 on the list.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be offensive, but you didn't try cutting the cord, your wife tried it, didn't like it, and directed you to fix it. Manager, tech support; her, you.
Look at Adobe. Their Flash code base 'got the job done'.
and people used it for years. We can complain, but they beat competitors by getting there first (rather than pretty under the hood).
1) i generally do not make a separate trip to the store, it is on the way to or from something else (usually work). So the environmental impact of my "shopping trip" is more minimal.
2) $10 for the service is a non-starter. Spending >$50 on groceries is rare for me (I'm single). This amounts to a 20%+ markup. Also, I expect in the US there will be a tip expected eventually.
3) Substitution is also a non-starter. I generally would pick the store brand for stuff where that was acceptable. Where isn't not, i would prefer nothing to the store brand, and reducing the purchase order pushes up the effective markup %. Never wait till your out of TP to buy more.
4) Produce purchases (particularly bananas) are dependent on the quality of the produce - requires inspection to ascertain.
but demanded it back after 3 months. It was annoying, and i have real questions about the usefulness in predicting accident rates. It went off when i would back out of the driveway sometimes. My driveway is a bit steep, and if i had to stop while backing out the braking force would trip the device. It would go off sometimes for no reason i could figure.
Before i had the device, i was a pretty enthusiastic supporter of black boxes. This has dimmed my hopes substantially. :-(
I had a similar experience with a Mustang. Ran very well (and efficiently) at 2000 RPM, which was just under 80mph in 5th gear. Tended to lug a bit at lower speeds. I suspect a lot of sports cars have this, as the engine's most efficient speed * gear ratio determines most efficient road speed, and that math comes out well above 55 for cars with powerful engines.
I have had a liver/kidney transplant. The MELD scoring process determines who get the next liver available. Blood type is considered, transplants match blood type, even though this is not strictly technically necessary, because otherwise, type O (universal donor, anyone can use type O) patients would be on longer lists then other blood types - it's a fairness problem. MELD score considers various blood test score indicators for how sick you are. The sicker you are, the higher score you get, and thus higher on the "list". Other factors will be considered, to adjust for "sick" that doesn't show up in the blood tests. Early stage liver cancer will usually move someone up on the transplant list.
Caveats:
1) you have to be well enough to survive the operation, and well enough to have good prospects for reasonable survival beyond the surgery. You'll inactive until you recover sufficiently.
2) you have to have NOT demonstrated mental instability (not attributable to liver disease) that would cause you to be unable to maintain the post-transplant drug regimen - this will get you off the list until such issues are resolved. Attitude, doctor shopping, and any behavior that makes the transplant team unhappy can qualify. Follow your doctors instructions! Note that liver disease does commonly cause mental issues in it's end-stages, so the assumption is that your ok, till you demonstrate otherwise.
3) Cancer: you can have a limited amount of cancer of the liver (since they will replace the liver anyhow). There are specific criteria about how many lesions and how big they can be. Too little gives you a smaller MELD score (and you have to wait till they get bigger). Too much, and your off the list. Other cancers will generally put you off the list entirely, as the immuno-suppressant regimen will cause the cancers to take off like wildfire, resulting in a shorter overall lifespan. In support groups for transplant-list patients, announcing you have been diagnosed with liver cancer can lead to minor celebrations, which is a bit weird, but makes sense given how the system works.
4) Infections must be eliminated, again, because the immuno-suppressant regimen will cause them to take off. Off the list till eliminated.
5) Recreational drugs and alcohol. None. Top 2 causes of liver failure are cirrhosis and hepatitis - primarily brought on from drinking and intravenous drugs. They do blood tests for metabolites monthly, or more often, to ensure that you're behaving. No point in a new organ if you haven't eliminated the habit that destroyed the old organ. Plus, people generally look at that as unfair (see Mickey Mantle, one of the drivers for the MELD reform).
Infrastructure is real, and often controlled by software. You can do insidious, and potentially deadly things with software, from shutting down critical machines, to altering medical records (knee surgery changes from "fixed ligiment" to "amputate"). If you live as a web developer, you may have problems seeing how taking down/defacing websites could be serious. But software does a lot more than that. Critical failures or changes to databases can have life changing impacts for individuals, companies (lots of individual livelyhoods), and cause actual deaths.
So, yeah, hackers should be subject to retaliation, not just in kind. If you manage to kill someone with a computer, you should expect someone's friends/relatives/government to come looking for you, probably willing to do violence to achieve justice. And they shouldn't have to duel you with the weapon of your choice to get justice.
Berkley, aka The Peoples Repulic of Berkley, aka Bezerkly has only kilokooks, so the math really doesn't work until you get to say, $1,000,000/kilokook, or 1 quadrilion dollers per gigakook.
Maybe not meant that way. We've had 2 stoplights installed on a major divided hwy near my house, both driven by the accidents with fatalities at intersections on the hwy (it's not a freeway with limited access). Some people say "it cost us x lives to get that stoplight". Personally, i think they should have just blocked left hand turns onto the highway instead, but no one listens to me. :-(
On the other hand, it would help to identify infected computers and train users to pay more attention to what their computer is doing, and how to avoid the pain of getting a bill voided by avoiding infections and behaviors that lead to infections.
Its ultimately true that if people don't bear any cost for their irresponsibility, you can expect them to continue to be irresponsible. You own a computer, you gotta be responsible for it - or pay someone else to do it for you.
US: ~28,500
SK: ~639,000 active duty
~2,900,000 reserves
~300,000 paramilitary (possibly partially overlapping with reserves)
NK: ~1,106,000 active duty
~8,200,000 reserves
So, the US has 1/30 of SK, roughly, and 1/60 of NK, not counting reserves.
The US presence is more a physical manifestation of a guarentee that the US will assist SK in event of war than a serious threat. Its along the lines of the US presence in Europe during the Cold War - not nearly enough to stop a Soviet assult, just there to reassure the people there that the United States was serious about assisting with European defense. The real plan, in both cases, is that the troops in place will delay the advance of invading forces till reinforcements can arrive.
Data summarized from multiple Wikipedia articles.
didn't see the movie, but in the book, they won.
Who in their right mind would install a chinese OS on their device, unless it was Open Source. And i'd still be nervous even then.
I have a goal of owning my own house, since my mom doesn't own hers, and doesn't have a basement. Open source, open toed sandals, and a long beard seem unlikely to move me meaningfully toward this goal.
Additionally, I have 2 sick brothers - my mom will eventually wind up relying on me. So I pay my own bills or they don't get paid. Dad and 4 grandparents are dead already, leaving nothing. Mom is essentially broke, 2 brothers are both broke and on disability. Some of us have responsibilities and f*ing around with giving away our time for free will not meet those responsibilities. Unless you can get everyone else to work for free too, in which case i'm becoming a full-time gamer.
per Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_DA14
2.5MT, less than Tunguska, numerous volcanos, etc. Really, would need to hit some population to get attention, and most of the planet is not populated by humans because of excessive standing water.
Thanks, appreciate a serious response. Lots of "unfair, unfair" without meaningful suggestions, except for the guys suggesting that taking advantage of other people really is other people's problem.
Seriously, what do you propose as a penalty, or do you propose no penalty?
At some point, when dealing with a group of people on legal issues, you have to have some comprimise. There are amongst us, people who think selling coffee that is "too hot" is criminally negligent. There are others that assume that hot coffee is hot and the buyer is responsible for taking appropriate care after the sale. The law is going to have to establish a common understanding, so that everyone knows what the rules are, even if they don't agree with them.
Taking this to the computer world, there are people that feel they should be able to use their computer, in peace, without having other using it, scaring them into doing stupid things, etc. And people who think anything online is theirs if they can take it or trick someone into giving them access. Are you taking the position that you must understand every way someone can be tricked into doing things in order to use a computer? This seems to be a pretty high bar.
I personally prefer a more "tricking people is bad" whether it involves dodgy product labeling (as by MS in another article on Slashdot), or by jackasses trying to get women to take off their clothes. In this case, I'm thinking something along the lines of 1 month per violation (given that the extent of the damage is embarassment).
I'd like to hear specific ideas from people - either "what he did should be legal" or "what he did should merit punishment along these lines". People saying they are outraged without making specific suggestions aren't really helping.
Further, if MURDER is the standard (you can't do worse than murder, right?) it severely limits what you can do with financial mismanagement, et.al. After all, surely Bernie Madoff isn't WORSE THAN A MURDERER. And if we're talking ruined lives, how do you judge ruined?
If you dropped it, you weren't holding it right^H^H^H^H^H^H.
Simplify! Steve Jobs approves!
My first day on the job in a very brief career as a firefighter, we responded to a vehicle fire. I backed up the engineer on the hose. The engineer pointed out the magnesium shifter in the cab of the truck - it was throwing sparks as if we were applying a grinder to it rather than 100gpm. Because it was small we could disapate enough heat to put out the fire, but it was kinda cool. We got more of an explanation back at the station.
Although prohibition came first, prohibition was strongly linked to femist movements. Even though women couldn't vote, they were leading the charge to outlaw alcohol, believing it to be a heavy contributing factor to a women's misery overall.
Further, though the 19th amendment gave women the vote nationally, women already had the vote in a number of states.
There is a strong tendency outside the US to assume that states are like provinces, or countys in other countries. My impression of non-american opinion is that the federal government can just do anything it wants, which is far from the rule. Fed definitely runs international relationships (trade, war, alliances, etc), so to any non-american they are going to be the face of the country. But most of the laws for everyday life are state. If you murder someone, 95 times out of 100, there is going to be a state looking for you, not the federal government. You will likely wind up in a state prison, or executed by the state government (if applicable). The feds only become involve under certain circumstances, and most often only provide assistance. Again, the cases you are likely to hear about are the most henious and unusual ones, which is where the fed is most likely to get involved.
There is an idiom in the US: "Don't make a federal case out of it" meaning roughly, don't make this into a big deal.
The better comparison is between the EU and the US government (from a European perspective) with differences - there are national direct elections, national debates, etc. States have pretty wide discretion to go off and do their own things. This is a fundamental debate in the US: should states have more or less rights to do what they want? We had a war over slavery that could have been avoided by guarenteeing the right states to have legal slavery, but that was unacceptable to the northern majority. We have national laws against possessing marajuana, but state laws legalizing the same. The state/national who-makes-the-rules debate crops up all the time here, and there isn't a consistent left/right consensus on it - generally, either side is willing to impose their rules nationally if they can, or by state, if they can.
The Telegraph is a British paper, where Chinese are not Asian, they are Chinese. "Asian" there means Indian, Pakistani, Persian, etc, all the way to apparently include Turkish people. Turkey is asia minor on some maps, and whether is is Europe or Asia or both or neither is disputed by argumentative geographers.
In the US, Asian means generally people from Asia, but usually Indians are called out as specifically Indian (and Sikhs as Sikhs, Pakistanis as Pakistani, Iranians as Iranian and rarely as Persian, etc.) Awkward for some, because American Indians still mostly refer to themselves as Indian as well (I have Navaho cousins living on the rez, don't start with me - Native American is a polictically correct invention that does not have mainstream acceptance amongst actual Indians, who often regard their New Age-y admirers with contempt. For the brits out there, calling them "Red Indians" or such is likely to be met with amusement initially, then with rising disgust if you keep it up).
The vast bulk of serial killers who have been caught have been white. Charles Ng jumps out as an exception, but he was working with a white guy. There are methodological problems with jumping to the conclusion that most serial killers are white however:
1) does not consider police focus on catching perps victimizing white people
2) does not consider some sub-culture resistance to involving police in their issues/reporting crimes
3) does not consider surviability of youth with mental problems into adulthood (remember we are talking a very small population, a few individuals one way or the other would drastically change rates)
4) does not consider variability in instititionalization rates for severely mentally ill (e.g. black would-be serial killers put into the criminal justice system on flimsier charges earlier in a budding career, before being able to do much damage, for example, or white patient getting outpatient treatment and earlier where a minority patient gets committed and stuck in the system)
I wouldn't claim all of these factors make the case for "white people are more likely to be serial killers" more or less valid, just that it is not a particularly well justified conclusion given the unmanaged variables in the available data.
The alternate hypothosis "most serial killers are white" has population issues, of course - in the US, 65-80% of US pop is white (depending on how you count hispanic, mixed race, and "other") you would expect that, given similar rates, white people would be most of anything.
-----------------------
On the larger question, I think you should expect villians to be spread across the spectrum of the manufacturing culture. When its always the black guy that did it, that's a problem. When there is always a "good minority" to make sure the audience doesn't think the producer is discriminating, that is a problem too.
I don't think i've seen anything out of Hollywood that had "bad muslims" without making sure to have at least one or two "good muslims" to offset them. The fact that you have to produce a best friend that is if you are going to have a villian of is a problem, in my opinion. You don't have to do that for white sub-cultures, you shouldn't have to for other cultures either (sub or not).
Thinking further, would you have a case if insurers amalgamated data and determined that Browns where x% more or less likely to have some condition? in other words, you can't discriminate on the basis of genetic testing, but could you technically work out a system to bias rates based on surname, and if so, what would be it's legal position?
I have a genetic disease, and my RL last name is Brown. Good luck with that.
Yes, already at +5 insightful, but this is the number one thing coders need to understand. You are getting paid to produce stuff people other than you want. Satisfying yourself is #6 on the list.