If the waiter checks back shortly after delivering the food, the waiter will be interrupting my eating and likely interrupting my conversation. This is the kind of service I specifically DON'T want.
So much THIS!!! Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
Tipping is structurally unable to achieve the kind of service which I want - which is a waiter who doesn't interrupt me while I'm eating or talking to ask if everything is okay.
I think tuition support is a taxable benefit. So the folks will pay $1/day for tuition, but the IRS will count it as then having earned an extra 15k/year or whatever its market value is, and some folks (maybe the married ones in dual income families) now find themselves pushed into a taxable income bracket.
Which 'serious problem with crypto currencies' do you think it highlights? This was a journalistic institution who decided for ethical reasons that they couldn't use or donate the bitcoins they got from a miner that was given them, and after several weeks of deliberation they decided to destroy the key permanently, and write an article about it at the time.
Couldn't a tool developed to detect bias in algorithms, be used in an attempt to insert bias into algorithms, without detection?
Imagine an algorithm to roll a six-sided dice, and we define bias as anything where a given number appears more than 1/6 of the time on average, and a tool to detect bias works by running the algorithm a lot and checking frequencies.
No there's no way this tool could be used to insert bias into algorithms without detection, by definition.
So it all depends on what they mean by "bias" and what kind of tool they're writing.
Ooh! And in that vein, maybe it could have something about economic treaties and a trade blockade? Maybe something about the procedural mechanisms for getting a vote in the senate?
Then why bother trying to claim there are so many laws that prohibit it?
Because you flat-out asked asked "is this a crime?" (look it up in the post history). I answered your literal question and then said why I thought it was the wrong question.
It is the critical question if you are going to keep harping about how the system isn't fulfilling the FCC requirements for accepting comments. The system accepts comments, so that can't be the broken part. It must be the part about identifying the commenter. How do you do that?
You're conflating some very different things.
(1) The FCC has a duty implied by "for the people" to respect them in some way. This is pretty wishy-washy which is why people came up with more concrete rules.
(2) The current concrete rules say it has to respond to comments. Those are clearly poor rules. Nevertheless it's in violation of them.
(3) I think it should come up with a better mechanism for "respecting the people in some way". It's arguable whether its response to the problems it has in part (2) should be to dilute how it aims to fulfill (1), or find a more effective way to fulfill (1). I personally think it should be the latter. I don't know if it's within the remit of the FCC to unilaterally decide between the two options, but I don't think it should be.
It's not a FEEDBACK SYSTEM. It's not a vote. It's not a referendum. It's not a poll. It's not an opinion gatherer. It's a PUBLIC COMMENT system. What things do the FCC need to consider that they already haven't.
I don't know what the "it" in that paragraph refers to. I agree with you that there shouldn't be a vote, referendum, poll or opinion gatherer, as was made clear by my post. I also don't think there's much merit in a public comment system for fulfilling the duty in (1). As for the term "feedback system", I think you and I likely have different definitions of the term. I mean it just in the broadest possible sense of some information flow into the FCC from outside.
"Interest groups" with "spokespeople" are allowed to comment in the existing system. You don't need to redesign anything.
I agree that "interest groups" and "spokespeople" are allowed to comment in the existing system. However, the existing system doesn't satisfy the major points I put forward. It's not very productive for you to to snip to just this one isolated clause in my proposal.
The FCC public comment period is NOT A VOTE. It is NOT A DEMOCRACY. They read the comments and consider them for what they contain -- not who makes them. The public comments may or may not contain this "evidence" which you think is so critical. They are not, by themselves, evidence.
I fully agree with this.
You have some twisted definition of "attend to" if you think it means they have to answer each and every comment.
I firmly believe they shouldn't answer each and every comment, and they shouldn't be expected to.
If it then says "we can't pay attention to the comments because there were too many of them and they were junk"
Saying that they found the 8 million junk comments unconvincing is "attend[ing] to" them with one sentence. They will, of course, not pay attention to the junk comments, in the sense that they will not change the outcome. Why would you expect them to? They're junk comments.
I agree they shouldn't pay attention to the junk comments. I think they should pay attention to important evidence (some of which may be raised in the non-junk website comments, much of which will come from elsewhere).
I think however that they've knowingly chosen a submission-and-evidence-receiving mechanism (the comments website) which is doomed to be unworkable. The high volume of junk there doesn't absolve them of the duty to gather important and relevant submissions in some form or other. I think they're pointing to junk comments and saying basically that they've fulfilled their duty via the website and there's nothing they can usefully do with the responses.
[Why should I define "real name"?] Because you want to prosecute people for lying to the government on an FCC public comment website.
No I don't want to prosecute people for that. (You were the one who asked if anyone broke any laws by using fake names, and I answered your question, but I said it wasn't the right thing to ask). As I've made clear, I want the FCC to be better fulfilling its duties.
The question you are avoiding is how they would possibly VALIDATE every name entered into the comment forms.
Avoid the question? Sure I haven't answered the question because -- as I've said explicitly -- I don't think it's important. You apparently think it's important but you haven't connected the dots as to why.
(If you do want an answer? I'd design a very different feedback mechanism for the FCC. It'd start with interest groups with spokespeople, and they would provide submissions, and the FCC would provide some form of public record which implied it had understood those submissions and had analyzed the data provided in an evidence-based way. It would publish metrics/criteria by which it would judge its right course of action. The question of whether it had competently set metrics and competently assessed the evidence would be challengeable, either by the public or by ombuds or by congress; I'm not sure what would be the right check+balance here. For the wider public including anonymous submissions, I expect the bulk of folks would be satisfied that at least one of the interest group submissions had articulated their own ideas well. If not there'd be a second round of submissions with some lower barrier to entry. I'd have to work further on precisely what the barriers of entry should be. However I bet that the transparency and objectivity of earlier rounds would mean that a large enough majority feels their voice has been fairly heard that we could deem the FCC's duties fulfilled.)
Oh, poppycock. You have no such evidence [that combined together paints a picture of an FCC that willfully ignored all evidence that disagreed with its vision]. You don't know what comments they did and did not consider fully, you only know that you see ALL of the public comments that are on the public record. Yes, you see ALL the comments on the public record because that's how the public record works.
I'm not talking about comments submitted to the website. I'm talking about what I've read of its public consultation process, and how it characterized the responses it got from industry responses.
Why should I define it? There's a statue in place. Our system of law comes with built-in mechanisms for determining what they mean.
I keep asking this, and nobody has yet provided an answer I've seen: exactly WHAT MECHANISM do you want the FCC to use to validate the names on submitted comments? Before you answer, that mechanism has to WORK. It has to allow anonymous comments.
That's a strange question for you to be asking me. I see only these three questions at this stage: (1) do we have reason to believe that it's IMPOSSIBLE to gather feedback in a way that's compatible with the FCC's existing duties and rules? (2) if we don't yet have a definitive answer as to whether it's impossible, then what is the right way to develop new mechanisms and/or test their plausibility? (3) if we do believe it's impossible, how are we going to adjust its existing duties?
For (1) I think that remains to be seen. We haven't seen discussion either way. (Such a discussion would start with a requirements spec that pinpoints precisely what are those duties according to legal interpretations of USC and FCC's own rulemaking process).
For (2), who are you asking for an answer? random people on slashdot? me personally? the news media? They're all very strange places to ask. I think the right way to develop new mechanisms is for the GAO to find that the current mechanisms are flawed (the GAO is already investigating), and then the FCC to bring in experts to develop new mechanisms, and then if those aren't persuasive then it needs some kind of congressional or senate smackdown to get it back on track.
There is no good solution to the identification issue and no reason to solve it. The only people who think it is an issue now are those who think that the FCC is supposed to add up all the yeas and nays and make the rules based on that "vote".
Personally I don't care about identification. I don't think it's the important issue. I think the important issue is numerous pieces of corroborating evidence which together paint picture of an FCC that willfully ignored all evidence that disagreed with its vision. I want my government to be more evidence-based than that.
What's to complain about? This wasn't a mechanism for voting -- it was a mechanism for members of the public to provide perspectives to the FCC that they might not have already considered. Given that, the names attached to the comments are, frankly, irrelevant. The only reason there was a kerfuffle about this at all is the pervasive urban legend that this was somehow a vote.
The other reason is it's a basic part of democracy that the FCC should pay attention to what people think and should base its decisions on evidence; it enshrined part of this duty in its own rule-making process which requires it to attend to every comment. If it then says "we can't pay attention to the comments because there were too many of them and they were junk" then some think this exempts it from its duty, and others think it has to find other ways to fulfill its duty.
What is this "actionable hook", and what "action"?
The hook this time is a senior enough politician who has an eye-catching angle and is willing to pick up the fight.
What should the FCC do?... There is no action to be taken here. People used fake names to post comments on a government website. Is that a crime? Who committed the crime, the government or the people using the fake names?
(1) Yes it looks like a crime to post fake comments here - 18 USC sec 1001, a felony for anyone to willfully make false or fictitious statements any any matter under the Executive Branch's jurisdiction.
(2) Yes it looks like a violation of FCC's own rulemaking process to fail to address all comments it receives
(3) I believe it's a duty (but can't find evidence to back this up) of the FCC to gather opinions and evidence to support the decisions it takes. But rather than investigating how to obtain opinions and evidence, it seems to have used the deluge of fake comments as a kind of smokescreen and distraction from this duty.
Well those are three answers to your questions, but I don't think they're the right ones to ask. It boils down to this: I think it's an existing duty of the FCC to get feedback (a duty both in terms of its own rules and to follow the general constitutional principle of "for the people"); it's current mechanisms have been shown inadequate to the task, and I think the FCC is cavalier and/or negligent in its duty by failing to address the defects in its mechanisms.
Actually I believe it serves the FCCs ulterior purposes to leave the defective mechanisms in place, since it makes it easier for FCC to ignore its duties where it finds them inconvenient.
I can't believe anyone is truly shocked over this.
No one's shocked. The background is that you need a hook to make a proper actionable complaint about it. What this news story is about is that now there's a hook that looks more actionable than previously discussed hooks.
Also if the brakes are simply under sized, how is that fixed with a firmware update?
I agree that couldn't be addressed with a firmware update. But I didn't see any indication that "undersized brakes" was the cause of the problem. My default assumption is that the Tesla's firmware has to decide how much breaking to do via regenerative braking and how much to do via friction braking, and that it currently optimizes for regenerative (hence range) at the expense of short stopping distance. This kind of thing could certainly be fixed by a firmware update.
I mean, in this day in age....does not pretty much everyone not already know that pre-processed junk food is bad for you?
That's an irrelevant question, and use of the word "know" is way off-base when it comes to advertising.
The question is, does the advertising on junk food cause more people to purchase junk food than otherwise would? The answer is self-evidently yes. (by following the money). So this move will obviously reduce the amount of junk food ingested. It's not a great leap to think that this will in turn reduce the amount of obesity.
Yep, a week is much too long. Why would you even need data access when it's locked anyway? How hard is it to unlock it when you need that?
I sit down at my desk, plug my phone into my laptop, and start doing stuff on the laptop say to retrieve photos or sync music. "Please unlock phone to proceed" it says. So I clear away the jumble of papers, get the phone, press my thumb awkwardly into touch-id because it's lying on the desk not in my hand, and go back to work on photos+music. I get distracted by something else on the computer for a few minutes, resume my iphone syncing work, and have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again. I get up to get a coffee, come back to my computer to resume iphone syncing work, and have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again. I get up to use the restroom (and take my phone with me), come back to the desk, plug it in, resume iphone syncing work, but it's already locked so I have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again.
In all I get pretty fed up with having to keep unlocking it when it's at my desk!
(Sometimes I take a lot of time syncing because I'm preparing my child's device with videos for a long plane flight. Sometimes I'm transferring photos from my phone to my laptop. Sometimes I'm transferring photos from my laptop to my phone. It often takes quite a while to do all these things.)
The way investigative policing works is you have numerous leads, and you follow up on them, and most end up asv dead ends, but hopefully some bear fruit.
So, a smaller company shouldn't be able to retain any information about which of their modest advertising expenditures resulted in which sales, and which search engine terms produced the traffic that led to the specific transactions that allow them to actually stay in business? The company's got no interest in retaining information when a customer or prospective customer uses a contact form to ask a question, or a chat tool to provide some guidance on a product? A business could easily do a million dollars worth of sales as year and still have nowhere near the budget to build all of tools the EU insists that the web site provide to anyone who's visited the web site.
Sounds brilliant. I suggest your hypothetical Mom&Pop website should have a checkout button marked "I agree to a $0.05 discount on my purchase in exchange for granting [shop] the right to retain data on what I bought, when, what are my other interests, which website I visited prior to buying, and to sell any and all of that information on to other advertisers." From all the customers electing to pay the extra $0.05 to avoid that, well, they the shop can stack up their pennies and build the damned tools that they should have created in the first place.
Someone has quoted this in another comment, presumably from the CoC in question: "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:..."
No, that's not from the CoC in question (it's from the github CoC).
I don't know why someone would even bring that up in relation to Rafael/LLVM. It can't be a slippery slope argument because LLVM clearly decided *against* those terms in a CoC.
"By registering to attend you agree to abide by the Terms of Conduct". That's quite explicit.
No, it's implicit. Implicit means that it's implied by registering, rather than being an explicit statement.
Let's verify that we're talking about the same case. Rafael said he does not agree to the terms of conduct. He didn't say that he thought there are vague edge cases (which indeed there are). He said he could not to the code.
Actually there's a logic gap. The conference says someone must agree "to" the code of conduct. That's an unusual linguistic construction. I understood it to mean "agree to abide by the code of conduct". But Rafael also said he did not agree "with" the code of conduct. The two are separate concepts -- people often agree to abide by laws even ones they consider unjust, for example.
I think it would be entirely normal for a social group to expect members to abide by its code, and entirely unusual for a social group to expect members to buy into its code. I'm therefore assuming the first interpretation. (This assumption is dodgy because Rafael himself has blurred the distinction in his own letter).
Working through your examples in the specific case of Rafel:
Your restroom example - do you think Rafael is the male who insists on going into the female bathroom and feels this is disrespectful to the women at the conference and nevertheless insists on going? (To stay focused, I'm not looking at example edge cases about who might or might not be offended; I'm wondering why he said he could not agree to abide by the terms of conduct).
Your MAGA example - is Rafael the one wearing the MAGA T-shirt who feels this is disrespectful and nevertheless insists on wearing it?
However the point of your examples seems to be different. You seem to be suggesting that he feels he can't abide by a commitment to be respectful, because there are cases where he will be respectful or at least he feels he will be respectful, but other people might take his actions as disrespectful. Am I understanding you right?
That's very tenuous reasoning. If that were true, he would be able to agree to the terms of conduct (because he himself would say he's being respectful), but he would be in fear of unjust accusations or an unjust decision process. Fear of unjust accusations/process is a reasonable fear, and your T-shirt case was a good example of it.
So I guess in the end we don't know, and the words as literally written don't unambiguously direct us: (1) maybe he feels he can't abide by the code of conduct himself; (2) maybe he doesn't agree with the code of conduct because of its content or vagueness or inherent contradictions; (3) maybe he doesn't trust the organization's ability to enforce the code of conduct with balance and fairness.
I'm drawn to (1) because I think that's what the conference was expecting and what he said he couldn't agree to. If someone's okay with (3) then they'll likely be okay with (2). You gave examples of both (2) and (3).
First of all, having to explicitly agree to this to attend a conference is like having to pledge allegiance every time to get food in a mess hall (as mocked so brilliantly in Catch-22 — great read). How would like you like a daily popup on/. asking you to promise not to molest children today?
On the subject of great reads, we could read the T&C of the LLVM conference that I linked. You don't *explicitly* agree to the code of conduct. Agreement is implicit by registering for the conference. So no, it's really very dissimilar to reciting the pledge of allegiance every time to get food, and it's very dissimilar to a daily popup on slashdot.
The code asks you to be "respectful" -- what does it mean? If one were to show up to a conference in a T-shirt with a picture of AR-15, or a portrait of President Trump, would that be Ok? I've worked with people IRL, who'd file a complaint with Human Resources over such a thing -- because they'd "feel unsafe". And it could get worse!
Again on the subject of great reads, the code of conduct does indeed say what it means by being "respectful" (albeit in a vague way): no personal attacks, good behavior, good manners.
I'm having a hard time understanding the point you're making with your link. There was a student who had agreed to the school dress code and then either did or didn't violate it. The police officer attempted to get to the bottom of it but was hindered because the student wouldn't stop talking. The police officer thought this amounted to obstruction of justice but due process decided it didn't. I don't see how that relates to a conference situation.
What does beliefs about women have to do with engineering?
Imagine those attitudes in a workplace. If the engineer believes that women should be shielded and kept at home, and has women on his team, will he shield those women more than he shields men from work challenges? will he give reviews or peer feedback that make them more likely to leave the workplace and stay at home, than he does men? will he cut short hallway chats with them because he doesn't believe they should be on his team?
Was the engineer doing something illegal?
If he was doing any of those things within a company in America, then yes it would have been illegal. We obviously don't know whether he was actually doing them. In a company, it would boil down to the question of whether management is willing to tolerate the legal risk. In a community project, it boils down to the question of whether the rest of the project was willing to tolerate the behavior. For that at least, we have the answer.
No he said that what clinched his decision to leave was... [The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry]
Read his resignation letter. He wrote two separate paragraphs:
(1) He is unable to attend LLVM conferences because he is cannot agree to [abide by] the code of conduct. This is what the post you replied to "meet minimum standards of human behavior" was talking about. I too wish to know which parts of that code of conduct he considers himself unable to abide by.
(2) What clinched his decision to leave was that LLVM is now associated with outreachy, and he himself didn't want himself to be associated indirectly with outreachy.
Slashdot Mirror
If the waiter checks back shortly after delivering the food, the waiter will be interrupting my eating and likely interrupting my conversation. This is the kind of service I specifically DON'T want.
So much THIS!!! Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
Tipping is structurally unable to achieve the kind of service which I want - which is a waiter who doesn't interrupt me while I'm eating or talking to ask if everything is okay.
To find something with real value we need to go back to beans, firewood, pork, tools, etc. These sorts of things have real value.
Thanks for your 2c^H^H^H half a bean
I think tuition support is a taxable benefit. So the folks will pay $1/day for tuition, but the IRS will count it as then having earned an extra 15k/year or whatever its market value is, and some folks (maybe the married ones in dual income families) now find themselves pushed into a taxable income bracket.
Which 'serious problem with crypto currencies' do you think it highlights? This was a journalistic institution who decided for ethical reasons that they couldn't use or donate the bitcoins they got from a miner that was given them, and after several weeks of deliberation they decided to destroy the key permanently, and write an article about it at the time.
Couldn't a tool developed to detect bias in algorithms, be used in an attempt to insert bias into algorithms, without detection?
Imagine an algorithm to roll a six-sided dice, and we define bias as anything where a given number appears more than 1/6 of the time on average, and a tool to detect bias works by running the algorithm a lot and checking frequencies.
No there's no way this tool could be used to insert bias into algorithms without detection, by definition.
So it all depends on what they mean by "bias" and what kind of tool they're writing.
Ooh! And in that vein, maybe it could have something about economic treaties and a trade blockade? Maybe something about the procedural mechanisms for getting a vote in the senate?
Then why bother trying to claim there are so many laws that prohibit it?
Because you flat-out asked asked "is this a crime?" (look it up in the post history). I answered your literal question and then said why I thought it was the wrong question.
It is the critical question if you are going to keep harping about how the system isn't fulfilling the FCC requirements for accepting comments. The system accepts comments, so that can't be the broken part. It must be the part about identifying the commenter. How do you do that?
You're conflating some very different things.
(1) The FCC has a duty implied by "for the people" to respect them in some way. This is pretty wishy-washy which is why people came up with more concrete rules.
(2) The current concrete rules say it has to respond to comments. Those are clearly poor rules. Nevertheless it's in violation of them.
(3) I think it should come up with a better mechanism for "respecting the people in some way". It's arguable whether its response to the problems it has in part (2) should be to dilute how it aims to fulfill (1), or find a more effective way to fulfill (1). I personally think it should be the latter. I don't know if it's within the remit of the FCC to unilaterally decide between the two options, but I don't think it should be.
It's not a FEEDBACK SYSTEM. It's not a vote. It's not a referendum. It's not a poll. It's not an opinion gatherer. It's a PUBLIC COMMENT system. What things do the FCC need to consider that they already haven't.
I don't know what the "it" in that paragraph refers to. I agree with you that there shouldn't be a vote, referendum, poll or opinion gatherer, as was made clear by my post. I also don't think there's much merit in a public comment system for fulfilling the duty in (1). As for the term "feedback system", I think you and I likely have different definitions of the term. I mean it just in the broadest possible sense of some information flow into the FCC from outside.
"Interest groups" with "spokespeople" are allowed to comment in the existing system. You don't need to redesign anything.
I agree that "interest groups" and "spokespeople" are allowed to comment in the existing system. However, the existing system doesn't satisfy the major points I put forward. It's not very productive for you to to snip to just this one isolated clause in my proposal.
The FCC public comment period is NOT A VOTE. It is NOT A DEMOCRACY. They read the comments and consider them for what they contain -- not who makes them. The public comments may or may not contain this "evidence" which you think is so critical. They are not, by themselves, evidence.
I fully agree with this.
You have some twisted definition of "attend to" if you think it means they have to answer each and every comment.
I firmly believe they shouldn't answer each and every comment, and they shouldn't be expected to.
If it then says "we can't pay attention to the comments because there were too many of them and they were junk"
Saying that they found the 8 million junk comments unconvincing is "attend[ing] to" them with one sentence. They will, of course, not pay attention to the junk comments, in the sense that they will not change the outcome. Why would you expect them to? They're junk comments.
I agree they shouldn't pay attention to the junk comments. I think they should pay attention to important evidence (some of which may be raised in the non-junk website comments, much of which will come from elsewhere).
I think however that they've knowingly chosen a submission-and-evidence-receiving mechanism (the comments website) which is doomed to be unworkable. The high volume of junk there doesn't absolve them of the duty to gather important and relevant submissions in some form or other. I think they're pointing to junk comments and saying basically that they've fulfilled their duty via the website and there's nothing they can usefully do with the responses.
[Why should I define "real name"?] Because you want to prosecute people for lying to the government on an FCC public comment website.
No I don't want to prosecute people for that. (You were the one who asked if anyone broke any laws by using fake names, and I answered your question, but I said it wasn't the right thing to ask). As I've made clear, I want the FCC to be better fulfilling its duties.
The question you are avoiding is how they would possibly VALIDATE every name entered into the comment forms.
Avoid the question? Sure I haven't answered the question because -- as I've said explicitly -- I don't think it's important. You apparently think it's important but you haven't connected the dots as to why.
(If you do want an answer? I'd design a very different feedback mechanism for the FCC. It'd start with interest groups with spokespeople, and they would provide submissions, and the FCC would provide some form of public record which implied it had understood those submissions and had analyzed the data provided in an evidence-based way. It would publish metrics/criteria by which it would judge its right course of action. The question of whether it had competently set metrics and competently assessed the evidence would be challengeable, either by the public or by ombuds or by congress; I'm not sure what would be the right check+balance here. For the wider public including anonymous submissions, I expect the bulk of folks would be satisfied that at least one of the interest group submissions had articulated their own ideas well. If not there'd be a second round of submissions with some lower barrier to entry. I'd have to work further on precisely what the barriers of entry should be. However I bet that the transparency and objectivity of earlier rounds would mean that a large enough majority feels their voice has been fairly heard that we could deem the FCC's duties fulfilled.)
Oh, poppycock. You have no such evidence [that combined together paints a picture of an FCC that willfully ignored all evidence that disagreed with its vision]. You don't know what comments they did and did not consider fully, you only know that you see ALL of the public comments that are on the public record. Yes, you see ALL the comments on the public record because that's how the public record works.
I'm not talking about comments submitted to the website. I'm talking about what I've read of its public consultation process, and how it characterized the responses it got from industry responses.
Define "real name".
Why should I define it? There's a statue in place. Our system of law comes with built-in mechanisms for determining what they mean.
I keep asking this, and nobody has yet provided an answer I've seen: exactly WHAT MECHANISM do you want the FCC to use to validate the names on submitted comments? Before you answer, that mechanism has to WORK. It has to allow anonymous comments.
That's a strange question for you to be asking me. I see only these three questions at this stage: (1) do we have reason to believe that it's IMPOSSIBLE to gather feedback in a way that's compatible with the FCC's existing duties and rules? (2) if we don't yet have a definitive answer as to whether it's impossible, then what is the right way to develop new mechanisms and/or test their plausibility? (3) if we do believe it's impossible, how are we going to adjust its existing duties?
For (1) I think that remains to be seen. We haven't seen discussion either way. (Such a discussion would start with a requirements spec that pinpoints precisely what are those duties according to legal interpretations of USC and FCC's own rulemaking process).
For (2), who are you asking for an answer? random people on slashdot? me personally? the news media? They're all very strange places to ask. I think the right way to develop new mechanisms is for the GAO to find that the current mechanisms are flawed (the GAO is already investigating), and then the FCC to bring in experts to develop new mechanisms, and then if those aren't persuasive then it needs some kind of congressional or senate smackdown to get it back on track.
There is no good solution to the identification issue and no reason to solve it. The only people who think it is an issue now are those who think that the FCC is supposed to add up all the yeas and nays and make the rules based on that "vote".
Personally I don't care about identification. I don't think it's the important issue. I think the important issue is numerous pieces of corroborating evidence which together paint picture of an FCC that willfully ignored all evidence that disagreed with its vision. I want my government to be more evidence-based than that.
What's to complain about? This wasn't a mechanism for voting -- it was a mechanism for members of the public to provide perspectives to the FCC that they might not have already considered. Given that, the names attached to the comments are, frankly, irrelevant. The only reason there was a kerfuffle about this at all is the pervasive urban legend that this was somehow a vote.
The other reason is it's a basic part of democracy that the FCC should pay attention to what people think and should base its decisions on evidence; it enshrined part of this duty in its own rule-making process which requires it to attend to every comment. If it then says "we can't pay attention to the comments because there were too many of them and they were junk" then some think this exempts it from its duty, and others think it has to find other ways to fulfill its duty.
What is this "actionable hook", and what "action"?
The hook this time is a senior enough politician who has an eye-catching angle and is willing to pick up the fight.
What should the FCC do? ... There is no action to be taken here. People used fake names to post comments on a government website. Is that a crime? Who committed the crime, the government or the people using the fake names?
(1) Yes it looks like a crime to post fake comments here - 18 USC sec 1001, a felony for anyone to willfully make false or fictitious statements any any matter under the Executive Branch's jurisdiction.
(2) Yes it looks like a violation of FCC's own rulemaking process to fail to address all comments it receives
(3) I believe it's a duty (but can't find evidence to back this up) of the FCC to gather opinions and evidence to support the decisions it takes. But rather than investigating how to obtain opinions and evidence, it seems to have used the deluge of fake comments as a kind of smokescreen and distraction from this duty.
Well those are three answers to your questions, but I don't think they're the right ones to ask. It boils down to this: I think it's an existing duty of the FCC to get feedback (a duty both in terms of its own rules and to follow the general constitutional principle of "for the people"); it's current mechanisms have been shown inadequate to the task, and I think the FCC is cavalier and/or negligent in its duty by failing to address the defects in its mechanisms.
Actually I believe it serves the FCCs ulterior purposes to leave the defective mechanisms in place, since it makes it easier for FCC to ignore its duties where it finds them inconvenient.
I can't believe anyone is truly shocked over this.
No one's shocked. The background is that you need a hook to make a proper actionable complaint about it. What this news story is about is that now there's a hook that looks more actionable than previously discussed hooks.
Also if the brakes are simply under sized, how is that fixed with a firmware update?
I agree that couldn't be addressed with a firmware update. But I didn't see any indication that "undersized brakes" was the cause of the problem. My default assumption is that the Tesla's firmware has to decide how much breaking to do via regenerative braking and how much to do via friction braking, and that it currently optimizes for regenerative (hence range) at the expense of short stopping distance. This kind of thing could certainly be fixed by a firmware update.
I mean, in this day in age....does not pretty much everyone not already know that pre-processed junk food is bad for you?
That's an irrelevant question, and use of the word "know" is way off-base when it comes to advertising.
The question is, does the advertising on junk food cause more people to purchase junk food than otherwise would? The answer is self-evidently yes. (by following the money). So this move will obviously reduce the amount of junk food ingested. It's not a great leap to think that this will in turn reduce the amount of obesity.
More examples...
A red panda isn't a panda
A red dwarf isn't a dwarf
A fake Gucci handbag isn't a Gucci handbag
Yep, a week is much too long. Why would you even need data access when it's locked anyway? How hard is it to unlock it when you need that?
I sit down at my desk, plug my phone into my laptop, and start doing stuff on the laptop say to retrieve photos or sync music. "Please unlock phone to proceed" it says. So I clear away the jumble of papers, get the phone, press my thumb awkwardly into touch-id because it's lying on the desk not in my hand, and go back to work on photos+music. I get distracted by something else on the computer for a few minutes, resume my iphone syncing work, and have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again. I get up to get a coffee, come back to my computer to resume iphone syncing work, and have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again. I get up to use the restroom (and take my phone with me), come back to the desk, plug it in, resume iphone syncing work, but it's already locked so I have to redo the awkward unlock dance once again.
In all I get pretty fed up with having to keep unlocking it when it's at my desk!
(Sometimes I take a lot of time syncing because I'm preparing my child's device with videos for a long plane flight. Sometimes I'm transferring photos from my phone to my laptop. Sometimes I'm transferring photos from my laptop to my phone. It often takes quite a while to do all these things.)
The way investigative policing works is you have numerous leads, and you follow up on them, and most end up asv dead ends, but hopefully some bear fruit.
A false positive is a lead that didn't work out.
So, a smaller company shouldn't be able to retain any information about which of their modest advertising expenditures resulted in which sales, and which search engine terms produced the traffic that led to the specific transactions that allow them to actually stay in business? The company's got no interest in retaining information when a customer or prospective customer uses a contact form to ask a question, or a chat tool to provide some guidance on a product? A business could easily do a million dollars worth of sales as year and still have nowhere near the budget to build all of tools the EU insists that the web site provide to anyone who's visited the web site.
Sounds brilliant. I suggest your hypothetical Mom&Pop website should have a checkout button marked "I agree to a $0.05 discount on my purchase in exchange for granting [shop] the right to retain data on what I bought, when, what are my other interests, which website I visited prior to buying, and to sell any and all of that information on to other advertisers." From all the customers electing to pay the extra $0.05 to avoid that, well, they the shop can stack up their pennies and build the damned tools that they should have created in the first place.
Someone has quoted this in another comment, presumably from the CoC in question: "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding: ..."
No, that's not from the CoC in question (it's from the github CoC).
I don't know why someone would even bring that up in relation to Rafael/LLVM. It can't be a slippery slope argument because LLVM clearly decided *against* those terms in a CoC.
"By registering to attend you agree to abide by the Terms of Conduct". That's quite explicit.
No, it's implicit. Implicit means that it's implied by registering, rather than being an explicit statement.
Let's verify that we're talking about the same case. Rafael said he does not agree to the terms of conduct. He didn't say that he thought there are vague edge cases (which indeed there are). He said he could not to the code.
Actually there's a logic gap. The conference says someone must agree "to" the code of conduct. That's an unusual linguistic construction. I understood it to mean "agree to abide by the code of conduct". But Rafael also said he did not agree "with" the code of conduct. The two are separate concepts -- people often agree to abide by laws even ones they consider unjust, for example.
I think it would be entirely normal for a social group to expect members to abide by its code, and entirely unusual for a social group to expect members to buy into its code. I'm therefore assuming the first interpretation. (This assumption is dodgy because Rafael himself has blurred the distinction in his own letter).
Working through your examples in the specific case of Rafel:
Your restroom example - do you think Rafael is the male who insists on going into the female bathroom and feels this is disrespectful to the women at the conference and nevertheless insists on going? (To stay focused, I'm not looking at example edge cases about who might or might not be offended; I'm wondering why he said he could not agree to abide by the terms of conduct).
Your MAGA example - is Rafael the one wearing the MAGA T-shirt who feels this is disrespectful and nevertheless insists on wearing it?
However the point of your examples seems to be different. You seem to be suggesting that he feels he can't abide by a commitment to be respectful, because there are cases where he will be respectful or at least he feels he will be respectful, but other people might take his actions as disrespectful. Am I understanding you right?
That's very tenuous reasoning. If that were true, he would be able to agree to the terms of conduct (because he himself would say he's being respectful), but he would be in fear of unjust accusations or an unjust decision process. Fear of unjust accusations/process is a reasonable fear, and your T-shirt case was a good example of it.
So I guess in the end we don't know, and the words as literally written don't unambiguously direct us: (1) maybe he feels he can't abide by the code of conduct himself; (2) maybe he doesn't agree with the code of conduct because of its content or vagueness or inherent contradictions; (3) maybe he doesn't trust the organization's ability to enforce the code of conduct with balance and fairness.
I'm drawn to (1) because I think that's what the conference was expecting and what he said he couldn't agree to. If someone's okay with (3) then they'll likely be okay with (2). You gave examples of both (2) and (3).
First of all, having to explicitly agree to this to attend a conference is like having to pledge allegiance every time to get food in a mess hall (as mocked so brilliantly in Catch-22 — great read). How would like you like a daily popup on /. asking you to promise not to molest children today?
On the subject of great reads, we could read the T&C of the LLVM conference that I linked. You don't *explicitly* agree to the code of conduct. Agreement is implicit by registering for the conference. So no, it's really very dissimilar to reciting the pledge of allegiance every time to get food, and it's very dissimilar to a daily popup on slashdot.
The code asks you to be "respectful" -- what does it mean? If one were to show up to a conference in a T-shirt with a picture of AR-15, or a portrait of President Trump, would that be Ok? I've worked with people IRL, who'd file a complaint with Human Resources over such a thing -- because they'd "feel unsafe". And it could get worse!
Again on the subject of great reads, the code of conduct does indeed say what it means by being "respectful" (albeit in a vague way): no personal attacks, good behavior, good manners.
I'm having a hard time understanding the point you're making with your link. There was a student who had agreed to the school dress code and then either did or didn't violate it. The police officer attempted to get to the bottom of it but was hindered because the student wouldn't stop talking. The police officer thought this amounted to obstruction of justice but due process decided it didn't. I don't see how that relates to a conference situation.
What does beliefs about women have to do with engineering?
Imagine those attitudes in a workplace. If the engineer believes that women should be shielded and kept at home, and has women on his team, will he shield those women more than he shields men from work challenges? will he give reviews or peer feedback that make them more likely to leave the workplace and stay at home, than he does men? will he cut short hallway chats with them because he doesn't believe they should be on his team?
Was the engineer doing something illegal?
If he was doing any of those things within a company in America, then yes it would have been illegal. We obviously don't know whether he was actually doing them. In a company, it would boil down to the question of whether management is willing to tolerate the legal risk. In a community project, it boils down to the question of whether the rest of the project was willing to tolerate the behavior. For that at least, we have the answer.
No he said that what clinched his decision to leave was ... [The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry]
Read his resignation letter. He wrote two separate paragraphs:
(1) He is unable to attend LLVM conferences because he is cannot agree to [abide by] the code of conduct. This is what the post you replied to "meet minimum standards of human behavior" was talking about. I too wish to know which parts of that code of conduct he considers himself unable to abide by.
(2) What clinched his decision to leave was that LLVM is now associated with outreachy, and he himself didn't want himself to be associated indirectly with outreachy.