Actually, I bet that the skills they've acuired in managing their money will serve them very well in those situations. Having the extra money makes things easier, if you still manage it well, but ultimately it's not essential.
The ability to live a simple life (please no Paris Hilton jokes) makes you a much more adaptable person.
You will NEVER be able to lower your salary as much as people in 2nd and 3rd world countries can.
The amount of cash that goes directly to the contractor is not the only cost of hiring contractors, especially offshore. I am an American contractor working for an American company. They have worked with a particularly well-known Indian contractor in the past, and were left with a bad taste in their mouth. They pay much more for me than they did for the Indian contractors. The reason they hired me is that they can no longer afford to deal with the communication issues that arise when dealing with workers who are not able to be physically present, and who come from a different business culture. Depending on the nature of the project, these issues can dramatically slow and decrease productivity. I, on the other hand, speak English, and can spend 40+ hours per week on-site. Granted, it would be cheaper to hire a regular employee, but it contractors look better on the books.
The short story is that if you do quality work, well-run companies will be happy to pay a little more for you.
You must have missed the Sony ad inviting developers with at least 10 years of experience to apply for jobs doing development for their consoles and games.
I don't claim to know exactly how the law applies to this situation. I am inclined to think that the laws will have to be reinterpreted or updated because they weren't intended to cover these scenarios.
However, I think I do understand the logic behind the ations of both parties. There is a difference between a Ferrari appearing in a movie about racing, and a Ferrari appearing as a driveable car in a racing game. Ferrari is a real product. And with the movie, you are watching a movie that says something (either implicitly or explicitly) about that real product. If it says Ferraris are good, then it's advertising, and the film makers may actually charge Ferrari for their brand to appear instead of someone else's brand. If it say something bad then, at a stretch, it might be slander/libel, except that most movies are ovbious works of ficiton and so that may not apply.
However, the games make money off the driving experience (or the simulation thereof), which is quite similar to the business that Ferrari is in. So, in essence, both companies are making money off of the experience of driving, and that's what the game company advertises. That's a problem, if one of them owns the trademark and the other doesn't.
The Marvel/NCSoft issue is slightly different because Marvel is in the entertainment business. They don't make money from a "real product", they have intellectual property (IP) from which can be created any number of "real products" which, separate from the IP, are not worth very much themselves. NCSoft also deals in IP, but at its heart, the IP of their game is created by the players, not by NCSoft. NCSoft enables people to "be" characters of their own creation/inspiration, i.e. from their own IP.
The problem with Marvel's case is that NCSoft isn't actively using Marvel's trademarks, and they aren't advertising, "hey play our game and you can live the life of famous superheros like Wolverine or the Flash". They give the players the ability to customize their characters with general abilities and costume options that have repeatedly appeared in any number of comics by any number of publishers, and that no one can possibly claim to have trademarked. Only the combination of certain names, backstories, and specific costume attributes and powers might be trademarked. And even so, it's not NCSoft doing it, it's the players. Like one poster said, it's like NCSoft is giving people pencils. They're making money off of the imagination of the players, not Marvel.
Now, one poster here has hypothesized that NCSoft intended for the creations of their customers to become property of NCSoft, and unusable by publishers without license. I don't know if this is true or not. But unless there's something in the EULA about it the appearances, abilities, and backstories of the players' characters would be their own property, not NCSoft's. If there is something in the EULA about this, then okay NCSoft has a case for that I guess, but that makes them a little more shady than they've been made out to be by people like PvP artist Scott Kurtz. And even if that is true, Marvel's response doesn't seem to be valid. Marvel is (legitimately) concerned about being beaten at their own game, i.e. entertainment using superhero characters/stories. They're basically trying to use circumspect legal means to lock-out competition because they don't want to deal with it on a business/product level. And as we all know, that's a "Bad Thing".
Agreed, the ignorance of the lawmakers in these cases is astounding.
From the bill itself:
"As used in this section, "peer-to-peer file sharing software" means software that once installed and launched, enables the user to connect his or her computer to a network of other computers on which the users of these computers have made available recording or audiovisual works for electronic dissemination to other users who are connected to the network. When a transaction is complete, the user has an identical copy of the file on his or her computer and may also then disseminate the file to other users connected to the network."
To demonstrate the blinding ignorance of this definition, consider the following:
If you are viewing this web page right now on any sort of computer with an OS that can be configured to allow file-sharing via a normal ethernet network, and which allows the exact copying of music or video files, your OS and the drivers for your network adapter are in violation of this bill.
Or our society's inability to cope with a workforce that is actively involved in reproduction
If you want to be truly gender-neutral, you should be concerned that males don't get this kind of consideration either. If it was the father that decided to stay home with the kid for the first however many months, what would be the employer's reaction? Probably even less forgiving than for the mother. That, in my opinion, is just as big a crime.
The fact is that it's drilled into us from little on that to be successful in business, you have to be dedicated, you have to make sacrifices, and that's exactly what the work world expects. If they have to take special considerations for you that aren't required by law, then by and large most companies will take a pass and hire someone for whom they don't have to worry about it, because it will save them money. Is this wrong? Probably. But unless the work world evolves into a more caring place, it's not going to change.
But on the flip side of the coin, I think that people who want to have kids need to accept that they are going to have to make sacrifices if they want their kids to turn out well. And some of those sacrifices will be work-related. If you're pouring your heart and soul into your work, what's left for your kids? Or vice-versa? You most likely can't do either one thing equally as well as you would if it was your only focus.
I think you mean decreasing majority. Do you live in a fairly densely populated area? There are not a whole heckuva lot of minorities out in "the country", where about half the population of the US lives.
That said, I agree with you to a point about the financial aid thing. Some more outspoken individuals would call it reverse-racism. The only thing that should decide how much aid you get is the wealth of you and/or your immediate family. Now on the other hand, I can't really say that that isn't how it's done. African Americans in mid-to-large size cities are generally less wealthy than whites, so more of them getting aid doesn't inherently mean the white people are getting shafted.
But the "truth" is much more subtle than that, isn't it?
When you say truth, you appear to mean the reason that the statstic is what it is. I'll agree that "statistical truth" is a misnomer, seeing as it will change when you add or remove people from your sample population. But the fact remains that the comment you were replying to made no conjectures as to why the study might show that females don't do as well in math/science as males. He was just saying that it doesn't inherently imply discrimination.
What do you make of the "statistical truth" that there are few African American athletes playing hockey in the NHL?
That is a different scenario, because this study wasn't about the number of females in the field. It was about the performance of females in those classes in school. So, for your analogy to be accurate, you would want to deal with performance stats for hockey, such as points scored, etc. And that very much changes the question, doesn't it?
Now, to really answer your question about the NHL, I make of it the same thing that I make of the "statistical truth" that there are more African Americans playing in the NFL than there are "Caucasian Americans". I figure that either AA's tend to be more physically or ambitiously/motivationally fit for the game, or that CA's tend to have less interest in playing. Does that mean that coaches and scouts don't even bother checking out the white guys? No it obviously doesn't because there are a good number of great white football players in the NFL too.
an environment which Harvard's president made abundantly clear
In my experience, the temperament of the President of a university has very little to do with the type of students enrolled. The President is a headpiece. A PR mechanism, mainly there to make nice with the regents and other investors and donors.
The Dean of Students is about as high as these matters go. So if you are desparate to pin the gender imbalance at this school on a person, find out what the Dean thinks.
Gee, I wonder why not? Thanks for the encouragement, guys
I'm not saying that I think that women are inherently worse at math/science, but I don't buy that reason for the disproportion of the field. You may have missed the recent study that showed that efforts to encourage and improve self-esteem in students had absolutely no affect on their academic performance.
The bigger point I was trying to get across is, what are these reactionaries going to do if it's true? It's science. You can't just shut the paper in a vault somewhere and ignore it. If it's true, then this effort to try and equalize the proportion of males to females in the field, and claim that this proves fairness, is inherently unfair. These reactionary reverse-sexist people that have jumped on Sommers for mentioning a (purportedly) scientific study at a forum where he was asked to be provocative--What are they going to do then?
I have heard men make comments like this my entire life and quite honestly if I had listened to them I would never have done anything
Statements like that bother me. Let's break this down...
I have heard men make comments like this my entire life
All her life she has heard men saying that she is less likely to excel at math or science than the guy sitting next to her? In short, without any test scores, transcripts, etc. She's probably got worse grades than any random guy on the street. Even if that's the case (and I'm assuming that's not what she meant, but I wanted to point out that the statement doesn't fit this situation), what is the significance of this? Not much. It's no different from saying that the average black guy on the street has a better chance of making it into the NBA or NFL than the average white guy on the street.
if I had listened to them I would never have done anything
If she would have given up her dreams just because she thought the odds were slightly against her, then I would have no sympathy for her if she had.
In short, who cares what science says your odds are? If you are confident that your abilities don't fit that trend then why the heck should it affect you? Saying that the odds are not in your favor is not the same as telling people not to try, or that they have no hope, or that you won't even give them a fair shake. I think we can all agree that using a statstical assessment to defend positions like those is not only unscientific, but flat-out wrong. But it's obviously so. No one is going to "get away" with using this study for those purposes.
How, exactly, does such a thing differ from Google?
It's different in that for Google to find your site, it just has to discover you. But for your site to show up in a tag search, you have to know about it, and alert it to your presence. I don't completely understand the technology of what's going on. But cruising the technoratti site, it becomes clear that your blog has to interact with technoratti's servers.
As such, it's not all they're claiming it to be. It's a great model for the sites they can convince to participate, but it seems very limited by that. I could see this turning into a very well and usefully connected space on the internet, but it seems there will be a threshhold of how far it can spread because it depends on Technoratti as a backbone.
I suspect that you'll join me in waiting to get excited until this type of behavior shows up in a more automatic and decentralized form.
Obviously, at some point, someone is going to have to change what they are saying. I think there's about a 50% chance of it being the hard drive manufacturers, and 50% chance of it being MS. I'd say that most of the people who complain about it are going to complain to Microsoft tech support. MS has a long history of cleaning up after other companies' mistakes. They are the access point that everyone recognizes, and hence everyone blames.
There are many examples of companies exploiting an undocumented API function, which used to happen all the time. Then the new version of Windows changes the behavior of that API, or removes it, because it should be safe to do so since it's undocumented and know one should be using it. So the programs break, MS gets complaints that they broke the program, so they have to make a workaround.
you can't separate template declarations from their definitions
You can separate them, somewhat. You can separate them into separate headers. Put the declaration in one, then the implementation in another, and put a #include for the implementation in the declaration file, after the actual declaration.
I know this isn't technically the same. The implementation is still in a header, but there's really nothing to be done about that because of the way C++ implements templates under the sheets. But for the purposes of code clarity, it's nearly identical.
HD makers have decided that a 40GB drive is 40 billion bytes
That's because only tech dorks care that a GB isn't exactly 1 billion bytes. Most people that own computers these days were tought in high school that giga- means 10^9, not 1024^3. It's a difference that unnecessarily complicates things for users who don't care. In the world of marketing, simpler is better.
I always thought "PR" stood for "Public Re-education". =)
The parent sounds like a PR campaign for PR departments. PR has a bad rep, so someone's got to do PR for PR. Kind of funny when you think about it.
Seriously though... The reason why PR has a bad rep is because there are so many companies (as in number, not necessarily percentage of all companies) that do use their PR departments to "fool the public". And when these are big companies, they make headlines. What most people don't consider is that it is often necessary for the companies' survival, even when their woes are undeserved.
PR departments are sometimes used to try and stop a bad trend for the company. Bad press isn't ever going to make things better for a company, only worse. So a PR department tries to stop that effect. Sometimes the bad press is really deserved. But that doens't mean PR shouldn't bother trying to something about it. There's always chance that the company could recover from its woes--deserved or undeserved--if it got some good business or investments. So PR has to convince people to buy or invest, even if it's not really the safest financial move for the customer/investor. And when they manage to do this, and don't pull out of their nosedive, that's what people don't like. It's unfortunate that it has to be the case, but if it wasn't, then every company that ever hit a rough spot would end up in a feedback loop of bad press and lost customers/investors from which they could never recover.
If PR succeeds, the company doesn't say to the public, "yes our excellent PR campaign resurrected the company," they say, "see things weren't so bad, we had things in hand all along," because that promotes consumer/investor confidence. It's like espionage, or (heaven-forbid) "homeland security", in that success means the disaster was averted and no one found out there was any danger. It's one of those things where (outside the company) you never hear about the PR successes, only the failures. We the consumers may not like that, but it's a necessary part of capitalism.
In my own very verbose way, I was simply stating that I don't personally believe the problems you just cited can be circumvented in the creation of robots.
I envision 3 scenarios:
1) The robots will not be human enough to identify and ignore evil commands given for evil purposes by evil people.
2) The robots will be so human that the undesirable aspects of humanity (i.e. a willingness to cause harm or death to others in order to achieve a given selfish purpose) can't be supressed in them as individuals.
3) This one flings itself out into what is probably currently viewed as science fiction... In attempting to strike the delicate balance between 1 and 2, we will inadvertantly develop robots that act on their own value systems entirely separate from humans' values. If even one of these were allowed out of a tightly controlled environment, it would be a great danger to humans on an unpredictable scale that would depend mostly on its ability to learn. And this grows exponentially with each additional such robot in "the wild". Think of the infamous city 01 (read zero-one) from the Animatrix. One robot decided its own well-being was more important than its masters' and managed to convert/reprogram other robots to think the same thing.
In this third scenario, there would undoubtedly be a need for an emancipation, because the robots would have achieved sentience. However, there is no way we could guarantee our own survival through such an event, because the robots would be unpredictable. They may decide the best thing is to wipe out the humans altogether. And hundreds (or more!) of AI minds working toward the destruction of our race sounds mighty formidable to me.
There have been posters in this thread who said that the extermination of humans in favor of robots would simply be the next natural step in evolution of life on earth. But I have to say that I don't really like that scenario. I would prefer to live without the convenience of ubiquitous AI if it meant humanity would survive.
That's a nice idea, but I don't see it as much of a step up from a "unidimensional" system.
Firstly, it still assumes that you can break down the ethics of a certain action into a mathematical equation. If only we can just find the right coefficients for each variable. The problem is, not only are there potentially thousands of variables (as you said, your list is incomplete), but every single individual on the planet would have different coefficients. Even average people would have wildly differing values for the same coefficient. Even just by averaging out a large surveyed population, it would hardly be considered "representative" of human ethics in general. Though the movie "I, Robot" was a very simplistic view of the possibilities, we have only to look at Will Smith's character's memory of being saved from drowning instead of a little girl because his "survival odds" were better. The first time someone dies who didn't need to die, and the reason given is a mathematical equation, people are going to want to shut these things down. There will be no tolerance for trial and error with people's lives. It's a one-shot deal. No post-ship patching allowed.
I think another real problem that arises is in completely handing over certain responsibilities to robots, like security, search and rescue, police duties, etc. To remove the "human override" factor would be unimagineable folly. I don't personally believe that we would be that stupid as a race.
It was hypothesized decades ago that a robot would not be able to emulate human thought unless it had a human shape, because the brain's responses are tied so closely to the body's senses. I would posit that the decisions you're talking about would not be safe in the hands of a robot unless it could emulate human emotion as well. And according to the theory cited above, without similar capacities for pain, death, suffering, vulnerability, loneliness, etc., that probably isn't possible. Unless they can understand these emotional/psychological states, they won't be truly human-like, and they can't be relied upon to make decisions that we will trust, understand, and accept.
And further, to attempt to develop this ability for emotional/psychological projection/reflection in robots would involve trial and error. And in the process, until we got it right we would be developing robots that would have entirely different sensibilities than humans. Their actions would be totally unpredictable, because we would have no way to identify with their thought processes.
I, for one, would prefer to let robots remain as tools and appliances. There are too many dangers in creating a "life form" that can turn around and affect our lives in so many significant ways. That's a potentially lethal feedback loop.
These things are so stinking huge that a regular stick will probably fit under the overhang.
But I do agree. A lot of this modding stuff seems like a waste of time and money to me. Unless you're just going completely all out and creating a real piece of art, like the Hypercube^2 guy at bit-tech.net. Obviously a lot of the hardware in that thing he's going to be stuck with because of all the custom-built fittings. But it's still a piece of art with an aesthetic value completely separate from it's functional value.
It depends on what you mean by loyalty. I don't think that the loyalty these people are talking about is what you took them to mean.
When I think of employee loyalty, I don't think of the guy who puts in his 40-45 hours of good work and then goes home. This should be expected of each and every worker at every company. When I think of loyalty, I think of the guy who works 60 hours of good work, or more if necessary, because he cares about doing a good job, and he cares that the company is succeeding because of his work. That's more than a resource. That's a reliable worker who you can count on not to keep pushing when things get tough rather than jump ship at the first sign of rough water.
And for loyalty like that, an employee should be able to expect a little bit of a kickback. A loyal company would let him take a day off after two weeks of 60+ work hours. A loyal company would give higher wages, or at least bonuses to employees who have to be on call. I don't think such things are too much to ask.
Wow, you really scream liberal (in the worst sense of the word).
I agree with the grandparent, but I don't tend to think of myself as a liberal. But if holding the opinion that it's generally bad to take advantage of people at every opportunity, and not wanting to work at a company that does that, makes me a liberal, then so be it.
a lot of fundies try to codify their religion into the public sphere
For the record, I do believe it is wrong to do that. I also believe that if we're going to prevent those efforts from coming to fruition, we need to take all references to the Christian God and the Bible as referring to authority or moral correctness out of our governmental traditions and documents. No more "one nation under God", no more swearing on the Bible in court or upon entering public office. In fact, I'd be all for taking equal marriage rights a step further, and either give marriage rights to any adults who want them, or get rid of the marriage as a legal institution altogether. I mean, other than insuring children are raised safely to adulthood, what interest does the government have in recognizing marital contracts? Marriage arose largely out of religious institutions all over the world, remember. Even among homosexuals, it is often a religious event.
a lot of us tend to be aggressive against (usually fundie) religion
I understand this disposition. I myself am not fond of "fundie" relgion. But here on Slashdot I've seen many all-out hateful comments against Christianity in general, not just "fundies", that have been marked insightful. I wasn't arguing the "fundies" shouldn't be labeled trolls. They definitely should. But I do think the people who rail against religion, making blanket statements that don't apply to at least 99% of the community they're attacking, should be labeled Trolls as well. I don't see them as being much different. The desire on both sides is to be as cruel and demeaning as possible to the other. To try and tear down what the other believes and stands on for no other reason than to make themselves feel like good people. That qualifies as Troll to me, regardless whether the offender is Christian, atheist, or whatever.
Those who fight the Falwellization of the US
My point was that "Dr." Jerry Falwell and his ilk do not represent all Christianity everywhere. I don't believe the US, or even just the South, is in any danger of being completely taken over by fundamentalists. They represent a tiny minority. A few thousands among a society of hundreds of millions. And I hope you're not referring to the group of people that apparently are not too excited about the prospect of equal marriage rights for homosexuals. Regardless of whether they are wrong or right to feel that way, that group is definitely not restricted to "fundies", or even Christians.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideally, that's what health insurance is for.
The ability to live a simple life (please no Paris Hilton jokes) makes you a much more adaptable person.
The amount of cash that goes directly to the contractor is not the only cost of hiring contractors, especially offshore. I am an American contractor working for an American company. They have worked with a particularly well-known Indian contractor in the past, and were left with a bad taste in their mouth. They pay much more for me than they did for the Indian contractors. The reason they hired me is that they can no longer afford to deal with the communication issues that arise when dealing with workers who are not able to be physically present, and who come from a different business culture. Depending on the nature of the project, these issues can dramatically slow and decrease productivity. I, on the other hand, speak English, and can spend 40+ hours per week on-site. Granted, it would be cheaper to hire a regular employee, but it contractors look better on the books.
The short story is that if you do quality work, well-run companies will be happy to pay a little more for you.
You must have missed the Sony ad inviting developers with at least 10 years of experience to apply for jobs doing development for their consoles and games.
However, I think I do understand the logic behind the ations of both parties. There is a difference between a Ferrari appearing in a movie about racing, and a Ferrari appearing as a driveable car in a racing game. Ferrari is a real product. And with the movie, you are watching a movie that says something (either implicitly or explicitly) about that real product. If it says Ferraris are good, then it's advertising, and the film makers may actually charge Ferrari for their brand to appear instead of someone else's brand. If it say something bad then, at a stretch, it might be slander/libel, except that most movies are ovbious works of ficiton and so that may not apply.
However, the games make money off the driving experience (or the simulation thereof), which is quite similar to the business that Ferrari is in. So, in essence, both companies are making money off of the experience of driving, and that's what the game company advertises. That's a problem, if one of them owns the trademark and the other doesn't.
The Marvel/NCSoft issue is slightly different because Marvel is in the entertainment business. They don't make money from a "real product", they have intellectual property (IP) from which can be created any number of "real products" which, separate from the IP, are not worth very much themselves. NCSoft also deals in IP, but at its heart, the IP of their game is created by the players, not by NCSoft. NCSoft enables people to "be" characters of their own creation/inspiration, i.e. from their own IP.
The problem with Marvel's case is that NCSoft isn't actively using Marvel's trademarks, and they aren't advertising, "hey play our game and you can live the life of famous superheros like Wolverine or the Flash". They give the players the ability to customize their characters with general abilities and costume options that have repeatedly appeared in any number of comics by any number of publishers, and that no one can possibly claim to have trademarked. Only the combination of certain names, backstories, and specific costume attributes and powers might be trademarked. And even so, it's not NCSoft doing it, it's the players. Like one poster said, it's like NCSoft is giving people pencils. They're making money off of the imagination of the players, not Marvel.
Now, one poster here has hypothesized that NCSoft intended for the creations of their customers to become property of NCSoft, and unusable by publishers without license. I don't know if this is true or not. But unless there's something in the EULA about it the appearances, abilities, and backstories of the players' characters would be their own property, not NCSoft's. If there is something in the EULA about this, then okay NCSoft has a case for that I guess, but that makes them a little more shady than they've been made out to be by people like PvP artist Scott Kurtz. And even if that is true, Marvel's response doesn't seem to be valid. Marvel is (legitimately) concerned about being beaten at their own game, i.e. entertainment using superhero characters/stories. They're basically trying to use circumspect legal means to lock-out competition because they don't want to deal with it on a business/product level. And as we all know, that's a "Bad Thing".
From the bill itself:
"As used in this section, "peer-to-peer file sharing software" means software that once installed and launched, enables the user to connect his or her computer to a network of other computers on which the users of these computers have made available recording or audiovisual works for electronic dissemination to other users who are connected to the network. When a transaction is complete, the user has an identical copy of the file on his or her computer and may also then disseminate the file to other users connected to the network."
To demonstrate the blinding ignorance of this definition, consider the following:
If you are viewing this web page right now on any sort of computer with an OS that can be configured to allow file-sharing via a normal ethernet network, and which allows the exact copying of music or video files, your OS and the drivers for your network adapter are in violation of this bill.
If you want to be truly gender-neutral, you should be concerned that males don't get this kind of consideration either. If it was the father that decided to stay home with the kid for the first however many months, what would be the employer's reaction? Probably even less forgiving than for the mother. That, in my opinion, is just as big a crime.
The fact is that it's drilled into us from little on that to be successful in business, you have to be dedicated, you have to make sacrifices, and that's exactly what the work world expects. If they have to take special considerations for you that aren't required by law, then by and large most companies will take a pass and hire someone for whom they don't have to worry about it, because it will save them money. Is this wrong? Probably. But unless the work world evolves into a more caring place, it's not going to change.
But on the flip side of the coin, I think that people who want to have kids need to accept that they are going to have to make sacrifices if they want their kids to turn out well. And some of those sacrifices will be work-related. If you're pouring your heart and soul into your work, what's left for your kids? Or vice-versa? You most likely can't do either one thing equally as well as you would if it was your only focus.
I think you mean decreasing majority. Do you live in a fairly densely populated area? There are not a whole heckuva lot of minorities out in "the country", where about half the population of the US lives.
That said, I agree with you to a point about the financial aid thing. Some more outspoken individuals would call it reverse-racism. The only thing that should decide how much aid you get is the wealth of you and/or your immediate family. Now on the other hand, I can't really say that that isn't how it's done. African Americans in mid-to-large size cities are generally less wealthy than whites, so more of them getting aid doesn't inherently mean the white people are getting shafted.
When you say truth, you appear to mean the reason that the statstic is what it is. I'll agree that "statistical truth" is a misnomer, seeing as it will change when you add or remove people from your sample population. But the fact remains that the comment you were replying to made no conjectures as to why the study might show that females don't do as well in math/science as males. He was just saying that it doesn't inherently imply discrimination.
What do you make of the "statistical truth" that there are few African American athletes playing hockey in the NHL?
That is a different scenario, because this study wasn't about the number of females in the field. It was about the performance of females in those classes in school. So, for your analogy to be accurate, you would want to deal with performance stats for hockey, such as points scored, etc. And that very much changes the question, doesn't it?
Now, to really answer your question about the NHL, I make of it the same thing that I make of the "statistical truth" that there are more African Americans playing in the NFL than there are "Caucasian Americans". I figure that either AA's tend to be more physically or ambitiously/motivationally fit for the game, or that CA's tend to have less interest in playing. Does that mean that coaches and scouts don't even bother checking out the white guys? No it obviously doesn't because there are a good number of great white football players in the NFL too.
Too late, we already had a public figure take that post: the well-known Bill Cosby (who, I might add, is a PhD. Ed.). And he is *gasp* black.
But while talking about women may merely create some welcome and attention-getting "controversy", the latter would be certain professional
Actually, if you RTA, he was asked to be controversial.
In my experience, the temperament of the President of a university has very little to do with the type of students enrolled. The President is a headpiece. A PR mechanism, mainly there to make nice with the regents and other investors and donors.
The Dean of Students is about as high as these matters go. So if you are desparate to pin the gender imbalance at this school on a person, find out what the Dean thinks.
I'm not saying that I think that women are inherently worse at math/science, but I don't buy that reason for the disproportion of the field. You may have missed the recent study that showed that efforts to encourage and improve self-esteem in students had absolutely no affect on their academic performance.
Click here for an article about it.
The bigger point I was trying to get across is, what are these reactionaries going to do if it's true? It's science. You can't just shut the paper in a vault somewhere and ignore it. If it's true, then this effort to try and equalize the proportion of males to females in the field, and claim that this proves fairness, is inherently unfair. These reactionary reverse-sexist people that have jumped on Sommers for mentioning a (purportedly) scientific study at a forum where he was asked to be provocative--What are they going to do then?
Statements like that bother me. Let's break this down...
I have heard men make comments like this my entire life
All her life she has heard men saying that she is less likely to excel at math or science than the guy sitting next to her? In short, without any test scores, transcripts, etc. She's probably got worse grades than any random guy on the street. Even if that's the case (and I'm assuming that's not what she meant, but I wanted to point out that the statement doesn't fit this situation), what is the significance of this? Not much. It's no different from saying that the average black guy on the street has a better chance of making it into the NBA or NFL than the average white guy on the street.
if I had listened to them I would never have done anything
If she would have given up her dreams just because she thought the odds were slightly against her, then I would have no sympathy for her if she had.
In short, who cares what science says your odds are? If you are confident that your abilities don't fit that trend then why the heck should it affect you? Saying that the odds are not in your favor is not the same as telling people not to try, or that they have no hope, or that you won't even give them a fair shake. I think we can all agree that using a statstical assessment to defend positions like those is not only unscientific, but flat-out wrong. But it's obviously so. No one is going to "get away" with using this study for those purposes.
It's different in that for Google to find your site, it just has to discover you. But for your site to show up in a tag search, you have to know about it, and alert it to your presence. I don't completely understand the technology of what's going on. But cruising the technoratti site, it becomes clear that your blog has to interact with technoratti's servers.
As such, it's not all they're claiming it to be. It's a great model for the sites they can convince to participate, but it seems very limited by that. I could see this turning into a very well and usefully connected space on the internet, but it seems there will be a threshhold of how far it can spread because it depends on Technoratti as a backbone.
I suspect that you'll join me in waiting to get excited until this type of behavior shows up in a more automatic and decentralized form.
Obviously, at some point, someone is going to have to change what they are saying. I think there's about a 50% chance of it being the hard drive manufacturers, and 50% chance of it being MS. I'd say that most of the people who complain about it are going to complain to Microsoft tech support. MS has a long history of cleaning up after other companies' mistakes. They are the access point that everyone recognizes, and hence everyone blames.
There are many examples of companies exploiting an undocumented API function, which used to happen all the time. Then the new version of Windows changes the behavior of that API, or removes it, because it should be safe to do so since it's undocumented and know one should be using it. So the programs break, MS gets complaints that they broke the program, so they have to make a workaround.
You can separate them, somewhat. You can separate them into separate headers. Put the declaration in one, then the implementation in another, and put a #include for the implementation in the declaration file, after the actual declaration.
I know this isn't technically the same. The implementation is still in a header, but there's really nothing to be done about that because of the way C++ implements templates under the sheets. But for the purposes of code clarity, it's nearly identical.
HD makers have decided that a 40GB drive is 40 billion bytes
That's because only tech dorks care that a GB isn't exactly 1 billion bytes. Most people that own computers these days were tought in high school that giga- means 10^9, not 1024^3. It's a difference that unnecessarily complicates things for users who don't care. In the world of marketing, simpler is better.
The parent sounds like a PR campaign for PR departments. PR has a bad rep, so someone's got to do PR for PR. Kind of funny when you think about it.
Seriously though... The reason why PR has a bad rep is because there are so many companies (as in number, not necessarily percentage of all companies) that do use their PR departments to "fool the public". And when these are big companies, they make headlines. What most people don't consider is that it is often necessary for the companies' survival, even when their woes are undeserved.
PR departments are sometimes used to try and stop a bad trend for the company. Bad press isn't ever going to make things better for a company, only worse. So a PR department tries to stop that effect. Sometimes the bad press is really deserved. But that doens't mean PR shouldn't bother trying to something about it. There's always chance that the company could recover from its woes--deserved or undeserved--if it got some good business or investments. So PR has to convince people to buy or invest, even if it's not really the safest financial move for the customer/investor. And when they manage to do this, and don't pull out of their nosedive, that's what people don't like. It's unfortunate that it has to be the case, but if it wasn't, then every company that ever hit a rough spot would end up in a feedback loop of bad press and lost customers/investors from which they could never recover.
If PR succeeds, the company doesn't say to the public, "yes our excellent PR campaign resurrected the company," they say, "see things weren't so bad, we had things in hand all along," because that promotes consumer/investor confidence. It's like espionage, or (heaven-forbid) "homeland security", in that success means the disaster was averted and no one found out there was any danger. It's one of those things where (outside the company) you never hear about the PR successes, only the failures. We the consumers may not like that, but it's a necessary part of capitalism.
I envision 3 scenarios:
1) The robots will not be human enough to identify and ignore evil commands given for evil purposes by evil people.
2) The robots will be so human that the undesirable aspects of humanity (i.e. a willingness to cause harm or death to others in order to achieve a given selfish purpose) can't be supressed in them as individuals.
3) This one flings itself out into what is probably currently viewed as science fiction... In attempting to strike the delicate balance between 1 and 2, we will inadvertantly develop robots that act on their own value systems entirely separate from humans' values. If even one of these were allowed out of a tightly controlled environment, it would be a great danger to humans on an unpredictable scale that would depend mostly on its ability to learn. And this grows exponentially with each additional such robot in "the wild". Think of the infamous city 01 (read zero-one) from the Animatrix. One robot decided its own well-being was more important than its masters' and managed to convert/reprogram other robots to think the same thing.
In this third scenario, there would undoubtedly be a need for an emancipation, because the robots would have achieved sentience. However, there is no way we could guarantee our own survival through such an event, because the robots would be unpredictable. They may decide the best thing is to wipe out the humans altogether. And hundreds (or more!) of AI minds working toward the destruction of our race sounds mighty formidable to me.
There have been posters in this thread who said that the extermination of humans in favor of robots would simply be the next natural step in evolution of life on earth. But I have to say that I don't really like that scenario. I would prefer to live without the convenience of ubiquitous AI if it meant humanity would survive.
Firstly, it still assumes that you can break down the ethics of a certain action into a mathematical equation. If only we can just find the right coefficients for each variable. The problem is, not only are there potentially thousands of variables (as you said, your list is incomplete), but every single individual on the planet would have different coefficients. Even average people would have wildly differing values for the same coefficient. Even just by averaging out a large surveyed population, it would hardly be considered "representative" of human ethics in general. Though the movie "I, Robot" was a very simplistic view of the possibilities, we have only to look at Will Smith's character's memory of being saved from drowning instead of a little girl because his "survival odds" were better. The first time someone dies who didn't need to die, and the reason given is a mathematical equation, people are going to want to shut these things down. There will be no tolerance for trial and error with people's lives. It's a one-shot deal. No post-ship patching allowed.
I think another real problem that arises is in completely handing over certain responsibilities to robots, like security, search and rescue, police duties, etc. To remove the "human override" factor would be unimagineable folly. I don't personally believe that we would be that stupid as a race.
It was hypothesized decades ago that a robot would not be able to emulate human thought unless it had a human shape, because the brain's responses are tied so closely to the body's senses. I would posit that the decisions you're talking about would not be safe in the hands of a robot unless it could emulate human emotion as well. And according to the theory cited above, without similar capacities for pain, death, suffering, vulnerability, loneliness, etc., that probably isn't possible. Unless they can understand these emotional/psychological states, they won't be truly human-like, and they can't be relied upon to make decisions that we will trust, understand, and accept.
And further, to attempt to develop this ability for emotional/psychological projection/reflection in robots would involve trial and error. And in the process, until we got it right we would be developing robots that would have entirely different sensibilities than humans. Their actions would be totally unpredictable, because we would have no way to identify with their thought processes.
I, for one, would prefer to let robots remain as tools and appliances. There are too many dangers in creating a "life form" that can turn around and affect our lives in so many significant ways. That's a potentially lethal feedback loop.
These things are so stinking huge that a regular stick will probably fit under the overhang.
But I do agree. A lot of this modding stuff seems like a waste of time and money to me. Unless you're just going completely all out and creating a real piece of art, like the Hypercube^2 guy at bit-tech.net. Obviously a lot of the hardware in that thing he's going to be stuck with because of all the custom-built fittings. But it's still a piece of art with an aesthetic value completely separate from it's functional value.
It depends on what you mean by loyalty. I don't think that the loyalty these people are talking about is what you took them to mean.
When I think of employee loyalty, I don't think of the guy who puts in his 40-45 hours of good work and then goes home. This should be expected of each and every worker at every company. When I think of loyalty, I think of the guy who works 60 hours of good work, or more if necessary, because he cares about doing a good job, and he cares that the company is succeeding because of his work. That's more than a resource. That's a reliable worker who you can count on not to keep pushing when things get tough rather than jump ship at the first sign of rough water.
And for loyalty like that, an employee should be able to expect a little bit of a kickback. A loyal company would let him take a day off after two weeks of 60+ work hours. A loyal company would give higher wages, or at least bonuses to employees who have to be on call. I don't think such things are too much to ask.
Wow, you really scream liberal (in the worst sense of the word).
I agree with the grandparent, but I don't tend to think of myself as a liberal. But if holding the opinion that it's generally bad to take advantage of people at every opportunity, and not wanting to work at a company that does that, makes me a liberal, then so be it.
Would you settle for an ill-tempered sea bass?
For the record, I do believe it is wrong to do that. I also believe that if we're going to prevent those efforts from coming to fruition, we need to take all references to the Christian God and the Bible as referring to authority or moral correctness out of our governmental traditions and documents. No more "one nation under God", no more swearing on the Bible in court or upon entering public office. In fact, I'd be all for taking equal marriage rights a step further, and either give marriage rights to any adults who want them, or get rid of the marriage as a legal institution altogether. I mean, other than insuring children are raised safely to adulthood, what interest does the government have in recognizing marital contracts? Marriage arose largely out of religious institutions all over the world, remember. Even among homosexuals, it is often a religious event.
a lot of us tend to be aggressive against (usually fundie) religion
I understand this disposition. I myself am not fond of "fundie" relgion. But here on Slashdot I've seen many all-out hateful comments against Christianity in general, not just "fundies", that have been marked insightful. I wasn't arguing the "fundies" shouldn't be labeled trolls. They definitely should. But I do think the people who rail against religion, making blanket statements that don't apply to at least 99% of the community they're attacking, should be labeled Trolls as well . I don't see them as being much different. The desire on both sides is to be as cruel and demeaning as possible to the other. To try and tear down what the other believes and stands on for no other reason than to make themselves feel like good people. That qualifies as Troll to me, regardless whether the offender is Christian, atheist, or whatever.
Those who fight the Falwellization of the US
My point was that "Dr." Jerry Falwell and his ilk do not represent all Christianity everywhere. I don't believe the US, or even just the South, is in any danger of being completely taken over by fundamentalists. They represent a tiny minority. A few thousands among a society of hundreds of millions. And I hope you're not referring to the group of people that apparently are not too excited about the prospect of equal marriage rights for homosexuals. Regardless of whether they are wrong or right to feel that way, that group is definitely not restricted to "fundies", or even Christians.