A biological virus is a just instructions that say "copy me" to a cell.
A computer virus is just instructions that say "copy me" to a computer.
You can imagine something similar with message received by SETI. And actual a good message aimed at an extraterrestrial intelligence would need to be very target independent, unlike computer or biological viruses.
E.g. the Arecibo message aims at conveying a fair bit of information to any civilisation which picks it up -
Now if you can explain concepts like "we're carbon based life from the third planet in the system. There are about 4 billion of us and also about 4 billion base pairs in our genome which is stored in DNA" with a couple of k of bits it's not out of the question to teach them how to build something with a few million bits. And from there it's not that hard to explain how to build something to copy the message. So messages to unknown civilisations are already target independent.
Maybe a benign civilisation sent out a non viral message designed to get other civilisations communicating and it mutated into a viral one. Or maybe a paranoid civilisation created a viral message to nuke any competition.
I've done it multiple times before, and it just gets met with anger, crying and denials that I've read it
I clicked through a couple of pages of your comments and didn't see it.
So you've set your signature to say Damore said something so terrible Google had to fire him to protect the feelings of its employees, but you won't say what that is and when anyone asks you you accuse them of being snowflakes?
We are in a position now where a group of lawyers and administrators are deciding what published scientific research can be cited and what cannot.
We've been there for ages - it started with climate change. The data is noisy and there are multiple interpretations but the left decided anyone citing anything but the most apocalyptic predictions - which conveniently provided a justification for the sort of policies they wanted anyway - was A Denier Of The Science.
Admittedly even with that it didn't get quite to the point of having lawyers and administrators decide what could and could not be cited, and that's a new low.
Oddly enough Noam Chomsky made the same point when he defended Faurisson, a Holocaust denier
A professor of French literature was suspended from teaching on grounds that he could not be protected from violence, after privately printing pamphlets questioning the existence of gas chambers. He was then brought to trial for "falsification of History," and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it. Later he was beaten practically to death by Jewish terrorists. As of now, the European and other intellectuals have not expressed any opposition to these scandals; rather, they have sought to disguise their profound commitment to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine by following the same models, trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies.
Now I'm no fan of Chomsky - his record on Cambodia is awful - but he's got a point here. Actually he's pretty critical of identity politics too, albeit because it is based on race and gender and not on class. I.e. he's a old school Marxist.
Mind you class based organisation allows right wing populists to trounce left wing elitists, so maybe it's not all bad. Also I think Chomsky's of a generation on the left which is about to be no platformed en masse for their heresy.
-- Damore's document is so bad, the only arguments left to fans are spurious claims that "you didn't read it".
Bollocks.
His critics accuse him of saying that women were incapable of engineering or that diversity was bad thing or of creating a hostile working environment for women. Here's what he actually said
Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
I.e. even if the average X for women is lower than the average X for parameter men, it doesn't mean that all women have a lower X than all men, so you shouldn't discriminate against women.
On the other hand if you're recruiting a group where high X is desirable, it will have more men than women even if you don't discriminate.
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices: * Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race * A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate * Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias) * Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google.
He's accusing Google of 'incentivising illegal discrimination' - i.e. discriminating against whites and men in favour of non whites and women.
Suggestions
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
My concrete suggestions are to:
De-moralize diversity. * As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."
Stop alienating conservatives. * Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently. * In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express them
Another possibility is that once we viruses sent in messages we receive by SETI.
If the message tells you how to do something, the odds are that thing will be to send messages as efficiently as possible because messages like that would be more common than ones that helpfully sent the Encyclopedia Galactica.
If I was writing Contact the machine the aliens sent the blueprint for would replicate to form a bunch of copies, disassembling the Earth/planets for materials in the process, and then surround the sun as a Dyson swarm and use all its energy output to send very powerful copies of the message to distant stars forever.
Well if we follow the Japanese example we'll reorganize our society on alien lines, get technological parity and then go into full on 'conquer the universe' mode
This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
This is a problem that is "outside the context" as it is generally not considered until it occurs, and the capacity to actually conceive of or consider the OCP in the first place may not be possible or very limited (i.e., the majority of the group's population may not have the knowledge or ability to realize that the OCP can arise, or assume it is extremely unlikely). An example of OCP is an event in which a civilization does not consider the possibility that a much more technologically advanced society can exist, and then encounters one. The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
tl;dr "When judges make rulings I agree with they are impartially ruling based solely on law. When they make rulings I disagree with they are allowing their political biases to get in the way. Here are some links to an Indian news site(?), a progressive legal organisation, the left wing Vox, usnews, a left wing British newspaper, a left wing rant from Esquire and the left wing Daily Kos which I'll add in randomly to make my post look well cited"
By the way it's pretty clear what Washington thought about homosexuality
In March 1778, Lieut. Enslin was brought to trial before a court-martial. According to General Washington's report: "...Lieutt. Enslin of Colo. Malcolm's Regiment tried for attempting to commit sodomy..." Washington's secretary continues to describe the results of the trial: "His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves the sentence and with Abhorrence & Detestation of such Infamous Crimes orders Lieut. Enslin to be drummed out of Camp tomorrow morning...."
Oddly enough I read up on the Founder's views on abortion and they're rather nuanced
A different window into colonial attitudes toward abortion can be found in Corenlia Hughes Dayton's "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth Century New England Village." In her 1991 monograph which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Dayton examined a case from 1742 that occurred in the village of Pomfret, Connecticut, where 19-year-old Sarah Grosvenor died in a bungled abortion urged on her by her 27-year-old lover Amasa Sessions. Magistrates filed charges against both Sessions and the "doctor of physick" who mangled the operation, but Dayton points out the legal complaints were not for performing the abortion as such (which was legal) but for killing the mother. The whole episode was surrounded with a hush of secrecy, in an era when "fornication" was not only illegal but culturally taboo. Abortion, in the colonial context, carried a stigma of shame not because it ended the life of a fetus but because it was associated with illicit intercourse-helping to explain the outrage of Franklin's two characters Celia Shortface and Martha Careful when their private remedies for ending a pregnancy receive a public airing.
I think it's clear that the modern left and the people who founded America had very different views - fornication i.e. sex outside marriage was illegal back then. Something which would hardly endear them to the Pussy Hat wearers. On the other hand abortion was legal up to the fourth month of pregnancy - i.e. 17 weeks or so. Interestingly that's not that much different to the current UK limit
Even if you're uneasy about a ban on abortion that seems like an extreme position. I thought the Democrats had given up on the idea that some persons don't have rights after slavery was abolished...
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices: * Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race * A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate * Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias) * Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google....
Suggestions
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
My concrete suggestions are to:
De-moralize diversity. * As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."
Stop alienating conservatives. * Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently. * In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves. * Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Confront Google's biases. * I've mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that. * I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.
Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.
* These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.
If you say that you agree with what your employer is trying to do but they way they are doing it 'incentivising illegal discrimination' and suggest legal alternatives that makes you a whistleblower. CA has a whistleblower protection law -
Because that really matters with lawyers. It's literally impossible for them to issue a legal opinion based on case law, judicial opinions and statutes without applying their own political bias.
The left oppose the notion of originalism. E.g. Roe v Wade decided people had always had a right to abortion because of an invented 'right to privacy'. The SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage was based on the notion that it was an inevitable consequence of Due Process under the 14th Amendment. Even though the people who wrote the original documents didn't believe in a right to abortion or a right to gay marriage.
Judicial activism is always about allowing your political views to alter the way you read the law. It's a sort of 'ends justifies the means' approach to law. If you agree with the ends, then the means
- twisting or inverting the meaning of the actual words in the law or inventing new rights that aren't actually there - doesn't matter.
This is in of itself a good reason to distrust the US left. E.g. look at the gay marriage case. Both Obama and Clinton run on a platform of opposing it, but Obama set up a case which would legalise it and then celebrated. Even if left wing politicians say they won't do something, they may appoint judges who will twist the law to do it and then celebrate the result.
Now I'm not all that fussed about gay marriage. However even there you can see that the left will use it as a cudgel to beat the right - e.g. Christian bakers will be asked to bake a "I support gay marriage cake" and sued if they refuse.
By the way if Gorsuch ruled in a way that you didn't like would you say "Well he's just interpreting the law. You can't say he's allowing his political beliefs to get in the way"? I'm guessing not, because he's an originalist and not a believer that the role of a judge is to invent new rights. if someone's political views explicitly include a different method of how to interpret law - e.g. 'Improving rights' vs 'Originalism' then those political views obviously alter how they'd rule when they were a judge.
Look at the SCOTUS. On the politicized cases the justices vote in a very close to a bloc according to the party which appointed them.
If political views don't matter why is it so important to Americans that their party is the one appointing the next SCOTUS justice?
Couldn't agree more. This thread is full of people saying effectively that if you disagree with the Blank Slate view of humanity, you're a bigot and a science denier and need to be hounded out of society.
If on the other hand you pay lip service to that idea you get promoted to places like NLRB. I.e. it's setting up a horrible dystopia where the left's views are The Science and anyone who disagrees is a heretic that needs to be ruined.
And it's not even as if the left's views are stable. E.g. Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were regarded as being left wing stalwarts even ten years ago. Now Overton window has shifted to the point where they've all been no platformed.
It's like the Medieval Catholic church where heliocentrism was OK when Copernicus suggested it but Galileo sinned in being a bit rude about the priesthood and was stomped on.
Similarly Pinker could criticise the Blank Slate without much pushback in 2002. Now any attempt to suggest that men and women are, on average, different is completely unacceptable.
The most depressing thing about Damore is that his critics aren't criticising what he said, rather they're criticising what other critics of him said that he said.
Then again if you're going to shrink the Overton window it's probably easier to pick on some tongue tied autist like Damore over someone like Jordan Peterson. Peterson gives a much better defence of his ideas than Damore does. And most of the ideas in the memo seem to come from Peterson.
Peterson was attacked by the left, but it doesn't seem to have done him any harm. In fact he probably makes more on Patreon than he ever did at his day job.
That's a sure sign that a lot of people are pissed off at the people attacking him even if, unlike Damore, those people know better than to dissent from the orthodoxy the left are trying to enforce.
He was wrong to not sack all the Obama holdovers but I can see why people voted for him given how if Clinton had won the left would have even more power, including control over SCOTUS appointments. And all the signs are that would mean a serious erosion of constitutional rights.
And let's face it if he had sacked all the Obama holdovers the media would be full of scare stories about how he was LITERALLY HITLER for doing it.
Given a choice between an well organised group who aim to abolish freedom and a disorganised group trying to stop them, I'll pick the later every day.
I got into programming on the 6502 because I liked programming, especially low level programming. When I went to university I picked electronic engineering because I wanted to know more about how hardware worked. Both low level coding and engineering are very seriously skewed towards men.
Now if you look at Damore's memos his point was simply that not seeing 50% men and 50% women was not prima facie evidence of discrimination. He also explained a bunch of reasons why men might be more likely to pick engineering over women. He carefully pointed out that differences between groups X and Y that lead to more of group X choosing to do a job does not mean that all members of group Y are worse than all members of group X. He also pointed out that discriminating against members of group X wasn't the only or the best way to even up the numbers.
He got fired and everyone has mischaracterised his memo as 'Women are biologically unsuited to coding'. They've done that without reading the memo where he explicitly said that was not what he was saying. The memo has been more or less scrubbed off the web but you can find it here
Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
It's appalling. The memo has been memory holed and everyone is judging him by what hit pieces on him say he said, not what he said. Including Ms Sophir who said
Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore's memo was legally protected by workplace regulations, 'the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.
Read that and look at the paragraph I quoted where he explicitly said he was not saying 'Any individual woman is less proficient than any individual man'. And yet it's clear Ms Sophir is judging the case based on a belief that's what he said.
Best hope you don't say anything which the media decide is unacceptable. Because you'll be judged on what they say you said, not what you said. And before you say 'Won't happen. I'm a staunch left winger'. Well so were Sam Harris, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Julie Bindel until they pissed off the campus left. Now they're just as persona non grata as Damore is. Which means their rights can be violated just like his can.
In response to an April 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, calling on President Obama to explain the NLRB lawsuit against Boeing, NLRB attorney Jayme Sophir issues a one word email response on May 2, 2011, to NLRB attorney Debra Willen, Division of Advice: âoeUgh.â
An Obama administration holdover at the National Labor Relations Board recommended last year that a case accusing President Donald Trumpâ(TM)s businesses and presidential campaign of requiring workers to sign unlawful confidentiality agreements be dismissed, according to a memo released this week.
Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in an advice memo dated Oct. 31, 2017 said there was no evidence that the agreements were ever enforced, and the law firm that brought the case, Weinberg Roger & Rosenfeld, did not file it on behalf of any employees of the Trump Organization Inc or the campaign.
I think it's safe to assume Sophir is a left winger.
South Carolina is a right-to-work state, and we're proud that within our borders workers cannot be required to join a labor union as a condition of employment. We don't need unions playing middlemen between our companies and our employees. We don't want them forcefully inserted into our promising business climate. And we will not stand for them intimidating South Carolinians.
That is apparently too much for President Obama and his union-beholden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, who have asked the courts to intervene and force Boeing to stop production in South Carolina. The NLRB wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state, where its workers must belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
Let's be clear: Boeing is a great corporate citizen in Washington and in South Carolina. The company chose to come to our state because the cost of doing business is low, our job training and work force are strong, and our ports are tremendous. The fact that we are a right-to-work state is an added bonus.
The actions by the NLRB are nothing less than a direct assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America. They are also an unprecedented attack on an iconic American company that is being told by the federal governmentâ"which seems to regard its authority as endlessâ"where and how to build airplanes.
The president has been silent since his hand-selected NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who has not yet been confirmed by the United States Senate as required by law, chose to engage in economic warfare on behalf of the unions last week.
While silence in this case can be assumed to mean consent, President Obama's silence is not acceptableâ"not to me, and certainly not to the millions of South Carolinians who are rightly aghast at the thought of the greatest economic development success our state has seen in decades being ripped away by federal bureaucrats who appear to be little more than union puppets.
Basically Nikki Haley criticised the Obama admin for taking Boeing to court over setting up shop in a 'right to work' state where workers don't have to join a union..
Presumably her reaction to Damore's memo was a similarly visceral 'Ugh'.
So it's not surprising she's decided that the labor rules she's so keen on defending don't appl
I'm writing this on Mac running Yosemite. With Parallels VM I can run the following OSs in a VM
Windows XP (walled off from the Internet) Windows 10 Mac OS Sierra - for XCode 9
I'm installing High Sierra now
It's not as fast as having a native OS, but it's not too bad, so long as you have loads of Ram and an SSD. Unactivated Windows 10 is free.
On Linux you could run Windows 10 and the latest macOS in VirtualBox.
And yeah, I know this violates the EULA. The reason I got a Mac because I wanted to run XCode legally. Problem is that back when I got it I could buy a Macbook Pro mid 2012 for around the same price as an Asus Zenbook, i.e. $1099. It came with 4GB Ram and a 500GB SSD but I could upgrade to 16GB Ram and a 1TB SSD for a few hundred bucks. That means I can run a whole load of VMs without much lag. Now if I want a machine with that much Ram and storage I need to buy it with the machine because nothing is user upgradeable. And Apple charge a lot of cash for it, $2299
So suddenly rather than being around the cost of a Asus Zenbook and then a few hundred bucks for an upgrade I need to spend about 2x as much as an Asus Zenbook.
Running macOS legally is getting more and more expensive...
To their credit MS spent a lot of time on Unicode support. All Win32 functions have an A version which takes 8 bit chars and a W one which takes 16 bit ones. And Windows has moved smoothly from supporting UCS-2 for the W functions to UTF-16.
The nature of the revised punishments provides a stark reflection of the regime's anxiety at the nature and scale of cross-border activities, the source explained. A minimum of five years "re-education" or the death penalty can be decreed for those caught communicating with the outside world, a minimum of 10 years re-education is the maximum punishment for simply watching South Korean media or listening to foreign radio, and a minimum of five years reeducation is possible for drug smuggling.
Android sucks for patching because it's all up to the vendors who don't care about old machines - they want you to buy a new device.
However Apple sucks too - they force everyone to the latest version to get patches, and that version may run so slowly that you need to buy a new device.
Actually Google have a clever idea called Project Treble to solve the update problem
The idea is that there's a stable vendor interface to the low level parts so the stuff above that can be swapped out. Bad news is that it will only be in Android O and later. So it won't do anything to fix all the ageing Android devices out there as they slip out of vendor's support window.
That character is four bytes in UTF-8 which kills systems that assume a maximum of three - which used to be true for Chinese and Japanese, but isn't now.
It's also two UTF-16 code points, which will mess up systems that assume each character is a single code point.
Now you'll say "Those systems are all buggy". That's true now, but it wasn't true when a lot of them were designed - Unicode used to be limited to 64K characters which meant it was a fixed width encoding for UCS-2. And that three bytes was the maximum encoding for UTF-8.
When it grew those ceased to be true. Which is fine for systems that are maintained - the vendor would find bugs created by the standard change and push an update. Unfortunately a lot of systems - particularly embedded ones - aren't like that. Hell, Android isn't like that. Google push updates out to vendors but if your machine is EOL you're SOL.
As soon as I heard of this I posted an message on Porter Industries internal message board in Telugu inviting everyone to an expensive restaurant for a free meal.
Slashdot Mirror
(((non consensual sodomy)))
A biological virus is a just instructions that say "copy me" to a cell.
A computer virus is just instructions that say "copy me" to a computer.
You can imagine something similar with message received by SETI. And actual a good message aimed at an extraterrestrial intelligence would need to be very target independent, unlike computer or biological viruses.
E.g. the Arecibo message aims at conveying a fair bit of information to any civilisation which picks it up -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now if you can explain concepts like "we're carbon based life from the third planet in the system. There are about 4 billion of us and also about 4 billion base pairs in our genome which is stored in DNA" with a couple of k of bits it's not out of the question to teach them how to build something with a few million bits. And from there it's not that hard to explain how to build something to copy the message. So messages to unknown civilisations are already target independent.
Maybe a benign civilisation sent out a non viral message designed to get other civilisations communicating and it mutated into a viral one. Or maybe a paranoid civilisation created a viral message to nuke any competition.
So it's a virus, but it's not a computer virus.
Nowhere in this thread
I've done it multiple times before, and it just gets met with anger, crying and denials that I've read it
I clicked through a couple of pages of your comments and didn't see it.
So you've set your signature to say Damore said something so terrible Google had to fire him to protect the feelings of its employees, but you won't say what that is and when anyone asks you you accuse them of being snowflakes?
You're not arguing in good faith. You're a troll.
I formed my opinions after actually reading his document. It's funny how all the precious little snowflakes just cannot cope with that fact.
Nowhere in this thread have you explained what he said that is so triggering to you that it needs to be silenced.
We are in a position now where a group of lawyers and administrators are deciding what published scientific research can be cited and what cannot.
We've been there for ages - it started with climate change. The data is noisy and there are multiple interpretations but the left decided anyone citing anything but the most apocalyptic predictions - which conveniently provided a justification for the sort of policies they wanted anyway - was A Denier Of The Science.
Admittedly even with that it didn't get quite to the point of having lawyers and administrators decide what could and could not be cited, and that's a new low.
Oddly enough Noam Chomsky made the same point when he defended Faurisson, a Holocaust denier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A professor of French literature was suspended from teaching on grounds that he could not be protected from violence, after privately printing pamphlets questioning the existence of gas chambers. He was then brought to trial for "falsification of History," and later condemned for this crime, the first time that a modern Western state openly affirmed the Stalinist-Nazi doctrine that the state will determine historical truth and punish deviation from it. Later he was beaten practically to death by Jewish terrorists. As of now, the European and other intellectuals have not expressed any opposition to these scandals; rather, they have sought to disguise their profound commitment to Stalinist-Nazi doctrine by following the same models, trying to divert attention with a flood of outrageous lies.
Now I'm no fan of Chomsky - his record on Cambodia is awful - but he's got a point here. Actually he's pretty critical of identity politics too, albeit because it is based on race and gender and not on class. I.e. he's a old school Marxist.
Mind you class based organisation allows right wing populists to trounce left wing elitists, so maybe it's not all bad. Also I think Chomsky's of a generation on the left which is about to be no platformed en masse for their heresy.
My signature is 100% on point then.
--
Damore's document is so bad, the only arguments left to fans are spurious claims that "you didn't read it".
Bollocks.
His critics accuse him of saying that women were incapable of engineering or that diversity was bad thing or of creating a hostile working environment for women. Here's what he actually said
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
I.e. even if the average X for women is lower than the average X for parameter men, it doesn't mean that all women have a lower X than all men, so you shouldn't discriminate against women.
On the other hand if you're recruiting a group where high X is desirable, it will have more men than women even if you don't discriminate.
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google.
He's accusing Google of 'incentivising illegal discrimination' - i.e. discriminating against whites and men in favour of non whites and women.
Suggestions
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
My concrete suggestions are to:
De-moralize diversity.
* As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."
Stop alienating conservatives.
* Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
* In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express them
Sorry that should have been "Another possibility is viruses in messages we receive by SETI"
Another possibility is that once we viruses sent in messages we receive by SETI.
If the message tells you how to do something, the odds are that thing will be to send messages as efficiently as possible because messages like that would be more common than ones that helpfully sent the Encyclopedia Galactica.
If I was writing Contact the machine the aliens sent the blueprint for would replicate to form a bunch of copies, disassembling the Earth/planets for materials in the process, and then surround the sun as a Dyson swarm and use all its energy output to send very powerful copies of the message to distant stars forever.
Well if we follow the Japanese example we'll reorganize our society on alien lines, get technological parity and then go into full on 'conquer the universe' mode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course the technological difference between Perry and the Japanese wasn't that great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
This is a problem that is "outside the context" as it is generally not considered until it occurs, and the capacity to actually conceive of or consider the OCP in the first place may not be possible or very limited (i.e., the majority of the group's population may not have the knowledge or ability to realize that the OCP can arise, or assume it is extremely unlikely). An example of OCP is an event in which a civilization does not consider the possibility that a much more technologically advanced society can exist, and then encounters one. The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
The coffee must flow!
tl;dr "When judges make rulings I agree with they are impartially ruling based solely on law. When they make rulings I disagree with they are allowing their political biases to get in the way. Here are some links to an Indian news site(?), a progressive legal organisation, the left wing Vox, usnews, a left wing British newspaper, a left wing rant from Esquire and the left wing Daily Kos which I'll add in randomly to make my post look well cited"
By the way it's pretty clear what Washington thought about homosexuality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In March 1778, Lieut. Enslin was brought to trial before a court-martial. According to General Washington's report: "...Lieutt. Enslin of Colo. Malcolm's Regiment tried for attempting to commit sodomy ..." Washington's secretary continues to describe the results of the trial: "His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves the sentence and with Abhorrence & Detestation of such Infamous Crimes orders Lieut. Enslin to be drummed out of Camp tomorrow morning...."
Oddly enough I read up on the Founder's views on abortion and they're rather nuanced
https://americancreation.blogs...
Mind you look at this
A different window into colonial attitudes toward abortion can be found in Corenlia Hughes Dayton's "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth Century New England Village." In her 1991 monograph which appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Dayton examined a case from 1742 that occurred in the village of Pomfret, Connecticut, where 19-year-old Sarah Grosvenor died in a bungled abortion urged on her by her 27-year-old lover Amasa Sessions. Magistrates filed charges against both Sessions and the "doctor of physick" who mangled the operation, but Dayton points out the legal complaints were not for performing the abortion as such (which was legal) but for killing the mother. The whole episode was surrounded with a hush of secrecy, in an era when "fornication" was not only illegal but culturally taboo. Abortion, in the colonial context, carried a stigma of shame not because it ended the life of a fetus but because it was associated with illicit intercourse-helping to explain the outrage of Franklin's two characters Celia Shortface and Martha Careful when their private remedies for ending a pregnancy receive a public airing.
I think it's clear that the modern left and the people who founded America had very different views - fornication i.e. sex outside marriage was illegal back then. Something which would hardly endear them to the Pussy Hat wearers. On the other hand abortion was legal up to the fourth month of pregnancy - i.e. 17 weeks or so. Interestingly that's not that much different to the current UK limit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The UK limit is 24 weeks. Of course Hillary has said 'the unborn person has no constitutional rights'
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
Even if you're uneasy about a ban on abortion that seems like an extreme position. I thought the Democrats had given up on the idea that some persons don't have rights after slavery was abolished...
Another point in his favour is that he was saying that there are better ways to make the gender balance more equal than 'illegal discrimination'
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
The harm of Google's biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
* A high priority queue and special treatment for "diversity" candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for "diversity" candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it's not "diverse" enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We're told by senior leadership that what we're doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google. ...
Suggestions
I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
My concrete suggestions are to:
De-moralize diversity.
* As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the "victims."
Stop alienating conservatives.
* Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
* In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
* Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Confront Google's biases.
* I've mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.
* I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.
Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.
* These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.
If you say that you agree with what your employer is trying to do but they way they are doing it 'incentivising illegal discrimination' and suggest legal alternatives that makes you a whistleblower. CA has a whistleblower protection law -
https://www.workplacefairness....
Could Damore claim under it? I'm not sure. If I were him I'd try though.
Because that really matters with lawyers. It's literally impossible for them to issue a legal opinion based on case law, judicial opinions and statutes without applying their own political bias.
The left oppose the notion of originalism. E.g. Roe v Wade decided people had always had a right to abortion because of an invented 'right to privacy'. The SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage was based on the notion that it was an inevitable consequence of Due Process under the 14th Amendment. Even though the people who wrote the original documents didn't believe in a right to abortion or a right to gay marriage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Judicial activism is always about allowing your political views to alter the way you read the law. It's a sort of 'ends justifies the means' approach to law. If you agree with the ends, then the means
- twisting or inverting the meaning of the actual words in the law or inventing new rights that aren't actually there - doesn't matter.
This is in of itself a good reason to distrust the US left. E.g. look at the gay marriage case. Both Obama and Clinton run on a platform of opposing it, but Obama set up a case which would legalise it and then celebrated. Even if left wing politicians say they won't do something, they may appoint judges who will twist the law to do it and then celebrate the result.
Now I'm not all that fussed about gay marriage. However even there you can see that the left will use it as a cudgel to beat the right - e.g. Christian bakers will be asked to bake a "I support gay marriage cake" and sued if they refuse.
By the way if Gorsuch ruled in a way that you didn't like would you say "Well he's just interpreting the law. You can't say he's allowing his political beliefs to get in the way"? I'm guessing not, because he's an originalist and not a believer that the role of a judge is to invent new rights. if someone's political views explicitly include a different method of how to interpret law - e.g. 'Improving rights' vs 'Originalism' then those political views obviously alter how they'd rule when they were a judge.
Look at the SCOTUS. On the politicized cases the justices vote in a very close to a bloc according to the party which appointed them.
If political views don't matter why is it so important to Americans that their party is the one appointing the next SCOTUS justice?
Couldn't agree more. This thread is full of people saying effectively that if you disagree with the Blank Slate view of humanity, you're a bigot and a science denier and need to be hounded out of society.
If on the other hand you pay lip service to that idea you get promoted to places like NLRB. I.e. it's setting up a horrible dystopia where the left's views are The Science and anyone who disagrees is a heretic that needs to be ruined.
And it's not even as if the left's views are stable. E.g. Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were regarded as being left wing stalwarts even ten years ago. Now Overton window has shifted to the point where they've all been no platformed.
It's like the Medieval Catholic church where heliocentrism was OK when Copernicus suggested it but Galileo sinned in being a bit rude about the priesthood and was stomped on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Similarly Pinker could criticise the Blank Slate without much pushback in 2002. Now any attempt to suggest that men and women are, on average, different is completely unacceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The most depressing thing about Damore is that his critics aren't criticising what he said, rather they're criticising what other critics of him said that he said.
Then again if you're going to shrink the Overton window it's probably easier to pick on some tongue tied autist like Damore over someone like Jordan Peterson. Peterson gives a much better defence of his ideas than Damore does. And most of the ideas in the memo seem to come from Peterson.
Peterson was attacked by the left, but it doesn't seem to have done him any harm. In fact he probably makes more on Patreon than he ever did at his day job.
That's a sure sign that a lot of people are pissed off at the people attacking him even if, unlike Damore, those people know better than to dissent from the orthodoxy the left are trying to enforce.
He was wrong to not sack all the Obama holdovers but I can see why people voted for him given how if Clinton had won the left would have even more power, including control over SCOTUS appointments. And all the signs are that would mean a serious erosion of constitutional rights.
And let's face it if he had sacked all the Obama holdovers the media would be full of scare stories about how he was LITERALLY HITLER for doing it.
Given a choice between an well organised group who aim to abolish freedom and a disorganised group trying to stop them, I'll pick the later every day.
And, as I pointed out here,
https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
you shouldn't be so sure that just because you're on the left you're immune from the system shafting you just like it did him.
I got into programming on the 6502 because I liked programming, especially low level programming. When I went to university I picked electronic engineering because I wanted to know more about how hardware worked. Both low level coding and engineering are very seriously skewed towards men.
Now if you look at Damore's memos his point was simply that not seeing 50% men and 50% women was not prima facie evidence of discrimination. He also explained a bunch of reasons why men might be more likely to pick engineering over women. He carefully pointed out that differences between groups X and Y that lead to more of group X choosing to do a job does not mean that all members of group Y are worse than all members of group X. He also pointed out that discriminating against members of group X wasn't the only or the best way to even up the numbers.
He got fired and everyone has mischaracterised his memo as 'Women are biologically unsuited to coding'. They've done that without reading the memo where he explicitly said that was not what he was saying. The memo has been more or less scrubbed off the web but you can find it here
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
It's appalling. The memo has been memory holed and everyone is judging him by what hit pieces on him say he said, not what he said. Including Ms Sophir who said
Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore's memo was legally protected by workplace regulations, 'the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.
Read that and look at the paragraph I quoted where he explicitly said he was not saying 'Any individual woman is less proficient than any individual man'. And yet it's clear Ms Sophir is judging the case based on a belief that's what he said.
Best hope you don't say anything which the media decide is unacceptable. Because you'll be judged on what they say you said, not what you said. And before you say 'Won't happen. I'm a staunch left winger'. Well so were Sam Harris, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Julie Bindel until they pissed off the campus left. Now they're just as persona non grata as Damore is. Which means their rights can be violated just like his can.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/...
In response to an April 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, calling on President Obama to explain the NLRB lawsuit against Boeing, NLRB attorney Jayme Sophir issues a one word email response on May 2, 2011, to NLRB attorney Debra Willen, Division of Advice: âoeUgh.â
She was appointed by Obama
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
An Obama administration holdover at the National Labor Relations Board recommended last year that a case accusing President Donald Trumpâ(TM)s businesses and presidential campaign of requiring workers to sign unlawful confidentiality agreements be dismissed, according to a memo released this week.
Associate General Counsel Jayme Sophir in an advice memo dated Oct. 31, 2017 said there was no evidence that the agreements were ever enforced, and the law firm that brought the case, Weinberg Roger & Rosenfeld, did not file it on behalf of any employees of the Trump Organization Inc or the campaign.
I think it's safe to assume Sophir is a left winger.
Article here
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...
It's paywalled, but you can read it here
http://archive.is/1pp1R
South Carolina is a right-to-work state, and we're proud that within our borders workers cannot be required to join a labor union as a condition of employment. We don't need unions playing middlemen between our companies and our employees. We don't want them forcefully inserted into our promising business climate. And we will not stand for them intimidating South Carolinians.
That is apparently too much for President Obama and his union-beholden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, who have asked the courts to intervene and force Boeing to stop production in South Carolina. The NLRB wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state, where its workers must belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
Let's be clear: Boeing is a great corporate citizen in Washington and in South Carolina. The company chose to come to our state because the cost of doing business is low, our job training and work force are strong, and our ports are tremendous. The fact that we are a right-to-work state is an added bonus.
The actions by the NLRB are nothing less than a direct assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America. They are also an unprecedented attack on an iconic American company that is being told by the federal governmentâ"which seems to regard its authority as endlessâ"where and how to build airplanes.
The president has been silent since his hand-selected NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who has not yet been confirmed by the United States Senate as required by law, chose to engage in economic warfare on behalf of the unions last week.
While silence in this case can be assumed to mean consent, President Obama's silence is not acceptableâ"not to me, and certainly not to the millions of South Carolinians who are rightly aghast at the thought of the greatest economic development success our state has seen in decades being ripped away by federal bureaucrats who appear to be little more than union puppets.
Basically Nikki Haley criticised the Obama admin for taking Boeing to court over setting up shop in a 'right to work' state where workers don't have to join a union..
Presumably her reaction to Damore's memo was a similarly visceral 'Ugh'.
So it's not surprising she's decided that the labor rules she's so keen on defending don't appl
I'm writing this on Mac running Yosemite. With Parallels VM I can run the following OSs in a VM
Windows XP (walled off from the Internet)
Windows 10
Mac OS Sierra - for XCode 9
I'm installing High Sierra now
It's not as fast as having a native OS, but it's not too bad, so long as you have loads of Ram and an SSD. Unactivated Windows 10 is free.
On Linux you could run Windows 10 and the latest macOS in VirtualBox.
And yeah, I know this violates the EULA. The reason I got a Mac because I wanted to run XCode legally. Problem is that back when I got it I could buy a Macbook Pro mid 2012 for around the same price as an Asus Zenbook, i.e. $1099. It came with 4GB Ram and a 500GB SSD but I could upgrade to 16GB Ram and a 1TB SSD for a few hundred bucks. That means I can run a whole load of VMs without much lag. Now if I want a machine with that much Ram and storage I need to buy it with the machine because nothing is user upgradeable. And Apple charge a lot of cash for it, $2299
So suddenly rather than being around the cost of a Asus Zenbook and then a few hundred bucks for an upgrade I need to spend about 2x as much as an Asus Zenbook.
Running macOS legally is getting more and more expensive...
To their credit MS spent a lot of time on Unicode support. All Win32 functions have an A version which takes 8 bit chars and a W one which takes 16 bit ones. And Windows has moved smoothly from supporting UCS-2 for the W functions to UTF-16.
We all need to adopt the Mojibake standard for non ASCII characters, like Slashdot.
North Korea punishes people to talking to the South
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
The nature of the revised punishments provides a stark reflection of the regime's anxiety at the nature and scale of cross-border activities, the source explained. A minimum of five years "re-education" or the death penalty can be decreed for those caught communicating with the outside world, a minimum of 10 years re-education is the maximum punishment for simply watching South Korean media or listening to foreign radio, and a minimum of five years reeducation is possible for drug smuggling.
Android sucks for patching because it's all up to the vendors who don't care about old machines - they want you to buy a new device.
However Apple sucks too - they force everyone to the latest version to get patches, and that version may run so slowly that you need to buy a new device.
Actually Google have a clever idea called Project Treble to solve the update problem
https://android-developers.goo...
The idea is that there's a stable vendor interface to the low level parts so the stuff above that can be swapped out. Bad news is that it will only be in Android O and later. So it won't do anything to fix all the ageing Android devices out there as they slip out of vendor's support window.
A lot of embedded systems will behave strangely if you feed them a lot of characters like this
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin...
That character is four bytes in UTF-8 which kills systems that assume a maximum of three - which used to be true for Chinese and Japanese, but isn't now.
It's also two UTF-16 code points, which will mess up systems that assume each character is a single code point.
Now you'll say "Those systems are all buggy". That's true now, but it wasn't true when a lot of them were designed - Unicode used to be limited to 64K characters which meant it was a fixed width encoding for UCS-2. And that three bytes was the maximum encoding for UTF-8.
When it grew those ceased to be true. Which is fine for systems that are maintained - the vendor would find bugs created by the standard change and push an update. Unfortunately a lot of systems - particularly embedded ones - aren't like that. Hell, Android isn't like that. Google push updates out to vendors but if your machine is EOL you're SOL.
As soon as I heard of this I posted an message on Porter Industries internal message board in Telugu inviting everyone to an expensive restaurant for a free meal.
All who turned up were FIRED.