Hiring policies based on religion are illegal in the USA. As they very well should be.
In my country, too. I'll happily take this to the highest court, if need be. I don't care if you are christian, muslim, or some weird sect nobody has ever heard about. All that matters to me is that you have brain damage, which is what I consider religion to be. Now unless you come in on the grounds of discrimination against disabilities - which would prove me right - I'll defend my right to not have to hire people with massive thinking deficits.
I require players to give their real name to me. It remains their choice if they want it published in the player list or not. Privacy is still an important consideration.
I have the same rule for my own online game (no link or I'd be accused of slashvertisement). It's "my home", so to speak, I don't charge for it, but I expect my guests to follow some basic rules of courtesy and one of them is that you give me your actual, real, full name as I give you mine (on the site).
Nothing forces you to, you can play somewhere else if you don't like the rules in my "home". Which is where the chinese approach of making it mandatory for everything becomes a bit difficult. What if I wouldn't care? I - as the owner of the game should have the choice. Maybe that's a better way than both the mandatory and the "freedom über alles, make it the choice of the players" hysteria.
No, why should it be the choice of the players? We all know that the majority of people don't need rules for basic etiquette, they will follow it without rules. The rules are there for the minority who don't. So the "freedom" you speak about is only to the benefit of the anti-social assholes you don't want around anyways. I wouldn't let people into my house who refuse to give me their name. Why should I let them into my game?
As we seemingly can't stop the spread of idiocity, can we at least get transparency? Please mark clearly on the record sheet whether this student learned evolution or creationism, uh, sorry, they rebranded it to "intelligent design".
Please mark it, so I know, so I can hire only the people who learnt actual science.
If you teach both, please give seperate marks. So I know to hire specifically the people who scored A or B in evolution and F-- in creationism because they ridiculed it all year. That's the kind of people I want to have working for me. If you scored any acceptable score in creationism at all, then find a burger-flipping job somewhere. It means you at least pretended to take it seriously, or you did take it seriously, in which case you're either a liar or an idiot.
The religious conspiracy to force you to stop believing in science exists only in your mind.
Oh, I see. That explains why abortion doctors are killed by religious nutjobs, airplanes are flown into skyscrapers by religious nutjobs, proper education for our children is endangered by religious nutjobs, and people like Dawkins get death threats for writing books. It's all in my mind, that explains a lot.
anyone who's religious, well specifically a christian is an uneducated moron who believes in the 6000 year old universe.
That, or a cowardly non-decider whose life is a lie. Only religion allows you to believe in two mutually exclusive beliefs at the same time. One that can be verified, and one that - sorry for the pun - exists only in your mind.
The fanatics are at least honest. The people who go to church at christmas, and try hard not to think too deeply about either religion or science, lest they discover that it is impossible for both to be true, they are the ones providing the foundation that the fanatics can hide behind and grow in.
But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people probably don't care about science nearly as much as people here seem to think they do, admittedly that's not necessarily a good thing.
Science is fast becoming a new religion, or rather: Magic. Only a few people really understand it, but everyone relies on it. Soon our cell phone networks will be like rain dances - we pray it works, and we don't understand how.
But science is not like a rain dance. For one, it actually works. Two, there is something that can be understood. The problem is the many people with the old mindset. It's too much to expect that it would die out in a few generations after it survived several ten thousand years. The old mindset that works the other way around - not knowledge is power. In magic and religion, supposed knowledge is power, and secrecy not transparency, is necesary to solidify it. Control over knowledge is key, and especially meta-knowledge (who may know what).
The real poison of religion isn't in the unholy books - it's in the minds.
Of course, don't let that stop you from stereotyping. I've dealt with a few programmers who were elitist jerks not nearly as talented as they liked to believe they were. I suppose it's safe to say all programmers are like that.
Believe whatever you want to believe, we're on/. anyways. I've read more books about science of the mind than science of computers. It's more fascinating, too. But understanding both definitely helps, there are many cross-references, though not so many and not the ones that pop science wishes for.
Space doesn't exist. The bible doesn't mention it, so it doesn't exist. Was it created, hm? No! The stars and the moon, yes. Cosmic nebula? No. Black holes? No. All wishful thinking of these science heretics! Burn them, burn... oh, wait. What do you mean, "wrong century"?
(in case you need it spelt out: yes, I am being sarcastic. We have all this wonderful, fantastic, blow-your-mind stuff out there in the universe, and we are seriously debating whether some folk lores from two-, three-, four-thousand years ago, written by people who thought the earth is flat, light is magical and infinite in speed, and all-powerful beings talk through burning bushes at the wayside could be true in any meaningful sense of the word.)
But remember, it's only a theory! If you find a tiny snippet in some backwater part of the bible that contradicts it, then of course the old book is right. So don't get your hopes up.
Which is precisely why I'm sure that stop is the first thing they will try to attack. If you see them doing that, it means even Zuckerberg assumes he will lose.
It is always the same whining. "piracy is killing us", "the VHS is killing us", "bootlegs are killing us" - no matter if it's games, movies, music, the main expertise of the content industry has for at least 40 years been whining.
Unfortunately, they're not laughed out the door as they deserve to.
I actually like this idea. It's an alternative for small application developers to make money on their hard work.
If your stuff isn't worth someone paying $5 for it, then it isn't worth it. Getting someone else (the ad company) to pay that money instead is a scam, pure and simple. Instead of pleasing your customer, you are selling your customer. Does that change in attitude make for better applications? I very much doubt it. Sooner than you think, you're going to build the app around the ads, not around user satisfaction.
I doubt they dare. They are not desperate for cash, and they would be stupid, fucked-up fools to pull a stunt like that. Even though I've become quite a Mac fan over the years since I switched (from Linux, btw) one single OS-enforced ad on my screen would be enough for me to ditch the entire platform right then and there.
Yes, I hate advertisement. The line between regular ads and spam is very thin if you think about it, and we all agree that the death penalty is too good for spammers, don't we? Ad people aren't much better. And the second they force you to view ads, they cross the line.
I won't be running a spam OS, no matter if it's Linux, Windows or OS X behind the ads.
Lawyers know what things have to be in a contract to make it a contract. IANAL, so a little wikipedia check (ymmv) shows it's these things:
Wikipedia is not an authoritative source on many things. IANAL but contract law was part of my studies. Unless the US is vastly different from most other places, you need exactly one thing for a contract to come into existence. In german "eine beidseitige Willenserklärung", just in case I fuck up the translation: An intentional agreement between two parties.
All the rest, the form, the lawyer-speak, the bla-bla is just to make it easier to enforce. Oral contracts are as good as written contracts in theory, they are just more difficult to prove. A contract on the back of a napkin is as good as a 300-page legal document reviewed by two seperate legal departments - there's just a higher risk that it contains words you didn't mean like that.
Most of the stuff you list falls under the invalidation of "intentional" or "agreement", which are the most common attacks on contracts that you can't deny (e.g. they exist in written form or there are reliable witnesses). If you were tricked, for example, you can argue that there wasn't an agreement, because what the other party wanted and made you believe was not true.
if he missed even one, or if he failed to carry out some of them, then he's going to become a trivia question.
It ain't that simple. Contracts are regularily open to interpretation as it is semantically impossible to completely and 100% perfectly describe a non-trivial intention. Courts are used to that and it's not a checklist. "Oh, wrong word in paragraph four. You lost." Quite regularily, the courts try to divine the original intention of the parties, as that is what it's all about, and rule according to that. There are quite a list of famous contract law disputes that worked that out.
But, as you said, the main issue will be that the lawyers on the defending side will try to tie this up in court. I don't see how they can win it, but they sure can delay it. Maybe long enough for Zuckerberg to cash out.
Dell decided to produce cheaper, in order to compete on price. They could have decided to compete on, say, quality, service, security, or any other area. They didn't.
The "we the customer" meme should be shot on sight. It's from the 50s when we had something resembling free markets. Quick, how many major computer hardware manufacturers are there? So what are your choices, really? What are the choices of the general public, who know very little about computers or what goes into them?
There's no such thing as customer decision. If at all, there is customer choice, among the products that are offered. The people who decide what kinds of products are available to be chosen from aren't the customers, it's some dudes in the marketing and product management departments.
Don't make it too easy for them to avoid the blame. Nobody forced them to outsource to China. They decided to do it, because it would improve their bottom line. There are some - not many, but they exist - companies who made a different choice. Just because everyone else does it does not mean you have to do it - it just gives a manager with little interest beyond his yearly bonus a very easy excuse.
Yes, and us full disclosure supporters in the security community have been literally saying that for years. Good to see that some of the bigger players finally wake up.
But not of what happens with it. Imagine all that stuff being burnt. Constantly. Every second, every day of every week of every year. Actually, don't do that because it is not an honest picture. It is physically impossible to burn oil at this density, you'd have to spread it out.
So, instead of it flowing peacefully into the sea, imagine two Thames full of oil being dispersed into the air. If you turn that into a movie, I want 20% of the gross income (not of the profit, I've read about Hollywood accounting).:-)
What I said is we need to be realistic and stop pretending like we are safe, or pretending like some authority can keep us safe. Nobody is safe and nothing can keep anybody safe.
And that has what to do with the development of micro-needles? It's not exactly a good delivery device for bio-terrorism, and if someone wants just you dead, there are many simpler, cheaper and more reliable ways to get it done.
I am merely saying, let's stop looking at every technological advancement as if it would raise the global threat level. In this specific example, I am very, very certain that a lot less people will die from evil poison-patch attacks than currently die from unsterilized needles, for example.
Yes, because they puncture nerves that proceed to yell "invasion! our outer barrier has been breached! potentially fatal wound! need help here, right now!" and the only reason we only feel a prick and not excruciating pain is that it is only a few nerves screaming.
Your point being? Anything that could potentially be abused should be outlawed? I guess we as a species decided to leave that road when we choose to use fire instead of abandoning the concept as potentially dangerous.
is man actually capable of changing the properties of something as huge as planet Earth?
man? no.
But men - yes. Your intuition fails at the huge dimensions involved here, because it evolved to deal with the small immediate surroundings of you and your tribe on the plains of africa.
We are talking about 7 billion people, eating, shitting in the woods, making fire to cook their food, and - increasingly many of them - driving cars, flying planes, burning fuel to generate electricity and so on. Wolfram Alpha computes we use 86 million barrels of oil every day.
Unless you can create a picture in your mind of 86 million barrels a day, every day, build that up to a year, and then to a decade or five, I strongly suggest you stop relying on intuition and common sense and start relying on science and data.
Before you yell "get it right" to others, and then ramble on about "just two data points", how about reading TFA ?
oh, look:
He has not only followed in the footsteps of Mallory but also those of Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The result is a then-and-now series of photographs from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan - all of which show glaciers in retreat.
It appears that there are lots more than just two data points. It's just the/. summary and maybe limited space or journalistic choice at the BBC that made them pick out only one specific picture set to show.
Yes, because even where you have toll roads, those tolls do not pay for road construction and maintainance. The taxes collected from gas are mostly used up on things related to road traffic. There are some great studies on the actual cost of mobility, and it is massive.
Slashdot Mirror
Hiring policies based on religion are illegal in the USA. As they very well should be.
In my country, too. I'll happily take this to the highest court, if need be. I don't care if you are christian, muslim, or some weird sect nobody has ever heard about. All that matters to me is that you have brain damage, which is what I consider religion to be. Now unless you come in on the grounds of discrimination against disabilities - which would prove me right - I'll defend my right to not have to hire people with massive thinking deficits.
Hm, good point, yes.
The danger in deceit is that you deceive your friends as well as your enemies. It's a risk you choose to take.
I should have been more clear, my mistake.
I require players to give their real name to me. It remains their choice if they want it published in the player list or not. Privacy is still an important consideration.
I have the same rule for my own online game (no link or I'd be accused of slashvertisement). It's "my home", so to speak, I don't charge for it, but I expect my guests to follow some basic rules of courtesy and one of them is that you give me your actual, real, full name as I give you mine (on the site).
Nothing forces you to, you can play somewhere else if you don't like the rules in my "home". Which is where the chinese approach of making it mandatory for everything becomes a bit difficult. What if I wouldn't care? I - as the owner of the game should have the choice. Maybe that's a better way than both the mandatory and the "freedom über alles, make it the choice of the players" hysteria.
No, why should it be the choice of the players? We all know that the majority of people don't need rules for basic etiquette, they will follow it without rules. The rules are there for the minority who don't. So the "freedom" you speak about is only to the benefit of the anti-social assholes you don't want around anyways. I wouldn't let people into my house who refuse to give me their name. Why should I let them into my game?
As we seemingly can't stop the spread of idiocity, can we at least get transparency? Please mark clearly on the record sheet whether this student learned evolution or creationism, uh, sorry, they rebranded it to "intelligent design".
Please mark it, so I know, so I can hire only the people who learnt actual science.
If you teach both, please give seperate marks. So I know to hire specifically the people who scored A or B in evolution and F-- in creationism because they ridiculed it all year. That's the kind of people I want to have working for me. If you scored any acceptable score in creationism at all, then find a burger-flipping job somewhere. It means you at least pretended to take it seriously, or you did take it seriously, in which case you're either a liar or an idiot.
The religious conspiracy to force you to stop believing in science exists only in your mind.
Oh, I see. That explains why abortion doctors are killed by religious nutjobs, airplanes are flown into skyscrapers by religious nutjobs, proper education for our children is endangered by religious nutjobs, and people like Dawkins get death threats for writing books. It's all in my mind, that explains a lot.
anyone who's religious, well specifically a christian is an uneducated moron who believes in the 6000 year old universe.
That, or a cowardly non-decider whose life is a lie. Only religion allows you to believe in two mutually exclusive beliefs at the same time. One that can be verified, and one that - sorry for the pun - exists only in your mind.
The fanatics are at least honest. The people who go to church at christmas, and try hard not to think too deeply about either religion or science, lest they discover that it is impossible for both to be true, they are the ones providing the foundation that the fanatics can hide behind and grow in.
But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people probably don't care about science nearly as much as people here seem to think they do, admittedly that's not necessarily a good thing.
Science is fast becoming a new religion, or rather: Magic. Only a few people really understand it, but everyone relies on it. Soon our cell phone networks will be like rain dances - we pray it works, and we don't understand how.
But science is not like a rain dance. For one, it actually works. Two, there is something that can be understood. The problem is the many people with the old mindset. It's too much to expect that it would die out in a few generations after it survived several ten thousand years. The old mindset that works the other way around - not knowledge is power. In magic and religion, supposed knowledge is power, and secrecy not transparency, is necesary to solidify it. Control over knowledge is key, and especially meta-knowledge (who may know what).
The real poison of religion isn't in the unholy books - it's in the minds.
Of course, don't let that stop you from stereotyping. I've dealt with a few programmers who were elitist jerks not nearly as talented as they liked to believe they were. I suppose it's safe to say all programmers are like that.
Believe whatever you want to believe, we're on /. anyways. I've read more books about science of the mind than science of computers. It's more fascinating, too. But understanding both definitely helps, there are many cross-references, though not so many and not the ones that pop science wishes for.
Space doesn't exist. The bible doesn't mention it, so it doesn't exist. Was it created, hm? No! The stars and the moon, yes. Cosmic nebula? No. Black holes? No. All wishful thinking of these science heretics! Burn them, burn... oh, wait. What do you mean, "wrong century"?
(in case you need it spelt out: yes, I am being sarcastic. We have all this wonderful, fantastic, blow-your-mind stuff out there in the universe, and we are seriously debating whether some folk lores from two-, three-, four-thousand years ago, written by people who thought the earth is flat, light is magical and infinite in speed, and all-powerful beings talk through burning bushes at the wayside could be true in any meaningful sense of the word.)
But remember, it's only a theory! If you find a tiny snippet in some backwater part of the bible that contradicts it, then of course the old book is right. So don't get your hopes up.
Which is precisely why I'm sure that stop is the first thing they will try to attack. If you see them doing that, it means even Zuckerberg assumes he will lose.
When everyone in the world is half your price and you have no other redeeming quality to make you better than the rest
Which is precisely my point. Your decision to compete on price. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
It is always the same whining. "piracy is killing us", "the VHS is killing us", "bootlegs are killing us" - no matter if it's games, movies, music, the main expertise of the content industry has for at least 40 years been whining.
Unfortunately, they're not laughed out the door as they deserve to.
iAds is about allowing developers to give the option of paying for the app via watching ads.
It is about allowing developers to sell their users to ad companies instad of pleasing them with a good product so they're willing to pay for it.
At least say it how it is.
I actually like this idea. It's an alternative for small application developers to make money on their hard work.
If your stuff isn't worth someone paying $5 for it, then it isn't worth it. Getting someone else (the ad company) to pay that money instead is a scam, pure and simple. Instead of pleasing your customer, you are selling your customer. Does that change in attitude make for better applications? I very much doubt it. Sooner than you think, you're going to build the app around the ads, not around user satisfaction.
I doubt they dare. They are not desperate for cash, and they would be stupid, fucked-up fools to pull a stunt like that. Even though I've become quite a Mac fan over the years since I switched (from Linux, btw) one single OS-enforced ad on my screen would be enough for me to ditch the entire platform right then and there.
Yes, I hate advertisement. The line between regular ads and spam is very thin if you think about it, and we all agree that the death penalty is too good for spammers, don't we? Ad people aren't much better. And the second they force you to view ads, they cross the line.
I won't be running a spam OS, no matter if it's Linux, Windows or OS X behind the ads.
They have 90,000 employees - so this phone will have ca. 91,000 users? ;-)
Lawyers know what things have to be in a contract to make it a contract. IANAL, so a little wikipedia check (ymmv) shows it's these things:
Wikipedia is not an authoritative source on many things. IANAL but contract law was part of my studies. Unless the US is vastly different from most other places, you need exactly one thing for a contract to come into existence. In german "eine beidseitige Willenserklärung", just in case I fuck up the translation: An intentional agreement between two parties.
All the rest, the form, the lawyer-speak, the bla-bla is just to make it easier to enforce. Oral contracts are as good as written contracts in theory, they are just more difficult to prove. A contract on the back of a napkin is as good as a 300-page legal document reviewed by two seperate legal departments - there's just a higher risk that it contains words you didn't mean like that.
Most of the stuff you list falls under the invalidation of "intentional" or "agreement", which are the most common attacks on contracts that you can't deny (e.g. they exist in written form or there are reliable witnesses). If you were tricked, for example, you can argue that there wasn't an agreement, because what the other party wanted and made you believe was not true.
if he missed even one, or if he failed to carry out some of them, then he's going to become a trivia question.
It ain't that simple. Contracts are regularily open to interpretation as it is semantically impossible to completely and 100% perfectly describe a non-trivial intention. Courts are used to that and it's not a checklist. "Oh, wrong word in paragraph four. You lost." Quite regularily, the courts try to divine the original intention of the parties, as that is what it's all about, and rule according to that. There are quite a list of famous contract law disputes that worked that out.
But, as you said, the main issue will be that the lawyers on the defending side will try to tie this up in court. I don't see how they can win it, but they sure can delay it. Maybe long enough for Zuckerberg to cash out.
No we haven't, and no they weren't forced.
Dell decided to produce cheaper, in order to compete on price. They could have decided to compete on, say, quality, service, security, or any other area. They didn't.
The "we the customer" meme should be shot on sight. It's from the 50s when we had something resembling free markets. Quick, how many major computer hardware manufacturers are there? So what are your choices, really? What are the choices of the general public, who know very little about computers or what goes into them?
There's no such thing as customer decision. If at all, there is customer choice, among the products that are offered. The people who decide what kinds of products are available to be chosen from aren't the customers, it's some dudes in the marketing and product management departments.
Don't make it too easy for them to avoid the blame. Nobody forced them to outsource to China. They decided to do it, because it would improve their bottom line. There are some - not many, but they exist - companies who made a different choice. Just because everyone else does it does not mean you have to do it - it just gives a manager with little interest beyond his yearly bonus a very easy excuse.
Yes, and us full disclosure supporters in the security community have been literally saying that for years. Good to see that some of the bigger players finally wake up.
That is a fairly good picture of the volume.
But not of what happens with it. Imagine all that stuff being burnt. Constantly. Every second, every day of every week of every year. Actually, don't do that because it is not an honest picture. It is physically impossible to burn oil at this density, you'd have to spread it out.
So, instead of it flowing peacefully into the sea, imagine two Thames full of oil being dispersed into the air. If you turn that into a movie, I want 20% of the gross income (not of the profit, I've read about Hollywood accounting). :-)
What I said is we need to be realistic and stop pretending like we are safe, or pretending like some authority can keep us safe. Nobody is safe and nothing can keep anybody safe.
And that has what to do with the development of micro-needles? It's not exactly a good delivery device for bio-terrorism, and if someone wants just you dead, there are many simpler, cheaper and more reliable ways to get it done.
I am merely saying, let's stop looking at every technological advancement as if it would raise the global threat level. In this specific example, I am very, very certain that a lot less people will die from evil poison-patch attacks than currently die from unsterilized needles, for example.
There is a reason why we can feel needles.
Yes, because they puncture nerves that proceed to yell "invasion! our outer barrier has been breached! potentially fatal wound! need help here, right now!" and the only reason we only feel a prick and not excruciating pain is that it is only a few nerves screaming.
Your point being? Anything that could potentially be abused should be outlawed? I guess we as a species decided to leave that road when we choose to use fire instead of abandoning the concept as potentially dangerous.
is man actually capable of changing the properties of something as huge as planet Earth?
man? no.
But men - yes. Your intuition fails at the huge dimensions involved here, because it evolved to deal with the small immediate surroundings of you and your tribe on the plains of africa.
We are talking about 7 billion people, eating, shitting in the woods, making fire to cook their food, and - increasingly many of them - driving cars, flying planes, burning fuel to generate electricity and so on. Wolfram Alpha computes we use 86 million barrels of oil every day.
Unless you can create a picture in your mind of 86 million barrels a day, every day, build that up to a year, and then to a decade or five, I strongly suggest you stop relying on intuition and common sense and start relying on science and data.
Before you yell "get it right" to others, and then ramble on about "just two data points", how about reading TFA ?
oh, look:
He has not only followed in the footsteps of Mallory but also those of Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The result is a then-and-now series of photographs from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan - all of which show glaciers in retreat.
It appears that there are lots more than just two data points. It's just the /. summary and maybe limited space or journalistic choice at the BBC that made them pick out only one specific picture set to show.
Better things, like talking about Facebook on Slashdot?
At least the comments here are by actual human beings, not 90% automated postings.
Yes, because even where you have toll roads, those tolls do not pay for road construction and maintainance. The taxes collected from gas are mostly used up on things related to road traffic. There are some great studies on the actual cost of mobility, and it is massive.