You people will get your nose bent out of shape at any goddamn thing, won't you?
Gender shouldn't matter when it comes to writing code, period. Turns out, it does in some ways that are not good for the industry as a whole. We're missing about half the insight that the inconvenient gender (aka "women") could bring to the table if the tech industry wasn't a sweaty jock party.
So, Google is trying to do something about it. Might be the *wrong* thing (I don't think so, but I'm not omnipotent) but at least THEY ARE TRYING TO DO *SOMETHING*, which is a lot more than I see any of you other meatsacks doing. You can either start being part of the solution, or just go to Hell.
If it gets more women coding, then more power to them.
If it gets more women in tech, more power to them.
If it will shut up your goddamn special snowflake whining, full power to them.
I'm not seeing anything on their page that is, on the face of it, illegal. Certainly, they seem to be getting near the edge of the law, but if they don't cross the line, there's nothing there.
They may be immoral, but the moment you start legislating morality, you open up a can of worms that can't be unopened.
Stratfor may be kind of dumb in some areas, but that doesn't make them a bad company.
I won't pretend it's for mankind or science or anything like that - I'd be doing it because people would remember my name for having done something somewhat insane, with few harmful side-effects. That mankind would benefit or science would benefit is great, but it would be a side-effect.
Because I could carve a plaque that said "I was here first, bitch. Suck on that, you second-place losers." I would do my damndedst to ensure that I was remembered not only as the First Man On Mars, but also biggest, most insufferable d-bag at the same time.
The inherent non-acceptability of Google Glass was somewhat predicted by Snow Crash over 20 years ago. One of the characters, a "gargoyle" walks around in full-recording mode at all times, trying to capture every bit of information possible. The description, as given, is at best neutral and my takeaway was that it wasn't considered a positive thing by other information gatherers of that world.
Crapflooding ones own info stream is still crapflooding.
I think the broader question is why does the fact that its a game warrant some higher editorial standard. Apple would not block the NYT app if they used it to publish an editorial titled "Assad is a Jerk".
I don't see why a game that happens to portray the same opinion should be looked as different. Also the sort of people who we typically have editorializing about editorials do so because they happen to also be the types that read editorials; if they had any exposure to these games they'd complain about them too. I thought we for the mast part had societal value that considered freedom to express our opinions a virtue? Yes some of them are simplistic, and uniformed. I come back to so what?
I don't think it laudable of Apple to run a market place that actively bars goods and services that happen to express opinions, about real things. Doubly so when its terribly inconsistent about when and on what those rules are actually enforced. Yes they have right to do it; just I chose not to participate.
Because blocking the NYT app doesn't put them on one side or the other of a political crisis where people are living or dying.
Why is it that people who have evaded authorities find it irresistible to gloat about how "clever" they are to have outwitted cops. I get it, maybe eventually talk about it in an autobiography, but he may technically still be evading said authorities. He might as well say, "nanna nanna booboo, come and get me!".
He's monologuing. That's the downfall of every evil villain.
In this case, he's probably more of a rich, paranoid nutbag than anything. Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but he's not helping his case any and I'm not going to vouch for the authorities in Belize, either.
As a Mac user I know the feeling, but what would you even acquire by trying to game on Linux? There is Macs for unixy world and it has better support than Linux will ever will. Of course Windows is the best platform but mostly because they have things like XNA and.NET. Microsoft has really played their game well. But why on Linux rather than Mac? While Crossover isn't supporting all the games it's at least better and many games have Mac Ports? So if you want to do both unixy world and games why not Mac?
The only good thing about this is the feeling that maybe Mac ports become more frequent too, but I'm not putting lot into that hope as far as Linux support goes.
Valve isn't the problem here - they've been good about bringing their AAA content to Mac and keeping it supported. I expect that they will continue to do the same with Linux.
The problem is that they are the distributors (through Steam) for a bunch of publishers that aren't Mac friendly. However, this gives them a reason to change, if they want to. Some of them can't afford to, some of them just won't and some of them will even be dickbags about it.
A lot of those same publishers are willing to be completely mediocre in their support and decide that supporting Windows is enough. Valve apparently looked at the situation, said "Windows 8 WTF" and is moving to expand their offerings so that maybe one day they can laugh in Ballmer's balloon-shaped face.
> Then don't worry about it because the rate of error propagation due to aging for physical media is orders of magnitude greater than that of media stored on the Internet.
The rate of corporate revocation of access rights to cloud-based storage is much higher than the rate of bitrot at the moment. Amazon is awesome, but they won't be around forever. My Britney Spears collection (when I say Britney Spears, I mean King Crimson) will be safely enjoyed by my spawn, whereas I'm pretty sure my bad sci-fi novel collection won't be (no matter how you slice it).
No, but I can imagine a change to the legal system limiting the liability of the manufacturers of self-driving cars.
If we could know that self-driving cars reduce accidents by 95% (a not unrealistic amount), it would be morally wrong for us to not put them on the road. If the only hurdle the manufacturers had left was the liability issue, then it would be morally wrong for Congress to not change the laws.
Of course, Congress has been morally bankrupt since, oh, about 1789, so I doubt that they'll see this as an imperative. On the other hand, I do imagine the car makers paying lobbyists and making campaign contributions to ensure that self-driving car manufacturers are exempted from these lawsuits, so it could still happen.
If corporations have the same rights as people in our framework of laws, why should they not be subject to the same penalties, including the death penalty (in those jurisdictions that have it)? By limiting the liability of a corporation, you are placing a higher value on it's survival than an actual person.
Limited liability is fine, as long as the corporation is viewed as a collection of persons who can be held individually responsible for malfeasance, but the moment you equate the corporation to a person, in any sense, it should suffer the same consequences along with the privileges.
At some point, I stopped and realized that it is NOT a good thing to have things centralized and beyond your control. It IS better to own a book which is YOUR copy which does NOT change or disappear. Just as you should own your local music and not stream it from some "cloud". And the same goes for a lot of things.
To an extent, I agree.
I find that electronic books are fine for throwaway fiction - books that, for whatever reason, will only be read and if they were lost, I wouldn't care. But for reference books, I prefer hard copies that I can browse thru at my leisure, leave open on a desk or quickly flip between sections.
The same goes for music. A lot of it is stuff that I'll listen to once or twice, but wouldn't miss it otherwise. For things that I want future generations to know about, I get a more permanent format.
You'll end up with a starkly divided society: the wealthy class, who can afford new houses, and cars, and to start new businesses, and the underclass who cannot afford a house or a car because they cannot get a decent job because they cannot afford an education because everybody's got their money locked up in their bank vaults appreciating instead of out backing student loans, small business loans and mortgages.
We're scary close that situation now. A lot of people in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck without any real spare money to spend (yet they spend it anyway). It's not really the fault of the rich, it's more the fault of corporations who went nuts selling everyone credit and the fault of people who bought into that credit without thinking through the long term effects.
Being fair isn't hugely difficult, but it's easier to raise an accusation of being unfair than it is to combat it. There are people who wait and watch and see intentional discrimination even where none exists.
There's no easy solution. Sometimes there is no spoon.
The New York Times got caught in the same filter that catches everyone else while posting in corporate forum. Their problem is that, for some misguided reason, they, being the NYT, believe that they have some sort of free speech rights in a private space. Facebook is not a public space - it's corporate-owned and controlled. It's private space, open to some members of the public to post in, but with whatever restrictions FB feels like applying.
Actually, after that period about 2000 years ago, Israel did not exist as a state until 1948 or so, when the UN (mainly the British and the Americans) forcibly set up a new Israel because none of the major countries wanted an influx of Jewish refugees. It played into the hands of the Zionists of the time, who were keen on setting up a new religious state on their prior home ground, and gathered support from Christians all over the place who were all agog over the messianic revelations in The Bible.
To say that the founding of the new Israeli state was anything but a religious and political clusterfuck of epic proportions is to just be in denial.
What we have now is an even bigger mess, because once Israel beats the crap out of it's neighbors (and it will eventually, for better or worse), they'll turn inward and start beating the crap out of each other in a bout of sectarian warfare that will make the current fight seem like a sandbox rumble.
Whether or not The Ribbon is a Good Thing is immaterial at this point. The point is that Microsoft put it there and if you want to beat Microsoft in the word processor game, you have to either have The Ribbon, the Not-Quite-A-Lawsuit-Ribbon-Replacement, or something that's just plain better (on both a usability and a marketing level). For individuals, who cares? It matters when you're trying to pass off your Microsoft-Word-Alternative.
The Ribbon is not the worst thing ever invented. I reserve that for everything that got tacked onto Word after v5.1 for the Mac, except maybe multi-column editing. Frankly, The Ribbon is only the smallest part of that mess now.
Seriously. Why do distros have to ship with every possible FOSS package under the sun? Why not let the user decide which packages to install after they get the base system installed?
A word processor is not necessary to make a working system, yet every bloody one of them ships with Open Office as part of the default install, which then costs time in removing it. If I want a word processor, I'll install it later.
Same thing with Steam. It's awesome that Valve is doing this, but at the same time, it's not necessary to a working system and the people that are actually interested in playing Valve-distributed games will make the necessary investment in downloading the installer as a separate package. There is no need to include Steam on any distro.
I don't even see ads anymore, thanks to ad blindness. They're easy enough to mentally block (except for the auto-expanders), that whatever they're selling doesn't really register.
No Western leader ever lost an election by failing to appease China.
We'll harrumph a lot and wag the finger at them, but in the long term, we'll just roll over and let China do whatever the hell it wants to, partly because no one ove here really gives a shit what happens to a bunch of poor Chinese people, and mostly because Western corporations are lining up to cash in on their misery. We're all complicit to an extent, being addicted to the teat of cheap goods, and then washing our consciences by telling our leaders "Go get those dirty bastards! They're taking our jaaaaawbs!"
Whatever war we might have pretended to have against Communist China is over and we lost. We rolled over, showed our belly, and now we're lined up to let China run a train on our economy.
Slashdot Mirror
See, that whole union thing bugs me.
If you're Senior only because you've been there long enough, but you don't have the chops to show for it, just get the fuck out of the way.
You people will get your nose bent out of shape at any goddamn thing, won't you?
Gender shouldn't matter when it comes to writing code, period. Turns out, it does in some ways that are not good for the industry as a whole. We're missing about half the insight that the inconvenient gender (aka "women") could bring to the table if the tech industry wasn't a sweaty jock party.
So, Google is trying to do something about it. Might be the *wrong* thing (I don't think so, but I'm not omnipotent) but at least THEY ARE TRYING TO DO *SOMETHING*, which is a lot more than I see any of you other meatsacks doing. You can either start being part of the solution, or just go to Hell.
If it gets more women coding, then more power to them.
If it gets more women in tech, more power to them.
If it will shut up your goddamn special snowflake whining, full power to them.
I'm not seeing anything on their page that is, on the face of it, illegal. Certainly, they seem to be getting near the edge of the law, but if they don't cross the line, there's nothing there.
They may be immoral, but the moment you start legislating morality, you open up a can of worms that can't be unopened.
Stratfor may be kind of dumb in some areas, but that doesn't make them a bad company.
I would be a perfect gentleman to my shipmates and go above and beyond the call of duty, when possible, in whatever my job was.
But I'd be the first Total D-Bag on Mars to the rest of Humanity.
I considered it.
I won't pretend it's for mankind or science or anything like that - I'd be doing it because people would remember my name for having done something somewhat insane, with few harmful side-effects. That mankind would benefit or science would benefit is great, but it would be a side-effect.
Because I could carve a plaque that said "I was here first, bitch. Suck on that, you second-place losers." I would do my damndedst to ensure that I was remembered not only as the First Man On Mars, but also biggest, most insufferable d-bag at the same time.
But they'd remember my name.
Better revenge: move to Mars, destroy the Earth.
Way more satisfying.
The inherent non-acceptability of Google Glass was somewhat predicted by Snow Crash over 20 years ago. One of the characters, a "gargoyle" walks around in full-recording mode at all times, trying to capture every bit of information possible. The description, as given, is at best neutral and my takeaway was that it wasn't considered a positive thing by other information gatherers of that world.
Crapflooding ones own info stream is still crapflooding.
Call me when they actually have some compelling content and can be viewed on a device that doesn't guarantee eyestrain trying to pick out details.
I think the broader question is why does the fact that its a game warrant some higher editorial standard. Apple would not block the NYT app if they used it to publish an editorial titled "Assad is a Jerk".
I don't see why a game that happens to portray the same opinion should be looked as different. Also the sort of people who we typically have editorializing about editorials do so because they happen to also be the types that read editorials; if they had any exposure to these games they'd complain about them too. I thought we for the mast part had societal value that considered freedom to express our opinions a virtue? Yes some of them are simplistic, and uniformed. I come back to so what?
I don't think it laudable of Apple to run a market place that actively bars goods and services that happen to express opinions, about real things. Doubly so when its terribly inconsistent about when and on what those rules are actually enforced. Yes they have right to do it; just I chose not to participate.
Because blocking the NYT app doesn't put them on one side or the other of a political crisis where people are living or dying.
Why is it that people who have evaded authorities find it irresistible to gloat about how "clever" they are to have outwitted cops. I get it, maybe eventually talk about it in an autobiography, but he may technically still be evading said authorities. He might as well say, "nanna nanna booboo, come and get me!".
He's monologuing. That's the downfall of every evil villain.
In this case, he's probably more of a rich, paranoid nutbag than anything. Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but he's not helping his case any and I'm not going to vouch for the authorities in Belize, either.
You had me at "terminate the spammers".
With a goddamn axe.
As a Mac user I know the feeling, but what would you even acquire by trying to game on Linux? There is Macs for unixy world and it has better support than Linux will ever will. Of course Windows is the best platform but mostly because they have things like XNA and .NET. Microsoft has really played their game well. But why on Linux rather than Mac? While Crossover isn't supporting all the games it's at least better and many games have Mac Ports? So if you want to do both unixy world and games why not Mac?
The only good thing about this is the feeling that maybe Mac ports become more frequent too, but I'm not putting lot into that hope as far as Linux support goes.
Valve isn't the problem here - they've been good about bringing their AAA content to Mac and keeping it supported. I expect that they will continue to do the same with Linux.
The problem is that they are the distributors (through Steam) for a bunch of publishers that aren't Mac friendly. However, this gives them a reason to change, if they want to. Some of them can't afford to, some of them just won't and some of them will even be dickbags about it.
A lot of those same publishers are willing to be completely mediocre in their support and decide that supporting Windows is enough. Valve apparently looked at the situation, said "Windows 8 WTF" and is moving to expand their offerings so that maybe one day they can laugh in Ballmer's balloon-shaped face.
> Then don't worry about it because the rate of error propagation due to aging for physical media is orders of magnitude greater than that of media stored on the Internet.
The rate of corporate revocation of access rights to cloud-based storage is much higher than the rate of bitrot at the moment. Amazon is awesome, but they won't be around forever. My Britney Spears collection (when I say Britney Spears, I mean King Crimson) will be safely enjoyed by my spawn, whereas I'm pretty sure my bad sci-fi novel collection won't be (no matter how you slice it).
No, but I can imagine a change to the legal system limiting the liability of the manufacturers of self-driving cars.
If we could know that self-driving cars reduce accidents by 95% (a not unrealistic amount), it would be morally wrong for us to not put them on the road. If the only hurdle the manufacturers had left was the liability issue, then it would be morally wrong for Congress to not change the laws.
Of course, Congress has been morally bankrupt since, oh, about 1789, so I doubt that they'll see this as an imperative. On the other hand, I do imagine the car makers paying lobbyists and making campaign contributions to ensure that self-driving car manufacturers are exempted from these lawsuits, so it could still happen.
If corporations have the same rights as people in our framework of laws, why should they not be subject to the same penalties, including the death penalty (in those jurisdictions that have it)? By limiting the liability of a corporation, you are placing a higher value on it's survival than an actual person.
Limited liability is fine, as long as the corporation is viewed as a collection of persons who can be held individually responsible for malfeasance, but the moment you equate the corporation to a person, in any sense, it should suffer the same consequences along with the privileges.
There are people who wait and watch and see intentional discrimination even where none exists.
Your white privilege is showing.
Your bias against whites is showing.
Thing is, those people who watch and wait aren't confined to one racial group. They're all over the place.
My bias is more against people who just want to be dicks.
Like you.
At some point, I stopped and realized that it is NOT a good thing to have things centralized and beyond your control. It IS better to own a book which is YOUR copy which does NOT change or disappear. Just as you should own your local music and not stream it from some "cloud". And the same goes for a lot of things.
To an extent, I agree.
I find that electronic books are fine for throwaway fiction - books that, for whatever reason, will only be read and if they were lost, I wouldn't care. But for reference books, I prefer hard copies that I can browse thru at my leisure, leave open on a desk or quickly flip between sections.
The same goes for music. A lot of it is stuff that I'll listen to once or twice, but wouldn't miss it otherwise. For things that I want future generations to know about, I get a more permanent format.
You'll end up with a starkly divided society: the wealthy class, who can afford new houses, and cars, and to start new businesses, and the underclass who cannot afford a house or a car because they cannot get a decent job because they cannot afford an education because everybody's got their money locked up in their bank vaults appreciating instead of out backing student loans, small business loans and mortgages.
We're scary close that situation now. A lot of people in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck without any real spare money to spend (yet they spend it anyway). It's not really the fault of the rich, it's more the fault of corporations who went nuts selling everyone credit and the fault of people who bought into that credit without thinking through the long term effects.
> Just treat everyone fairly, how hard is that?
Being fair isn't hugely difficult, but it's easier to raise an accusation of being unfair than it is to combat it. There are people who wait and watch and see intentional discrimination even where none exists.
There's no easy solution. Sometimes there is no spoon.
> I'm not sure if you follow PETA's actions very closely but the *sanity* has no bearing on PETA.
FTFY.
The New York Times got caught in the same filter that catches everyone else while posting in corporate forum. Their problem is that, for some misguided reason, they, being the NYT, believe that they have some sort of free speech rights in a private space. Facebook is not a public space - it's corporate-owned and controlled. It's private space, open to some members of the public to post in, but with whatever restrictions FB feels like applying.
Actually, after that period about 2000 years ago, Israel did not exist as a state until 1948 or so, when the UN (mainly the British and the Americans) forcibly set up a new Israel because none of the major countries wanted an influx of Jewish refugees. It played into the hands of the Zionists of the time, who were keen on setting up a new religious state on their prior home ground, and gathered support from Christians all over the place who were all agog over the messianic revelations in The Bible.
To say that the founding of the new Israeli state was anything but a religious and political clusterfuck of epic proportions is to just be in denial.
What we have now is an even bigger mess, because once Israel beats the crap out of it's neighbors (and it will eventually, for better or worse), they'll turn inward and start beating the crap out of each other in a bout of sectarian warfare that will make the current fight seem like a sandbox rumble.
Whether or not The Ribbon is a Good Thing is immaterial at this point. The point is that Microsoft put it there and if you want to beat Microsoft in the word processor game, you have to either have The Ribbon, the Not-Quite-A-Lawsuit-Ribbon-Replacement, or something that's just plain better (on both a usability and a marketing level). For individuals, who cares? It matters when you're trying to pass off your Microsoft-Word-Alternative.
The Ribbon is not the worst thing ever invented. I reserve that for everything that got tacked onto Word after v5.1 for the Mac, except maybe multi-column editing. Frankly, The Ribbon is only the smallest part of that mess now.
Seriously. Why do distros have to ship with every possible FOSS package under the sun? Why not let the user decide which packages to install after they get the base system installed?
A word processor is not necessary to make a working system, yet every bloody one of them ships with Open Office as part of the default install, which then costs time in removing it. If I want a word processor, I'll install it later.
Same thing with Steam. It's awesome that Valve is doing this, but at the same time, it's not necessary to a working system and the people that are actually interested in playing Valve-distributed games will make the necessary investment in downloading the installer as a separate package. There is no need to include Steam on any distro.
I don't even see ads anymore, thanks to ad blindness. They're easy enough to mentally block (except for the auto-expanders), that whatever they're selling doesn't really register.
No Western leader ever lost an election by failing to appease China.
We'll harrumph a lot and wag the finger at them, but in the long term, we'll just roll over and let China do whatever the hell it wants to, partly because no one ove here really gives a shit what happens to a bunch of poor Chinese people, and mostly because Western corporations are lining up to cash in on their misery. We're all complicit to an extent, being addicted to the teat of cheap goods, and then washing our consciences by telling our leaders "Go get those dirty bastards! They're taking our jaaaaawbs!"
Whatever war we might have pretended to have against Communist China is over and we lost. We rolled over, showed our belly, and now we're lined up to let China run a train on our economy.