Looking around a crowd, and setting a shrapnel bomb on the sidewalk next to children...that's murder
It is but ONE form of murder, ONE of MANY.
Executing a death sentence as punishment for that cold, calculated act of deliberate cruelty and murder isn't murder.
Yet, if his parents had executed him when he got home, for precisely the same reason: "as punishment for that cold, calculated act [...]" it would be murder again, right? So... apparently that "reasoning" isn't what makes it "not murder". What makes it "murder" is the trappings of legality and due process... its purely semantics.
murder is premeditated homicide that the state has declared illegal execution is a specific premeditated homicide that the state has declared legal
Make no mistake the ONLY difference between them is the writing on paper that makes one legal and the other not. The writing is the difference. In some cases it is a sufficient difference to justify it being different.
If we execute an innocent person... though... is there any difference at all?
. It's self defense
After he's captured, in handcuffs, in prison, and under guard... Any threat he poses is well and truly neutralized. So, no, killing him at that point is NOT self defense.
I wasn't even going to attempt addressing the morality of the death penalty. I personally think the death penalty should be abolished because innocents are killed. I don't really object to it in principal as system of removing dangerous criminals that cannot be rehabilitated from society... but since there is no way of reliably determining those put to death are even actually GUILTY it is senseless to use it on anybody.
But its really beside the point.
The point of prison IS... no... scratch that... SHOULD BE to rehabilitate the prisoner, and to protect the public from prisoners who cannot be rehabilitated.
Desiring the imprisonment to be physically or mentally cruel to the prisoners serves no legitimate purpose; only sadism.
One leather key fob with manufacturer's crest. One car key.
I have a 2nd keychain with house key, mailbox key, spare car key, wife's car key, but I don't generally go out with it. And I usually use my wife's keys to drive her car or get the mail; so it mostly sits on my bedside table.
And yet, we don't feel we are secure enough to allow people to vote? How the fuck does that make any sense?
Voting should be simple. And by simple I mean low-tech. Canada's system is nearly perfect. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can see how the votes are counted. An observer can watch the voting, can watch the counts. Recounts are easy.
As soon as you make it online, it becomes inscrutable. Even if you design a system with open hardware, open software, etc most people still can't understand it, and can't verify it. And even if they verify the software and hardware, they can't know that's the software and hardware that was actually used, or that it wasn't remotely patched with new software the day of the election, and then patched back after the election. There are ways of securing it... but they are themselves inscrutable, crytopgraphy, digital signatures,... might as well be using more magic to show the original magic was right. The system should be something everyone can understand intuitively.
Paper voting is that. You have X paper ballots, each person is handed a ballot, person goes into a booth marks it, and then turns it in. You can see for yourself that the number of voters matches the number of ballots. You can see for your self that the voter puts the ballot in the box. You can watch the box yourself to see its not tampered with. At the end you can watch them take the ballots out of the box, you can watch them be counted, and recounted.
Democracy should be THAT transparent.
NOTHING beats the ease-of-use of and time saving of online voting.
But why on earth would "ease of use" and "time saving" be the most important aspects of choosing the system by which we select our governement?
You propose giving up a voting system even a child can understand and verify for a system that only the elite could even begin to understand, and which would be all but impossible to prove was operating correctly on election day.
But in the right hands they are the best and fastest solution to a problem.
Sure. Provided the "right hands" acknowledges that they are not usually the the right solution to a problem chosen at random.
Plenty of people code, and plenty more people think they can code. Someone who knows what they are doing will not get into trouble in ASM, much less in C or C++. But there are lots of people who claim they know what they are doing when actually they know squat.
Sure those completely worthless people do exist and most developers do overestimate their own abilities.
Q: Do you know how many really good ASM/ C / C++ devs are out there that you wouldn't dream of saying that they "don't know squat" that still produce and release code with subtle to obvious bugs in it?
A: All of them.
Yeah, maybe THOSE people should avoid these languages.
Nobody is perfect. And nobody gets better at something by not doing it. You learn by doing.
I agree some developers simply shouldn't be developers, and that others are way out of their proper depth. But no developers live up to your standards. Unintended things affect all of us; edge cases we didn't consider, api/library/hardware specs we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did, requirements we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did... that affects all of us.
Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.
That is a bit much too. Nobody wants to be 'Mr. & Mrs. Alzheimer'... and asking whole family trees to change their name is no more onerous than renaming a river.
I propose drawing on fantasy and science fiction for memorable disease names. Nazgul-flesheating-disease, Tatooine-Fever, Targaryen-herpes...
, but in Canada, you don't have to charge GST (same name, who would have guessed) if you make less than $30,000 in revenue.
You also lose the ability to claim ITCs input tax credits. Given that anybody driving regularly for uber is buying gas, paying for maintenance and repairs... it would probably actually boost their net take home slightly to collect the tax.
The revenue is also going to include any money uber keeps for itself. The only way the CRA only looks at the revenue uber pays the driver is if the CRA decides the driver is really an employee... and then the 30k excemption is moot, because it will at that point be considering uber total revenues for the purposes of whether or not it has to collect GST.. which of course, it would.
Where you are is somewhat the same thing and is probably protected in the same way.
One big difference, they can track my location even if I don't make a phone call. So if I have a phone on me, they can track all my movements in real-time.
Your expectations may be off, then.
They may be off relative to the law, but they are what they are and i suspect they're shared by most. The law should generally reflect the expectations/desires of the majority of its citizens*, not the other way a round.
(* emphasis on generally. I'm not advocating for true democracy)
It's not "no expectation of privacy". It's "no expectation that your location is kept private". Different thing.
Same difference. I expect that my location is kept private too.
If you call me on the phone, and the police asks me what you said, I can tell them. I don't know what rights I have to refuse to tell them if I don't want to, but you have no right to stop me if I decide to tell them.
Difference being that I am not friends with my telco. I can choose one from two or forego a modern convenience. The latter is an option, but runs against the freedom to pursue happiness. I want to be able to choose simple modern luxuries and conveniences without agreeing the government gets to know every where I go.
The phone company has no right to know what we were talking about, but the have the right to know your location.
Yes. They have the necessity to know it to fullfill the service.
but I expect they have the right to give it to the police.
Bingo. They should't. Just as I have attorney/client priviledge and have dr./patient priviledge... so too should I have ISP/carrier client priviledge. Enough private and personal information about me is recorded by the ISP/carrier in their legitimate fullfillment of service that special privliledge should apply.
The fault here lies not with the judges who are applying the law as it is written. The problem lies with the legislators who need to pass laws recognizing the privilege should exist.
Maybe one day eventually. But students and people who actually do any work are still buying them. Usually in the form of a laptop, but often desktops if they value power and performance and longevity over portability.
There is a large exodus sure... grandma might not need a PC now that she has a tablet. But nobody is giong to write a 10 page essay on a tablet if they dont have to.
The keyboard can be worked around with bluetooth... but the ability to multi-task-- collaborate with you friends in skype, while having not one, not two, but three browser windows open at the same time various sites with information your citing, plus your editor, plus excel for that graph your working on...
Doing any real work on a tablet is a JOKE. Tablets etc might one day catch up... let you attach a keyboard, monitor, and mouse... and run your desktop apps. Yeah... that could happen.
But so what... that's still a home pc with a desktop OS, with a tablet mode... why its almost like your inventing Windows 8 / Windows 10....or Ubunutu Unity...
Yeah, T9 and iTap etc should have been available; so not quite as bad as I made it out to be... but still texting was very different then. (i guess its still that way on dumb/feature phones... but i haven't used one since the Motorola Razr 2.)
And the texter wasn't "the world champion" just some dude who won some local texting contest. Still fast, but lets not go nuts.
Oh, and it was Leno not Letterman.
There was simililar race in Australia at the time and the morse guy won there too.
10 years ago the phones they were using had those press 1 once for A, 1 twice for B, 1 three times for C, 1 for times for 1, 1 five times for !. press 2 once time for D, press 2 twice for E.... systems.
It wasn't a competition between morse and a smartphone with swyft etc.
I still give the edge to a morse expert... but not by nearly as much.
Yeah. The kind of stuff you seem largely unfamiliar with.
Lol, yes, relax. I'm not a pure C guy and I won't offend you by pretending to be.
That's not true, and has never been. Until about 16 years ago, you had to declare your variables at the beginning of a block/compound statement. That can be well within the function.
You know, until I saw it in this thread, it never occurred to me to just open a new block for the purposes of inlining a debug declaration. Thanks, I'll use that.
As of about 16 years ago, you're even allowed to freely mix your declarations and code.
Cool beans. The one C program I do have to maintain (a small 'plugin' DLL for an embedded system) I have to compile with Visual Studio 2010, which doesn't support C99 syntax. So as of about today I'm still not allowed to, even if the rest of the world has been enjoying it for 16 years. VS2012 doesn't have it either; but i hear VS2013 does.:)
General hint: If your functions are so long that having to (suppose this was indeed the case) declare/define all your variables at the top becomes a serious annoyance, then chances are that your functions are too long/do too much. Fix that instead.
That's not the issue at all. The specific example I gave was the issue:
An IF DEBUG; where the variable was only used within the debug conditional.
In C++, C#, etc I've always declared and initialized anything I needed in a debug block in the debug block, except for in C where not only did i declared it at the top, but it gets its own debug block too since its only used by debug builds.
Even in a short function this is inelegant looking:
void func(int a) {
int x = 1;
int y = 2;
int z = 0; #IF DEBUG
int q = 3; #ENDIF
z = dosomething(a, x);
y += z; #IF DEBUG// do something that needs z,y and q #ENDIF [... rest of function...] }
Your note that I can start a block anywhere -- Thanks; until now it hadn't occurred to me to use that expressly to inline declarations for debug blocks.
// comments were added to the C standard. Not good old ANSI see but still ok.
I haven't looked at the code, but the one thing I usually trip over when having to write pure C instead of C++ that's really mostly C is that everything has to be declared at the top of the function... Always. even some variable you only use in the IF $DEBUG block, I normally declare those in the if $debug block where it occurs, rather than creating a 2nd if debug block at the top of the function just to declare it.
If the only argument is that Playboy is so bad that the cropped image is indelibly tainted by association, then I guess I'm fine with that - but the logical foundation seems shaky.
subsitute "so bad" with "controversial" and its about right. Playboy is a source of controversy, and anything coming from it IS going to be indelibly tainted by that controversy.
rational assessment of information is usually based on content rather than provenance.
I accept that the objection to the image may not be entirely rational. I also accept that, rational or not, their objection does exist.
I also note that the provenance of the image usually does come up, because its "interesting", and the inevitable recovery of the full nude image by some interested student, and the content of the resulting commentary is usually inappropriate in a computer science class. While the cropped picture itself is unobjectionable it all but inevitably triggers this chain of events.
Between that and the fact that the image itself is not in any way irreplaceable or indispensable it seems logical to replace the image.
I first met with the TJ administration in May in an attempt to fix the environment in our computer science labs. School officials didnâ(TM)t stop using the centerfold image in the classroom until February, after I met with them again.
Sounds like the school saw things her way... at least eventually.
Because someone will find something offensive about the picture of your wife...
So what? If significantly fewer people find it offensive, then its better.
And I can pretty much guarantee than an innocuous headshot photo I take of perfectly normal woman wearing a hat with a feather on it will prove to be far less controversial than a cropped playboy centerfold from the 70s.
Therefore, why not just use the one we already have.
You know why, your just being deliberately obtuse.
I am not being obtuse. I am well aware it is both a common and famous image. I've seen it several times over the years.
But the only real objection to dropping it amounts to "In a perfect world no one would think we should have to".
To that I would say "Grow up". The entire so-called standard image collection is extremely low resolution, poor quality color, and dated. Nobody is really doing real science on it anymore. We have libraries with thousands of equal or better images. People don't pick Lenna for their publication to compare it with old research - people pick her because she's like a mascot.
We can pick a new mascot image. It won't break science.
Lots of sports teams in the US have dropped their traditional names and selected new mascots over the years due to being inappropriately offensive to native americans. Even now The Washington Redskin's owner is kicking and screaming to hold onto that name, but the writing is on the wall; and its only a matter of time until that gets changed too.
Lenna is a central story in computer imaging history and that's fine. Let it just become history. It's not a appropriate photo anymore, it never really was.
This is a school that is supposed to be developing kids to do advanced work in the field.
So, not using the image in a high school assignment will somehow diminish the students education? Absurd.
Are we going to begin punishing people for having poor judgement?
Yes. That's exactly what we do. There are consequences. In most cases simply altering ones behavior to better meet expectations is sufficient.
Except - powerful people aren't held to such a standard. Look at Clinton. That skank has such poor judgement, I wonder how she has managed to feed herself all her life,
This really doesn't need to devolve into politics. No question the world is not remotely fair.
Do the course work, and stop worrying about the people around you. They don't matter. Do the work, get your grade, pass the course, and move on. That is what growing up is all about, right?
You've essentially said the students shouldn't question authority or express themselves when they see misogyny or injustice etc. Yes they will learn the world isn't a perfect place -- that is part of growing up. But trying to change it, and changing what you can is a part of growing up too.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking around a crowd, and setting a shrapnel bomb on the sidewalk next to children...that's murder
It is but ONE form of murder, ONE of MANY.
Executing a death sentence as punishment for that cold, calculated act of deliberate cruelty and murder isn't murder.
Yet, if his parents had executed him when he got home, for precisely the same reason: "as punishment for that cold, calculated act [...]" it would be murder again, right? So... apparently that "reasoning" isn't what makes it "not murder". What makes it "murder" is the trappings of legality and due process... its purely semantics.
murder is premeditated homicide that the state has declared illegal
execution is a specific premeditated homicide that the state has declared legal
Make no mistake the ONLY difference between them is the writing on paper that makes one legal and the other not. The writing is the difference. In some cases it is a sufficient difference to justify it being different.
If we execute an innocent person... though... is there any difference at all?
. It's self defense
After he's captured, in handcuffs, in prison, and under guard... Any threat he poses is well and truly neutralized. So, no, killing him at that point is NOT self defense.
I wasn't even going to attempt addressing the morality of the death penalty. I personally think the death penalty should be abolished because innocents are killed. I don't really object to it in principal as system of removing dangerous criminals that cannot be rehabilitated from society... but since there is no way of reliably determining those put to death are even actually GUILTY it is senseless to use it on anybody.
But its really beside the point.
The point of prison IS... no... scratch that... SHOULD BE to rehabilitate the prisoner, and to protect the public from prisoners who cannot be rehabilitated.
Desiring the imprisonment to be physically or mentally cruel to the prisoners serves no legitimate purpose; only sadism.
Tsarnaev should be made to know these things.
Why? To inflict as much anguish, stress, despair, and pain on him as you legally can get away with? That says more about YOU than anything else.
If he is imprisoned for life it should be simply because he is a threat to society.
One leather key fob with manufacturer's crest.
One car key.
I have a 2nd keychain with house key, mailbox key, spare car key, wife's car key, but I don't generally go out with it. And I usually use my wife's keys to drive her car or get the mail; so it mostly sits on my bedside table.
And yet, we don't feel we are secure enough to allow people to vote? How the fuck does that make any sense?
Voting should be simple. And by simple I mean low-tech. Canada's system is nearly perfect. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can see how the votes are counted. An observer can watch the voting, can watch the counts. Recounts are easy.
As soon as you make it online, it becomes inscrutable. Even if you design a system with open hardware, open software, etc most people still can't understand it, and can't verify it. And even if they verify the software and hardware, they can't know that's the software and hardware that was actually used, or that it wasn't remotely patched with new software the day of the election, and then patched back after the election. There are ways of securing it... but they are themselves inscrutable, crytopgraphy, digital signatures, ... might as well be using more magic to show the original magic was right. The system should be something everyone can understand intuitively.
Paper voting is that. You have X paper ballots, each person is handed a ballot, person goes into a booth marks it, and then turns it in. You can see for yourself that the number of voters matches the number of ballots. You can see for your self that the voter puts the ballot in the box. You can watch the box yourself to see its not tampered with. At the end you can watch them take the ballots out of the box, you can watch them be counted, and recounted.
Democracy should be THAT transparent.
NOTHING beats the ease-of-use of and time saving of online voting.
But why on earth would "ease of use" and "time saving" be the most important aspects of choosing the system by which we select our governement?
You propose giving up a voting system even a child can understand and verify for a system that only the elite could even begin to understand, and which would be all but impossible to prove was operating correctly on election day.
But in the right hands they are the best and fastest solution to a problem.
Sure. Provided the "right hands" acknowledges that they are not usually the the right solution to a problem chosen at random.
Plenty of people code, and plenty more people think they can code. Someone who knows what they are doing will not get into trouble in ASM, much less in C or C++. But there are lots of people who claim they know what they are doing when actually they know squat.
Sure those completely worthless people do exist and most developers do overestimate their own abilities.
Q: Do you know how many really good ASM/ C / C++ devs are out there that you wouldn't dream of saying that they "don't know squat" that still produce and release code with subtle to obvious bugs in it?
A: All of them.
Yeah, maybe THOSE people should avoid these languages.
Nobody is perfect. And nobody gets better at something by not doing it. You learn by doing.
I agree some developers simply shouldn't be developers, and that others are way out of their proper depth. But no developers live up to your standards. Unintended things affect all of us; edge cases we didn't consider, api/library/hardware specs we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did, requirements we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did... that affects all of us.
Worst case scenario, they have to change their name.
That is a bit much too. Nobody wants to be 'Mr. & Mrs. Alzheimer' ... and asking whole family trees to change their name is no more onerous than renaming a river.
I propose drawing on fantasy and science fiction for memorable disease names. Nazgul-flesheating-disease, Tatooine-Fever, Targaryen-herpes...
, but in Canada, you don't have to charge GST (same name, who would have guessed) if you make less than $30,000 in revenue.
You also lose the ability to claim ITCs input tax credits. Given that anybody driving regularly for uber is buying gas, paying for maintenance and repairs... it would probably actually boost their net take home slightly to collect the tax.
The revenue is also going to include any money uber keeps for itself. The only way the CRA only looks at the revenue uber pays the driver is if the CRA decides the driver is really an employee... and then the 30k excemption is moot, because it will at that point be considering uber total revenues for the purposes of whether or not it has to collect GST.. which of course, it would.
Where you are is somewhat the same thing and is probably protected in the same way.
One big difference, they can track my location even if I don't make a phone call. So if I have a phone on me, they can track all my movements in real-time.
Your expectations may be off, then.
They may be off relative to the law, but they are what they are and i suspect they're shared by most. The law should generally reflect the expectations/desires of the majority of its citizens*, not the other way a round.
(* emphasis on generally. I'm not advocating for true democracy)
It's not "no expectation of privacy". It's "no expectation that your location is kept private". Different thing.
Same difference. I expect that my location is kept private too.
If you call me on the phone, and the police asks me what you said, I can tell them. I don't know what rights I have to refuse to tell them if I don't want to, but you have no right to stop me if I decide to tell them.
Difference being that I am not friends with my telco. I can choose one from two or forego a modern convenience. The latter is an option, but runs against the freedom to pursue happiness. I want to be able to choose simple modern luxuries and conveniences without agreeing the government gets to know every where I go.
The phone company has no right to know what we were talking about, but the have the right to know your location.
Yes. They have the necessity to know it to fullfill the service.
but I expect they have the right to give it to the police.
Bingo. They should't. Just as I have attorney/client priviledge and have dr./patient priviledge ... so too should I have ISP/carrier client priviledge. Enough private and personal information about me is recorded by the ISP/carrier in their legitimate fullfillment of service that special privliledge should apply.
The fault here lies not with the judges who are applying the law as it is written. The problem lies with the legislators who need to pass laws recognizing the privilege should exist.
Maybe one day eventually. But students and people who actually do any work are still buying them. Usually in the form of a laptop, but often desktops if they value power and performance and longevity over portability.
There is a large exodus sure... grandma might not need a PC now that she has a tablet. But nobody is giong to write a 10 page essay on a tablet if they dont have to.
The keyboard can be worked around with bluetooth... but the ability to multi-task-- collaborate with you friends in skype, while having not one, not two, but three browser windows open at the same time various sites with information your citing, plus your editor, plus excel for that graph your working on...
Doing any real work on a tablet is a JOKE. Tablets etc might one day catch up... let you attach a keyboard, monitor, and mouse... and run your desktop apps. Yeah... that could happen.
But so what... that's still a home pc with a desktop OS, with a tablet mode... why its almost like your inventing Windows 8 / Windows 10....or Ubunutu Unity...
Yeah, T9 and iTap etc should have been available; so not quite as bad as I made it out to be... but still texting was very different then. (i guess its still that way on dumb/feature phones... but i haven't used one since the Motorola Razr 2.)
Hmmm.... typed this; using 2 spaces using regular spacebar as indents:
{
This
is
a
test
}
Simply copy and pasted this from wikipedia
; Uses S-C Assembler variant.
;
;
;
main ldy #$00
beq
jsr $fded ; ROM routine, COUT, y is preserved
iny
bne
str
Then Using preview and viewing the page source I get:
<code>
{
This
is
a
test
}
</code>
and
<code> .or is origin .as is ASCII String .hs is Hex String .or $300 .1 lda str,y .2 .1 .2 rts .as "HELLO WORLD" .hs
; Uses S-C Assembler variant.
;
;
;
main ldy #$00
beq
jsr $fded ; ROM routine, COUT, y is preserved
iny
bne
str
</code>
I'm not getting nbsp entities nor am i getting TT tags?! I'm using Firefox on Windows 7; not sure what else to say?!!
And the texter wasn't "the world champion" just some dude who won some local texting contest. Still fast, but lets not go nuts.
Oh, and it was Leno not Letterman.
There was simililar race in Australia at the time and the morse guy won there too.
10 years ago the phones they were using had those press 1 once for A, 1 twice for B, 1 three times for C, 1 for times for 1, 1 five times for !. press 2 once time for D, press 2 twice for E.... systems.
It wasn't a competition between morse and a smartphone with swyft etc.
I still give the edge to a morse expert... but not by nearly as much.
code tags of course. ;)
<code> </code>
And to post tags with out /. eating those html entities for less than and greater than:
< and > and & for the ampersand itself
Yeah. The kind of stuff you seem largely unfamiliar with.
Lol, yes, relax. I'm not a pure C guy and I won't offend you by pretending to be.
That's not true, and has never been. Until about 16 years ago, you had to declare your variables at the beginning of a block/compound statement. That can be well within the function.
You know, until I saw it in this thread, it never occurred to me to just open a new block for the purposes of inlining a debug declaration. Thanks, I'll use that.
As of about 16 years ago, you're even allowed to freely mix your declarations and code.
Cool beans. The one C program I do have to maintain (a small 'plugin' DLL for an embedded system) I have to compile with Visual Studio 2010, which doesn't support C99 syntax. So as of about today I'm still not allowed to, even if the rest of the world has been enjoying it for 16 years. VS2012 doesn't have it either; but i hear VS2013 does. :)
General hint: If your functions are so long that having to (suppose this was indeed the case) declare/define all your variables at the top becomes a serious annoyance, then chances are that your functions are too long/do too much. Fix that instead.
That's not the issue at all. The specific example I gave was the issue:
An IF DEBUG; where the variable was only used within the debug conditional.
In C++, C#, etc I've always declared and initialized anything I needed in a debug block in the debug block, except for in C where not only did i declared it at the top, but it gets its own debug block too since its only used by debug builds.
Even in a short function this is inelegant looking:
void func(int a)
{
int x = 1;
int y = 2;
int z = 0;
#IF DEBUG
int q = 3;
#ENDIF
z = dosomething(a, x);
y += z;
#IF DEBUG
#ENDIF
[... rest of function...]
}
Your note that I can start a block anywhere -- Thanks; until now it hadn't occurred to me to use that expressly to inline declarations for debug blocks.
Bzzt, wrong.
I'm not sure about that.
ANSI C, also known as C89 and C90 depending on the year of ratification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes it also says:
In March 2000, ANSI adopted the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard. This standard is commonly referred to as C99.
Thus C99 is an ANSI standard, but its not "ANSI C"
When you say "ANSI C" its still C89/90.
At least that's my take on it.
// comments were added to the C standard. Not good old ANSI see but still ok.
I haven't looked at the code, but the one thing I usually trip over when having to write pure C instead of C++ that's really mostly C is that everything has to be declared at the top of the function... Always. even some variable you only use in the IF $DEBUG block, I normally declare those in the if $debug block where it occurs, rather than creating a 2nd if debug block at the top of the function just to declare it.
And stuff like that.
a year from now (or an OS update,
Or he loads up a few more of those apps for it...
I installed in on my HP ProBook 6475b laptop the other day and have only run into some minor issues.
Wifi not working after suspend on a laptop?
Crashing on reboot every 2nd time?
What you consider minor issues, I would consider deal breakers.
If the only argument is that Playboy is so bad that the cropped image is indelibly tainted by association, then I guess I'm fine with that - but the logical foundation seems shaky.
subsitute "so bad" with "controversial" and its about right. Playboy is a source of controversy, and anything coming from it IS going to be indelibly tainted by that controversy.
rational assessment of information is usually based on content rather than provenance.
I accept that the objection to the image may not be entirely rational. I also accept that, rational or not, their objection does exist.
I also note that the provenance of the image usually does come up, because its "interesting", and the inevitable recovery of the full nude image by some interested student, and the content of the resulting commentary is usually inappropriate in a computer science class. While the cropped picture itself is unobjectionable it all but inevitably triggers this chain of events.
Between that and the fact that the image itself is not in any way irreplaceable or indispensable it seems logical to replace the image.
FTFA:
I first met with the TJ administration in May in an attempt to fix the environment in our computer science labs. School officials didnâ(TM)t stop using the centerfold image in the classroom until February, after I met with them again.
Sounds like the school saw things her way... at least eventually.
Because someone will find something offensive about the picture of your wife...
So what? If significantly fewer people find it offensive, then its better.
And I can pretty much guarantee than an innocuous headshot photo I take of perfectly normal woman wearing a hat with a feather on it will prove to be far less controversial than a cropped playboy centerfold from the 70s.
Therefore, why not just use the one we already have.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
You know why, your just being deliberately obtuse.
I am not being obtuse. I am well aware it is both a common and famous image. I've seen it several times over the years.
But the only real objection to dropping it amounts to "In a perfect world no one would think we should have to".
To that I would say "Grow up". The entire so-called standard image collection is extremely low resolution, poor quality color, and dated. Nobody is really doing real science on it anymore. We have libraries with thousands of equal or better images. People don't pick Lenna for their publication to compare it with old research - people pick her because she's like a mascot.
We can pick a new mascot image. It won't break science.
Lots of sports teams in the US have dropped their traditional names and selected new mascots over the years due to being inappropriately offensive to native americans. Even now The Washington Redskin's owner is kicking and screaming to hold onto that name, but the writing is on the wall; and its only a matter of time until that gets changed too.
Lenna is a central story in computer imaging history and that's fine. Let it just become history. It's not a appropriate photo anymore, it never really was.
This is a school that is supposed to be developing kids to do advanced work in the field.
So, not using the image in a high school assignment will somehow diminish the students education? Absurd.
Are we going to begin punishing people for having poor judgement?
Yes. That's exactly what we do. There are consequences. In most cases simply altering ones behavior to better meet expectations is sufficient.
Except - powerful people aren't held to such a standard. Look at Clinton. That skank has such poor judgement, I wonder how she has managed to feed herself all her life,
This really doesn't need to devolve into politics. No question the world is not remotely fair.
Do the course work, and stop worrying about the people around you. They don't matter. Do the work, get your grade, pass the course, and move on. That is what growing up is all about, right?
You've essentially said the students shouldn't question authority or express themselves when they see misogyny or injustice etc. Yes they will learn the world isn't a perfect place -- that is part of growing up. But trying to change it, and changing what you can is a part of growing up too.