The poster was making fun of the possible wordplay that "unmanned" did not necessarily mean robotic, it could have been women flying them. Now comedic timing is a difficult thing. Surely my statement above was not a funny description. The article stated that there was a serious problem with unmanned aircraft so there was already a sense that these unmanned craft were a bad thing because they were unmanned. There's an existing stereotype (certainly from a time when few women drove and rarely actually believed today) which when placed with the wordplay on "unmanned" makes a nice comedic delivery.
This is Slashdot. People make fun of things. Wordplay and poking fun at stereotypes is quite common here. If you've spent much time here, you've probably seen countless jokes made by Slashdotters about themselves: because they're all pimply faced 13-year-olds living in their mother's basement and dreadfully inept with girls. Now as a female programmer, I'll bet that you're already aware that this is a stereotype that is not necessarily true. Many programers are women. Most don't live at in their mother's basement (once they graduate college) as programming is one of the higher paid professions. Some even get married, too. They're jokes. Some of them quite funny, too.
When a joke like this is made, do you rush in to the rescue of pimply-faced nerds? Likely they've heard these stereotypes before and will hear them again. No one's going to melt away from hearing it again. If the stereotype fits the reader and it bothers them, they'll likely work hard to ensure that the stereotype is not true within themselves.
Now, as a female programmer, I would assume that you already know this. Or have you lived an extremely sheltered life and never heard the stereotype that women are not technical? Of course you've heard it before. It didn't stop you. Moreover, no one should stop doing what they love because it goes against a stereotype. I can't imagine that anyone thinks they should. But the stereotypes do exist in popular culture and they will be uttered by others.
Everyone will hear the stereotypes. It's always been a part of human nature and, trust me, it always will be. Everyone will always hear the stereotypes that they fight against whether it's because they're female, male, black, white, asian, blind, deaf, or from Texas. Everyone has heard stereotypes that includes them and are not true. Welcome to the club of everyone! The appropriate thing to do is to laugh it off and move on with your life. Especially when it's just a joke.
In the few cases where someone is so unbelievably stupid as to actually think the stereotype is a 100% true representation of reality and should be followed, then you should ignore them. Argument will not change the mind of someone that simple or they would already not believe in the truth of stereotypes. One should assume that everyone already knows you can't win that argument and people who still argue with them loom like fools.
Now, regarding your actions in the above post, you've made a serious error which I think you've may not have thought through. The stereotypes exist and will always exist, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. When you trace back some stereotypes you'll find they've existed for, quite literally, eons. Arguing about stereotypes will not make them go away it only gives them more exposure and greater traffic. Now, one of these common stereotypes is that women are weak and need to be protected. Every time you jump in and make statements like the one above you actually reinforce this very stereotype. You jump in to protect those poor, stupid, innocent women who are so weak that they'd simply crumble and stop their life's pursuit because someone uttered a simple stereotype. Thus, the great (and quite obviously rare) feminist needs to protect the other women who are naturally weak. And that's what I find truly offensive.
So, with Apples booting OS X or Windows and ASUS motherboards booting embedded Linux and Windows, Microsoft has stated that their operating system now runs on 168% of all computers.
In an attempt to comply and seem more high-tech, Microsoft has instructed all of their employee's to use carbon fiber bowls with their company-mandated, soup-only diets. The marketing department has already assured the various public works departments that the new bricks will be perfect for building bridges and other large architectural projects.
Of course, having smacked a rabbit with a rowboat oar, Carter had to come to terms with the fact that something he thinks is attacking him might be perfectly normal to someone else.
This is much more simple than most people realize. Think about it, your ISP has one gateway which passes all traffic between you and the Internet. If this gateway begins to spoof traffic, maybe because the government secretly forces the ISP to do so, you'd have no way to know it was happening. Each time you make a request for a page in the web, this gateway could retrieve the page from the remote server and then pass it to you and you'd have no verification that it was not correct. In the case of SSL, the server would send you a bogus certificate that seems to come form Verisign and seems to be for the domain you're contacting and you'd have no way of verifying that it was, in fact, fake. The actual certificate would be used by the gateway to connect to the other server then the contents of the page are encrypted with the fake certificate you were given by the gateway. all requests to the certificate authority would simply be spoofed to the gateway's own certificates and you'd never know the difference.
To prove your point, let's propose to make congress the most secure place on earth by taking all of their privacy away. If removing privacy makes them secure they should do it, however, if removing their privacy makes them less powerful....
Politicians get everything backwards. We have education programs for real dangers like roads near schools to teach kids to stay out of the road, when we should be building bridges and tunnels to physically separate kids from traffic. (Of course they also create "school zones" to annoy millions of drivers everyday around the country, too.) Then they try to build physical barriers for rare problems of pedophiles violating children over the internet, which, to the best of my knowledge, is physically impossible already. (You need to actually meet in the real world to be violated.)
The real question is how can we get the politicians, and the public at large, to assess risks and apply solutions appropriate to their likelihood?
Actually, trademarks were originally registered by medieval guilds to mark the work of a particular craftsman. It was done so that craftsmen producing substandard quality could determined and then punished (often quite harshly) by the guilds. It seems to me that they are used for quite the opposite purpose today.
I see this whole format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as being similar to the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. Both standards were competitors but now almost all DVD burners support both. While VHS and Beta had vastly different physical packages, it'll soon be technically trivial to have dual-format players (Philips has already developed the system and is distributing it.) Samsung will soon be releasing a full featured dual format player for around $800. You can already buy players of each format for that price. Later when one of the players gives up the ghost, seems to be about every five years with DVD players, you'll buy a new player that is dual format and just use it.
The only real battle is between two different licensing bodies. Sony is trying to keep hardware vendors from making dual-format players with their licensing agreements. I've bought both formats and buy movies in the format it's available in or, when available in both formats, whichever is offers more value for the money (better encoding, more special features, lower price, etc.) Right now huge amounts of money are changing hands between patent holders and the studios to try to force one standard to win over the other and we'll ultimately end up paying that price. Sony seems to be the biggest offender here and most studios are choosing Blu-Ray then charging more for fewer features. The sooner we, the consumers, make our households dual-format, the sooner the industry will have to start competing legitimately for our dollars instead of trying to lock us into one format or the other.
the UPSTO has just received a patent application It's a good thing they didn't file at the USPTO. There may still be time for Google to get a real patent.
The artist is taking a gamble with putting their music out there for sale. If you really know the game you know it costs money to put something together like this. The artist doesn't have the guaranteed payday that you have when you go to work. People have already proven that they're not willing to ante up if they can get away with it. By that fact alone I support copyright. Copyright helps to ensure that artists get paid for their gamble.
We all make huge gambles when we choose a career and it doesn't entitle any of us to compensation. Many people reading this have invested years and tens of thousands of dollars in a university and are not guaranteed any compensation. I've seen many people dedicate themselves completely to their career, often damaging their bodies, their families or their own financial situation, only to meet with failure in the end even though the work they did was very good. Every career has sacrifices and requires an investment from the worker.
Should we now start paying a lifelong salary to a promising college athlete who spent years training before injuring himself in a car accident before playing in the major leagues? Do we owe living to every person who graduated from the university with a history degree because he made an investment of time and money much greater than any single song required? Surely, we all owe a lifelong compensation to the people who brought us kozmo.com or pets.com. I hear they were both very good but, more importantly, they made huge investments that must be compensated. If a heart surgeon keeps a person from dying surely he should be compensated for every day that person continues to live, right? Especially since that was his only successful surgery followed by a string of failures before his license to practice medicine was revoked. I mean, really, imagine the huge speculative investment of time and money his medical education was. He must deserve to be paid forever for his one success, right? Hell, even I'm typing this message, that may never be read by anyone, but surely I deserve to be compensated for the rest of my life for the effort I've put into it. Don't I?
I agree that artists should be compensated for their work. I've never downloaded or otherwise copied any copyrighted content. But I'm reluctant to say that they deserve the rest of their lives to get compensated for the labor. In fact, of the artists I've known personally, I'd say the worst way to ensure that they create new artworks is to continue compensating them for their past efforts. I think a five year copyright, from the initial publishing of a work, would be a sufficient window for an artist to exact a just reward for their efforts. In every other career, you must keep doing something new to get paid. Why should music be any different?
There seems to be an awful lot of communication going on on companies and governments, yet they all seem to believe that they need privacy to properly carry out their duties. When I see governments and corporations doing away with their own privacy then I'll believe it may have little value. However, when I see them increasing privacy and secrecy while hoarding information about the people then I'll assume they are getting some value from their privacy and my lack thereof. I have my own ideas about what that value is, perhaps you'd agree or have your own ideas of it's value, but in any case, privacy clearly has a value or those in power would not be trying to keep it only for themselves.
This thread is about RFID implants and you responded to the question, "Do you believe employers should be allowed to require employees to have RFID implants?" It's not my fault you think your yes answer only applies to REAL ID cards.
When you said, "I am willing to make that trade off for the career I want." You're making a statement that if you make this "trade-off" it would be so you can have the career you want. The problem is that meeting the first condition does not lead to your second condition. It's not a trade-off of one thing for another, you do the one thing and are not in anyway guaranteed the other. Therefore, it's not a trade-off you just already have low standards.
I am willing to make that trade off for the career I want. Being willing to implant an RFID does not mean that you'll get to have the career you want. Perhaps you'll work there for only a month or two and be laid off because of an airline's financial insolvency. Then you can get a new RFID from the next business.
The problem with implanted RFID is that most people underestimate their future costs as a result of an employer implanting the chip. It costs considerably more to remove an RFID, in money and personal risk, and the employer makes no provision to pay for this. Over a lifetime of jobs, once all employers require RFIDs, how many of these chips will need to be implanted? Assume that every time you change employers or even locations for the same employer you'll need new chip implanted. Every time a system is cracked (your individual chip or the outdated technology of the original chip) you'll need another chip implanted. If your company is bought by another company, implant a new chip. Technology changes constantly and employment terms for one entity are becoming increasingly shorter than in the past. Once employers do it, everyone else will want a chip under your skin for credit cards, or even customer memberships. You may have, literally, hundreds of opportunities to be re-chipped. How many chips can you realistically implant in your arm? Will you be forced to remove some of them because they compete with other technology? (The RFID used for toll booths in Maryland and Delaware are incompatible so I have to put one in the glove box to pass through the other because their systems interfere and cannot read their own ID if the other ID is also present.)
How many of these concerns do you think a person who is asked to install a chip has actually considered before they get implanted? The long term issues of chipping and the future costs which will be borne by the person being chipped and they are woefully uninformed. This lack of information availability is exactly what allows larger players in a market to abuse the smaller players. When a company knows the dangers but the employees or customers do not, they can shift future costs to them because they lack this information. The market is notoriously bad at affixing future costs to those who caused the problem (from cancer risks of smoking to pollution of locales to bad economic decisions.)
I think you're misunderstanding the point of school. It's not to get information from your head to a report. Instead the point is to get the information from an authority into the head of the student. The papers and reports the students create are immediately garbage once the lesson has been taught they're an exercise to help the student remember. Seriously, who thinks the writing of students is of any value other than a teaching tool for the student (or maybe refrigerator wallpaper for a proud parent?)
There is no easy way to apply corrections to pen and paper. And a blackboard is not able to retain information. It's called a strike-through or if you're really ambitious you can use the scribble technique. You can also quickly add diagrams and illustrations to make the text more clear.
There are no easy ways to back up the data or duplicate it (of course xeroxing is an option for paper, but not for blackboards). Because the whole point of education is to put the information in the students head not in printed form or a file somewhere. An effective teaching method forces the students to write the information in notes which is an effective method of improving recall.
A smartboard/interactive white/blackboard has replaced the ancient black/white board. In business meetings where documentation is more important than education but in schools this is simply not the case.
Even a tablet PC and beamer is more effective. Teachers can sit behind desk and use the tablet to show stuff on a larger surface using the beamer. Thus ensuring that the teacher stick to a predefined set of information as defined by their slides. It pretty much ensures that the teacher will not adapt the lesson to a particular group of students which may already understand some concepts or need more granularity in another area.
The Soviet Union was dependent upon loans from foreign banks to prop up their domestic policies and military objectives. Eventually, as they began to decline in their output of relevant technology these foreign banks decided that the future value of a ruble wasn't worth much and refused additional loans and demanded payments. The Soviet Union could not exist without the foreign money it was dependent upon and it collapsed.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, its a joke.
The poster was making fun of the possible wordplay that "unmanned" did not necessarily mean robotic, it could have been women flying them. Now comedic timing is a difficult thing. Surely my statement above was not a funny description. The article stated that there was a serious problem with unmanned aircraft so there was already a sense that these unmanned craft were a bad thing because they were unmanned. There's an existing stereotype (certainly from a time when few women drove and rarely actually believed today) which when placed with the wordplay on "unmanned" makes a nice comedic delivery.
This is Slashdot. People make fun of things. Wordplay and poking fun at stereotypes is quite common here. If you've spent much time here, you've probably seen countless jokes made by Slashdotters about themselves: because they're all pimply faced 13-year-olds living in their mother's basement and dreadfully inept with girls. Now as a female programmer, I'll bet that you're already aware that this is a stereotype that is not necessarily true. Many programers are women. Most don't live at in their mother's basement (once they graduate college) as programming is one of the higher paid professions. Some even get married, too. They're jokes. Some of them quite funny, too.
When a joke like this is made, do you rush in to the rescue of pimply-faced nerds? Likely they've heard these stereotypes before and will hear them again. No one's going to melt away from hearing it again. If the stereotype fits the reader and it bothers them, they'll likely work hard to ensure that the stereotype is not true within themselves.
Now, as a female programmer, I would assume that you already know this. Or have you lived an extremely sheltered life and never heard the stereotype that women are not technical? Of course you've heard it before. It didn't stop you. Moreover, no one should stop doing what they love because it goes against a stereotype. I can't imagine that anyone thinks they should. But the stereotypes do exist in popular culture and they will be uttered by others.
Everyone will hear the stereotypes. It's always been a part of human nature and, trust me, it always will be. Everyone will always hear the stereotypes that they fight against whether it's because they're female, male, black, white, asian, blind, deaf, or from Texas. Everyone has heard stereotypes that includes them and are not true. Welcome to the club of everyone! The appropriate thing to do is to laugh it off and move on with your life. Especially when it's just a joke.
In the few cases where someone is so unbelievably stupid as to actually think the stereotype is a 100% true representation of reality and should be followed, then you should ignore them. Argument will not change the mind of someone that simple or they would already not believe in the truth of stereotypes. One should assume that everyone already knows you can't win that argument and people who still argue with them loom like fools.
Now, regarding your actions in the above post, you've made a serious error which I think you've may not have thought through. The stereotypes exist and will always exist, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. When you trace back some stereotypes you'll find they've existed for, quite literally, eons. Arguing about stereotypes will not make them go away it only gives them more exposure and greater traffic. Now, one of these common stereotypes is that women are weak and need to be protected. Every time you jump in and make statements like the one above you actually reinforce this very stereotype. You jump in to protect those poor, stupid, innocent women who are so weak that they'd simply crumble and stop their life's pursuit because someone uttered a simple stereotype. Thus, the great (and quite obviously rare) feminist needs to protect the other women who are naturally weak. And that's what I find truly offensive.
Talk about having to over-explain a joke. :(
Thus, advertising increases demand which drives prices up.
Wait! Don't taser me bro'...
So, with Apples booting OS X or Windows and ASUS motherboards booting embedded Linux and Windows, Microsoft has stated that their operating system now runs on 168% of all computers.
In an attempt to comply and seem more high-tech, Microsoft has instructed all of their employee's to use carbon fiber bowls with their company-mandated, soup-only diets. The marketing department has already assured the various public works departments that the new bricks will be perfect for building bridges and other large architectural projects.
Of course, having smacked a rabbit with a rowboat oar, Carter had to come to terms with the fact that something he thinks is attacking him might be perfectly normal to someone else.
This is much more simple than most people realize. Think about it, your ISP has one gateway which passes all traffic between you and the Internet. If this gateway begins to spoof traffic, maybe because the government secretly forces the ISP to do so, you'd have no way to know it was happening. Each time you make a request for a page in the web, this gateway could retrieve the page from the remote server and then pass it to you and you'd have no verification that it was not correct. In the case of SSL, the server would send you a bogus certificate that seems to come form Verisign and seems to be for the domain you're contacting and you'd have no way of verifying that it was, in fact, fake. The actual certificate would be used by the gateway to connect to the other server then the contents of the page are encrypted with the fake certificate you were given by the gateway. all requests to the certificate authority would simply be spoofed to the gateway's own certificates and you'd never know the difference.
To prove your point, let's propose to make congress the most secure place on earth by taking all of their privacy away. If removing privacy makes them secure they should do it, however, if removing their privacy makes them less powerful....
Well, Apple TV does stream YouTube videos to your television now.
I didn't mean for anyone to read this post on the internet. So it illegal.
Politicians get everything backwards. We have education programs for real dangers like roads near schools to teach kids to stay out of the road, when we should be building bridges and tunnels to physically separate kids from traffic. (Of course they also create "school zones" to annoy millions of drivers everyday around the country, too.) Then they try to build physical barriers for rare problems of pedophiles violating children over the internet, which, to the best of my knowledge, is physically impossible already. (You need to actually meet in the real world to be violated.)
The real question is how can we get the politicians, and the public at large, to assess risks and apply solutions appropriate to their likelihood?
Actually, trademarks were originally registered by medieval guilds to mark the work of a particular craftsman. It was done so that craftsmen producing substandard quality could determined and then punished (often quite harshly) by the guilds. It seems to me that they are used for quite the opposite purpose today.
I see this whole format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as being similar to the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. Both standards were competitors but now almost all DVD burners support both. While VHS and Beta had vastly different physical packages, it'll soon be technically trivial to have dual-format players (Philips has already developed the system and is distributing it.) Samsung will soon be releasing a full featured dual format player for around $800. You can already buy players of each format for that price. Later when one of the players gives up the ghost, seems to be about every five years with DVD players, you'll buy a new player that is dual format and just use it.
The only real battle is between two different licensing bodies. Sony is trying to keep hardware vendors from making dual-format players with their licensing agreements. I've bought both formats and buy movies in the format it's available in or, when available in both formats, whichever is offers more value for the money (better encoding, more special features, lower price, etc.) Right now huge amounts of money are changing hands between patent holders and the studios to try to force one standard to win over the other and we'll ultimately end up paying that price. Sony seems to be the biggest offender here and most studios are choosing Blu-Ray then charging more for fewer features. The sooner we, the consumers, make our households dual-format, the sooner the industry will have to start competing legitimately for our dollars instead of trying to lock us into one format or the other.
We all make huge gambles when we choose a career and it doesn't entitle any of us to compensation. Many people reading this have invested years and tens of thousands of dollars in a university and are not guaranteed any compensation. I've seen many people dedicate themselves completely to their career, often damaging their bodies, their families or their own financial situation, only to meet with failure in the end even though the work they did was very good. Every career has sacrifices and requires an investment from the worker.
Should we now start paying a lifelong salary to a promising college athlete who spent years training before injuring himself in a car accident before playing in the major leagues? Do we owe living to every person who graduated from the university with a history degree because he made an investment of time and money much greater than any single song required? Surely, we all owe a lifelong compensation to the people who brought us kozmo.com or pets.com. I hear they were both very good but, more importantly, they made huge investments that must be compensated. If a heart surgeon keeps a person from dying surely he should be compensated for every day that person continues to live, right? Especially since that was his only successful surgery followed by a string of failures before his license to practice medicine was revoked. I mean, really, imagine the huge speculative investment of time and money his medical education was. He must deserve to be paid forever for his one success, right? Hell, even I'm typing this message, that may never be read by anyone, but surely I deserve to be compensated for the rest of my life for the effort I've put into it. Don't I?
I agree that artists should be compensated for their work. I've never downloaded or otherwise copied any copyrighted content. But I'm reluctant to say that they deserve the rest of their lives to get compensated for the labor. In fact, of the artists I've known personally, I'd say the worst way to ensure that they create new artworks is to continue compensating them for their past efforts. I think a five year copyright, from the initial publishing of a work, would be a sufficient window for an artist to exact a just reward for their efforts. In every other career, you must keep doing something new to get paid. Why should music be any different?
There seems to be an awful lot of communication going on on companies and governments, yet they all seem to believe that they need privacy to properly carry out their duties. When I see governments and corporations doing away with their own privacy then I'll believe it may have little value. However, when I see them increasing privacy and secrecy while hoarding information about the people then I'll assume they are getting some value from their privacy and my lack thereof. I have my own ideas about what that value is, perhaps you'd agree or have your own ideas of it's value, but in any case, privacy clearly has a value or those in power would not be trying to keep it only for themselves.
This thread is about RFID implants and you responded to the question, "Do you believe employers should be allowed to require employees to have RFID implants?" It's not my fault you think your yes answer only applies to REAL ID cards.
When you said, "I am willing to make that trade off for the career I want." You're making a statement that if you make this "trade-off" it would be so you can have the career you want. The problem is that meeting the first condition does not lead to your second condition. It's not a trade-off of one thing for another, you do the one thing and are not in anyway guaranteed the other. Therefore, it's not a trade-off you just already have low standards.
The problem with implanted RFID is that most people underestimate their future costs as a result of an employer implanting the chip. It costs considerably more to remove an RFID, in money and personal risk, and the employer makes no provision to pay for this. Over a lifetime of jobs, once all employers require RFIDs, how many of these chips will need to be implanted? Assume that every time you change employers or even locations for the same employer you'll need new chip implanted. Every time a system is cracked (your individual chip or the outdated technology of the original chip) you'll need another chip implanted. If your company is bought by another company, implant a new chip. Technology changes constantly and employment terms for one entity are becoming increasingly shorter than in the past. Once employers do it, everyone else will want a chip under your skin for credit cards, or even customer memberships. You may have, literally, hundreds of opportunities to be re-chipped. How many chips can you realistically implant in your arm? Will you be forced to remove some of them because they compete with other technology? (The RFID used for toll booths in Maryland and Delaware are incompatible so I have to put one in the glove box to pass through the other because their systems interfere and cannot read their own ID if the other ID is also present.)
How many of these concerns do you think a person who is asked to install a chip has actually considered before they get implanted? The long term issues of chipping and the future costs which will be borne by the person being chipped and they are woefully uninformed. This lack of information availability is exactly what allows larger players in a market to abuse the smaller players. When a company knows the dangers but the employees or customers do not, they can shift future costs to them because they lack this information. The market is notoriously bad at affixing future costs to those who caused the problem (from cancer risks of smoking to pollution of locales to bad economic decisions.)
I think you're misunderstanding the point of school. It's not to get information from your head to a report. Instead the point is to get the information from an authority into the head of the student. The papers and reports the students create are immediately garbage once the lesson has been taught they're an exercise to help the student remember. Seriously, who thinks the writing of students is of any value other than a teaching tool for the student (or maybe refrigerator wallpaper for a proud parent?)
There are no easy ways to back up the data or duplicate it (of course xeroxing is an option for paper, but not for blackboards). Because the whole point of education is to put the information in the students head not in printed form or a file somewhere. An effective teaching method forces the students to write the information in notes which is an effective method of improving recall.
A smartboard/interactive white/blackboard has replaced the ancient black/white board. In business meetings where documentation is more important than education but in schools this is simply not the case.
Even a tablet PC and beamer is more effective. Teachers can sit behind desk and use the tablet to show stuff on a larger surface using the beamer. Thus ensuring that the teacher stick to a predefined set of information as defined by their slides. It pretty much ensures that the teacher will not adapt the lesson to a particular group of students which may already understand some concepts or need more granularity in another area.
Grocery stores sell money orders very inexpensively. Much less than the post office.
For those who are interested:
Apple iPhone
115 x 61 x 11.6mm
135 g
Nokia N95
99 x 53 x 21 mm
120 g
Samsung Blackjack
113 x 59 x 12 mm
106 g
Blackberry Curve 8300
107 x 60 x 15 mm
111 g
Palm Treo 750
111 x 58 x 22 mm
153 g
The Soviet Union was dependent upon loans from foreign banks to prop up their domestic policies and military objectives. Eventually, as they began to decline in their output of relevant technology these foreign banks decided that the future value of a ruble wasn't worth much and refused additional loans and demanded payments. The Soviet Union could not exist without the foreign money it was dependent upon and it collapsed.
Does any of this sound vaguely familiar to you?
You don't need to register your travel but foreigners who travel into Russia must register their travel in each city when they arrive there.