The County Council voted to prohibit public and private employers in the county from using genetic information obtained from
blood tests and family histories when making hiring, firing and promotion decisions.
The news article mentions blood tests specificially.. I wonder why they're so specific. This doesn't appear to prohibit your HR department from doing the Gattaca thing and picking up bits of your hair and skin from your keyboard.
I checked the Montgomery County web site and found the press release for the new law, but it didn't mention anything about just banning blood tests. Hmm.
The GPNA would prevent disclosure of genetic data of a person to anybody without the written consent of that person (with a few lawful exceptions of course, such as body IDing and for criminal investigations)
The GNPA sounds pretty worthless to me. Here's what the offer letter from my past job said:
"This offer is contingent upon the results of (employer's) standard background check."
And when you sign the offer letter, you're agreeing to let them perform that standard background check. You don't sign it, you don't get the job, so the best you can do is sign in and pray their "standard background check" doesn't include exploratory gropings of your double helices.
What's needed is a law like the one cited by another poster which totally prohibits genetic discrimination.
The "amazingly free society" does not guarantee that bonehead laws won't pass, but it does guarantee that we'll get the chance to fight them before, during, and after their passage.
Eternal vigilance, man.
zo.
Shuttle avionics hardware / software interesting..
on
2001: A Space Laptop
·
· Score: 1
In particular, I was impressed with the avionics computers and software. They have five computers to handle this. During ascent and descent, four of them are running identical software concurrently, and any two computers can vote another out of the loop, if they sense it's malfunctioning. The fifth computer runs an avionics package with identical specs but from a different vendor, in case a bug is discovered in the primary software. The captain or pilot can drop to the alternate software with a press of a button.
This is all pretty impressive stuff to me.. I'm just a Web peon who has to write and maintain Perl scripts. Never seen such an interesting exhibition of how stuff is engineered when lives are on the line.
Was that BASIC Breakout game that Woz describing called "Little Brick Out?"
LBO was one of the nice little surprises on the Apple II system disk.. there was also the Animals game and the biorhythms chart. That Animals game was my first exposure to programming data files, and I remember doing an all-nighter when I was twelve, trying to make LBO usable with a joystick rather than a paddle.
Ah, those were the days! Anyone remember any of the other goodies on the Apple II disk?
In fact, I think the way foward here is for the Internet to be restricted to those who have the brains to pass a test on basic technical skills (such as what is UDP or what port does HTTP use) and general net etiqutte. At least this way we'd only get people who would use the net for something good and maybe the corporate dominance of the net would be stymied.
Normally I don't like to descend to the ad hominim level, but I can't reconcile what's written above with any conception I have of a rational, thoughtful person. The best my liberal-squishy side can do -- and I assure you, it's splendid at rationalizing unfathomable behaviors -- is to reason that perhaps your faculties have been shredded by years of untreated syphillis infection.
So I'll just cut to the chase here and call you a pinheaded idiot. Anyone who'd take the greatest communications environment ever known to mankind and restrict it to propellerheads who know a socket from a hole in their vacuum cleaner cannot possibly be a thinking human being; such thought is generally confined to subhumans like marketing executives and Senators.
By way of direct refutation, I offer this: my mom, who has instructed beer-free courses in gardening over the net from a remote little town in Ontario for two years now, falls firmly into the port-challenged group. And I suspect that by any objective standard she's contributing far more to the Net as a whole than you are, with your asinine bleatings on Slashdot.
Not sure how they'd do it exactly, but perhaps as part of the player install the player would generate or be issued a license ID that would uniquely identify it. Then, when you contact MS to buy a license, the player reports its unique ID, and the license is tailored so that it's only valid for that particular install of the player.
Or they could use some piece of the OS (like the serial or registration number, which I think in Windows 2K is guaranteed unique) as a way to make the license apply to only that one install of the OS.
None of these are insurmountable, of course but they're probably enough to keep Jill Average from becoming Jill Pirate.
The problem for the IP owner occurs when little Toivo in Finland writes something that, given the encrypted product and a valid license, will produce a clean copy of the product in some friendly open format, which he is then free to Gnutella around the world.
I'm a Canadian systems analyst working in the U.S. under a NAFTA TN-1 visa. The TN is a temporary 1-year thing that can be renewed indefinitely. It can be issued in a few minutes at most any US / Canada border crossing, if your credentials (offer letter, proof of degree and / or experience, and proof of citizenship) are in order.
I believe that Mexicans also qualify to receive it, but I'm not sure if there are additional restrictions there.
There's lots and lots of professions that are eligible for TN-1's. Note that Programmer/Analyst positions are not eligible, although some HR departments are willing to phrase their requirements in the form of a Systems Analyst position in order to get a good candidate down from Canada.
There was still a producer dictating what I was going to see; the speeches were still teleprompted; the Blame Canada number was still choreographed. Where's the freaking interactivity in that? Backstage and prop and set shots do not equate interactivity -- they just represent further commodification of the process of filmmaking. And this has been happening at least since David Gerrold wrote "The Making of Star Trek," and probably much before that.
Connecting the buzzwords may be a fine journalistic strategy at USA TODAY, but it ain't working here.
</KATZFLAME>
More seriously and constructively:
Interactive and passive entertainments scratch different itches. I don't see how either can be posed as being generally superior to the other. In fact, I'd say that some forms of entertainment *must* be passive in order to be effective. When I read a book or watch a play or a film -- all decidedly passive experiences, despite Katz' proclamations -- I'm doing so because I want to experience something that I can't conceive of myself. It's hard to imagine any interactive exercise duplicating the single-minded genius of an Iain Banks or the punkish sensibility of Bruce MacDonald.
In fact, judging by how my tastes mesh with the tastes of Western culture at large, I'm a little leery of letting interactivity creep into non-interactive entertainment. The last thing I'd want to do is be trapped in a theatre with a bunch of people voting America's Funniest Home Video style on how the film we're watching will end.
Additionally, passive media have a strength that interactive media generally do not and that's the presence of an editor. When you buy an issue of a newspaper or magazine, you have some assurance that the content therein has been vetted by an educated eye for entertainment value or relevance or whatever.
(Slashdot is an exception to this, of course, with its elegant moderation system. It's not perfect, of course, but it does tend to bubble the interesting stuff upwards.)
I predict that as more grassroots content providers pop up and the Web becomes more ubiquitous, broadcast channels will not be organized around broadcast hardware, but around editors (or, perhaps, discussion sites like Slashdot -- what content provider wouldn't love to be slashdotted, especially given the stats on blowthedotoutyourass.com?) whose tastes are well known.
So, when I want to check out what's happening or cool or whatever, I'll log onto AICN or Slashdot or Joe Bob's Science Fiction Culture Mine because when I do, I know I'll find links to stuff that will sync with my entertainment wants.
Of course, this kind of narrowcasting can strangle one's exposure to new experience, but no more so than, say, choosing only to watch The Family Channel or reading only Reader's Digest.
Check out this Internet Week article for a clue as to why all these big companies are jumping on the free-PC bandwagon.
No, Slashdot paranoids, they ain't doing it so that they can trojan a telescreen into your house. They're doing it because they want their partners to be able to sell you stuff through their exclusive portals.
Jon, it is terribly hard to take you seriously when you make hugeass generalizations like:
At this moment in media history, newspapers have never been more pressed to define themselves, or done a worse job.
or
They don't tell us things we don't know. They don't offer us good writing or strong opinion. They don't even have good comics any more.
or
Newspapers are the scolds of the Digital Age, shrieking and clucking about a changing world (the Net, the Web, movies, TV shows, rap, hip-hop, kids today) like Temperance Ladies wandering into a bar.
Though such vast, unprovable overgeneralizations might be a decent starting point for discussion (my usual MO for a Katz article is to skip directly to the comments) they do little to enshrine Katz as a commentator worth my time -- unlike, say, a mere newspaper columnists like Gwynne Dyer.
Finally, if you think newspapers are missing the boat on cyberculture, then why don't you try pitching them stories about cyberculture?
Ideally, what kind of impact do you hope to have upon Slashdot and its readers? What kind of mental associations do you hope people will have with the name "Jon Katz?"
(This is an awfully high-falutin' question for a web journalist, I know. Just curious.)
DL'ed the Windows version of M13 today. Seems cool, if a little buggy. No speed problems here, although I've got a ballsy PIII-450 machine. We'll see how it fares on my P200 RH6.1 Linux machine though -- I found M12 to be rather slow on that machine.
Thing that jumped out at me most about Windows M13 -- and this is a common gripe I have with Windows apps -- is that the backgrounds of the sidebar and the preferences windows are set to white, ignoring the Windows settings, while the text in those locations obeys the Windows settings.
Since I use a white-on-black screen (I find it easier on the eyes) this is a big hassle.
I entered a minor bug report in BugZilla about it; we'll see what happens.
Simply, the training room scenes described in the book just won't work on film. Besides the technical challenges,
Hey, if Hollywood can do THE MATRIX, I'm sure they can do a reasonable job on ENDER'S GAME.
Experience tells us that explosions and fighters and war make noise. It'll look odd without it, technically correct or not. These are the sorts of concessions you make for a decent film.
I disagree. Given the concessions above, you will come up with something that conforms neatly to the expectations of the audience, but conforming to that expectation (as, say, Wing Commander did) does not guarantee a decent film.
Consider the closing scene of the first act of Earth 2, the scene where the Earth colony ship tumbles into the atmosphere with its outer surface boiling away and pieces breaking off -- in all, a scene of great visual violence -- took place in *complete silence.*
I thought that was pretty stunning, especially when they cut from the panicky-people-getting-on-lifepods-scene, with all the screaming and klaxons and other sound, to the absolute quiet of space.
(I hate citing Earth 2 in arguments of this nature, but they did get this one thing right, even if they got nothing else right except casting the way-way-hot Rebecca Gayheart.)
Screaming space fighters, faux-cool Euro-bridgecrew, (weep for Jürgen Prochnow -- from Das Boot to Wing Commander? poor dude) and valiant charges under fire -- it sure sounds to me like you're describing Wing Commander.
Lorax: You're committing an error here by asserting that a censorware product's functionality can be evaluated in terms of "correctly" blocked sites versus "incorrectly" blocked sites.
You and I will almost certainly differ as to which sites should be blocked and which sites shouldn't. Given that, how do we evaluate blocking schemes for "correctness?"
"Let's see, I'm fifty percent opposed to abortion, so we'll weight abortion advocacy sites by half. Bestiality and anarchy are right out. But kids should definitely have access to Mein Kampf and godhatesfags.com because they have to know who their enemy is." There's only one instrument that's totally suitable for determining what a child should and shouldn't be able to consume, and that's the eyes of its parents. I can't believe that people are willing to subcontract the job to incompetent software.
..of course, all of this is extremely easy for me to say, because I don't have any kids.
IPv6 has provisions for prioritizing packets based on the need to deliver realtime content or meet "quality of service" demands.
This makes me wonder, once Disney and Ted Turner buy up all the bandwidth they'll need, will the common man be able to serve content at anything more than a dribble? Big companies can bid up the price of bandwidth to *far* in excess of what the little guy can afford.
This feels like much more of a threat than any legislative attempts to regulate the Net.
Slashdot Mirror
The news article mentions blood tests specificially .. I wonder why they're so specific. This doesn't appear to prohibit your HR department from doing the Gattaca thing and picking up bits of your hair and skin from your keyboard.
I checked the Montgomery County web site and found the press release for the new law, but it didn't mention anything about just banning blood tests. Hmm.
zo.
The GNPA sounds pretty worthless to me. Here's what the offer letter from my past job said:
"This offer is contingent upon the results of (employer's) standard background check."
And when you sign the offer letter, you're agreeing to let them perform that standard background check. You don't sign it, you don't get the job, so the best you can do is sign in and pray their "standard background check" doesn't include exploratory gropings of your double helices.
What's needed is a law like the one cited by another poster which totally prohibits genetic discrimination.
zo.
zo.
Eternal vigilance, man.
zo.
In particular, I was impressed with the avionics computers and software. They have five computers to handle this. During ascent and descent, four of them are running identical software concurrently, and any two computers can vote another out of the loop, if they sense it's malfunctioning. The fifth computer runs an avionics package with identical specs but from a different vendor, in case a bug is discovered in the primary software. The captain or pilot can drop to the alternate software with a press of a button.
This is all pretty impressive stuff to me .. I'm just a Web peon who has to write and maintain Perl scripts. Never seen such an interesting exhibition of how stuff is engineered when lives are on the line.
LBO was one of the nice little surprises on the Apple II system disk .. there was also the Animals game and the biorhythms chart. That Animals game was my first exposure to programming data files, and I remember doing an all-nighter when I was twelve, trying to make LBO usable with a joystick rather than a paddle.
Ah, those were the days! Anyone remember any of the other goodies on the Apple II disk?
zo.
I bet Jon Johansen and Emmanuel Goldstein can't wait either.
zo.
Normally I don't like to descend to the ad hominim level, but I can't reconcile what's written above with any conception I have of a rational, thoughtful person. The best my liberal-squishy side can do -- and I assure you, it's splendid at rationalizing unfathomable behaviors -- is to reason that perhaps your faculties have been shredded by years of untreated syphillis infection.
So I'll just cut to the chase here and call you a pinheaded idiot. Anyone who'd take the greatest communications environment ever known to mankind and restrict it to propellerheads who know a socket from a hole in their vacuum cleaner cannot possibly be a thinking human being; such thought is generally confined to subhumans like marketing executives and Senators.
By way of direct refutation, I offer this: my mom, who has instructed beer-free courses in gardening over the net from a remote little town in Ontario for two years now, falls firmly into the port-challenged group. And I suspect that by any objective standard she's contributing far more to the Net as a whole than you are, with your asinine bleatings on Slashdot.
Or they could use some piece of the OS (like the serial or registration number, which I think in Windows 2K is guaranteed unique) as a way to make the license apply to only that one install of the OS.
None of these are insurmountable, of course but they're probably enough to keep Jill Average from becoming Jill Pirate.
The problem for the IP owner occurs when little Toivo in Finland writes something that, given the encrypted product and a valid license, will produce a clean copy of the product in some friendly open format, which he is then free to Gnutella around the world.
Check out one of jms' postings in the Valenti thread for some thoughts on this that are far better worded than mine.
zo.
I believe that Mexicans also qualify to receive it, but I'm not sure if there are additional restrictions there.
There's lots and lots of professions that are eligible for TN-1's. Note that Programmer/Analyst positions are not eligible, although some HR departments are willing to phrase their requirements in the form of a Systems Analyst position in order to get a good candidate down from Canada.
There's some more information at www.grasmick.com
zo.
There was still a producer dictating what I was going to see; the speeches were still teleprompted; the Blame Canada number was still choreographed. Where's the freaking interactivity in that? Backstage and prop and set shots do not equate interactivity -- they just represent further commodification of the process of filmmaking. And this has been happening at least since David Gerrold wrote "The Making of Star Trek," and probably much before that.
Connecting the buzzwords may be a fine journalistic strategy at USA TODAY, but it ain't working here.
</KATZFLAME>
More seriously and constructively:
Interactive and passive entertainments scratch different itches. I don't see how either can be posed as being generally superior to the other. In fact, I'd say that some forms of entertainment *must* be passive in order to be effective. When I read a book or watch a play or a film -- all decidedly passive experiences, despite Katz' proclamations -- I'm doing so because I want to experience something that I can't conceive of myself. It's hard to imagine any interactive exercise duplicating the single-minded genius of an Iain Banks or the punkish sensibility of Bruce MacDonald.
In fact, judging by how my tastes mesh with the tastes of Western culture at large, I'm a little leery of letting interactivity creep into non-interactive entertainment. The last thing I'd want to do is be trapped in a theatre with a bunch of people voting America's Funniest Home Video style on how the film we're watching will end.
Additionally, passive media have a strength that interactive media generally do not and that's the presence of an editor. When you buy an issue of a newspaper or magazine, you have some assurance that the content therein has been vetted by an educated eye for entertainment value or relevance or whatever.
(Slashdot is an exception to this, of course, with its elegant moderation system. It's not perfect, of course, but it does tend to bubble the interesting stuff upwards.)
I predict that as more grassroots content providers pop up and the Web becomes more ubiquitous, broadcast channels will not be organized around broadcast hardware, but around editors (or, perhaps, discussion sites like Slashdot -- what content provider wouldn't love to be slashdotted, especially given the stats on blowthedotoutyourass.com?) whose tastes are well known.
So, when I want to check out what's happening or cool or whatever, I'll log onto AICN or Slashdot or Joe Bob's Science Fiction Culture Mine because when I do, I know I'll find links to stuff that will sync with my entertainment wants.
Of course, this kind of narrowcasting can strangle one's exposure to new experience, but no more so than, say, choosing only to watch The Family Channel or reading only Reader's Digest.
No, Slashdot paranoids, they ain't doing it so that they can trojan a telescreen into your house. They're doing it because they want their partners to be able to sell you stuff through their exclusive portals.
At this moment in media history, newspapers have never been more pressed to define themselves, or done a worse job.
or
They don't tell us things we don't know. They don't offer us good writing or strong opinion. They don't even have good comics any more.
or
Newspapers are the scolds of the Digital Age, shrieking and clucking about a changing world (the Net, the Web, movies, TV shows, rap, hip-hop, kids today) like Temperance Ladies wandering into a bar.
Though such vast, unprovable overgeneralizations might be a decent starting point for discussion (my usual MO for a Katz article is to skip directly to the comments) they do little to enshrine Katz as a commentator worth my time -- unlike, say, a mere newspaper columnists like Gwynne Dyer.
Finally, if you think newspapers are missing the boat on cyberculture, then why don't you try pitching them stories about cyberculture?
Ideally, what kind of impact do you hope to have upon Slashdot and its readers? What kind of mental associations do you hope people will have with the name "Jon Katz?"
(This is an awfully high-falutin' question for a web journalist, I know. Just curious.)
Thing that jumped out at me most about Windows M13 -- and this is a common gripe I have with Windows apps -- is that the backgrounds of the sidebar and the preferences windows are set to white, ignoring the Windows settings, while the text in those locations obeys the Windows settings.
Since I use a white-on-black screen (I find it easier on the eyes) this is a big hassle.
I entered a minor bug report in BugZilla about it; we'll see what happens.
-- Johnzo.
Hey, if Hollywood can do THE MATRIX, I'm sure they can do a reasonable job on ENDER'S GAME.
Experience tells us that explosions and fighters and war make noise. It'll look odd without it, technically correct or not. These are the sorts of concessions you make for a decent film.
I disagree. Given the concessions above, you will come up with something that conforms neatly to the expectations of the audience, but conforming to that expectation (as, say, Wing Commander did) does not guarantee a decent film.
Consider the closing scene of the first act of Earth 2, the scene where the Earth colony ship tumbles into the atmosphere with its outer surface boiling away and pieces breaking off -- in all, a scene of great visual violence -- took place in *complete silence.*
I thought that was pretty stunning, especially when they cut from the panicky-people-getting-on-lifepods-scene, with all the screaming and klaxons and other sound, to the absolute quiet of space.
(I hate citing Earth 2 in arguments of this nature, but they did get this one thing right, even if they got nothing else right except casting the way-way-hot Rebecca Gayheart.)
Screaming space fighters, faux-cool Euro-bridgecrew, (weep for Jürgen Prochnow -- from Das Boot to Wing Commander? poor dude) and valiant charges under fire -- it sure sounds to me like you're describing Wing Commander.
zo.
You and I will almost certainly differ as to which sites should be blocked and which sites shouldn't. Given that, how do we evaluate blocking schemes for "correctness?"
"Let's see, I'm fifty percent opposed to abortion, so we'll weight abortion advocacy sites by half. Bestiality and anarchy are right out. But kids should definitely have access to Mein Kampf and godhatesfags.com because they have to know who their enemy is." There's only one instrument that's totally suitable for determining what a child should and shouldn't be able to consume, and that's the eyes of its parents. I can't believe that people are willing to subcontract the job to incompetent software.
This makes me wonder, once Disney and Ted Turner buy up all the bandwidth they'll need, will the common man be able to serve content at anything more than a dribble? Big companies can bid up the price of bandwidth to *far* in excess of what the little guy can afford.
This feels like much more of a threat than any legislative attempts to regulate the Net.
What do y'all think?
Interested? email johnzo@cyberus.ca