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Comment This is stupid. (Score 1) 204

It's either a web-service that emails a hyperlink to the message (which can be easily extracted), or something that only works if the recipient installs the same extension. In either case, why would a recipient voluntarily restrict their own access?

Comment Re:If Only (Score 1) 25

Well, it actually doesn't, at least not reliably. With the ability to retroactively alter history, you can never be 100% sure that someone didn't sneak a change into the repository without reviewing every line of every diff. Have fun!

You can rewrite history, but it will break compatibility with any forks or mirrors of the repository - and for popular github projects, there are hundreds or thousands of those. No way to alter commits that have already been published without making it very obvious.

Comment Re:Yeah, right. (Score 1) 892

The wage-gap argument doesn't even make sense. Just imagine if a company could get the same productivity out of women and pay them 30% less. It would have an enormous competitive advantage over every other company in its industry and all the companies would quickly be forced to either hire all women themselves or go out of business, not because of any misguided government interference, but purely because of overwhelming free-market forces. The same argument applies for women in the boardroom. If they gave a company a distinct competitive advantage, every company would already be forced by the market to have lots of them.

You are being very stupid. Your basic mistake is in assuming that the free market is 100% efficient and free of prejudice. What on earth gives you that impression? Hiring and firing responds to the trends of the day. Why do you think the participation of women in the economy has been changing over time? Why do you think the wage-gap has been changing? Why is the level of the pay gap perfect and just today, of all days, when it wasn't back in the 90s, the 80s, the 70s or the 1840s?

The fact is, prejudice exists despite the fact that it creates inefficiencies and makes more prejudiced people and companies perform worse. Because prejudice takes time to work itself out of the system! The Nazis refused to allow women into their munitions factories all the way until the end, even though this terrible decision contributed to their defeat to the Soviets who did so, and even put women into the front lines. If your argument was correct, the Nazis would never have done so, they would have seen the effects of their prejudices coming a long way off. But they didn't because they were idiots and in the real world there are a lot of idiots.

Ellen Pao's experiment, whether it works or not, is part of the process whereby inefficiencies are removed from the system. To do so, after all, people need to try different things. People like you, who think the status quo is perfect already, have always existed, and have successively been proven wrong again and again throughout history.

Comment Re:Everything's a negotiation (Score 1) 892

I think there are a lot of definitions of 'good' negotiators in play here. Like, a 'good' negotiator in a pay negotiation might be someone who opts for a lower salary because they understand the pressures the business is under and do not want to earn more than their colleagues doing equivalent quality work. Such a person, willing to sacrifice for the greater good, would be a good asset to the company. However in the context, a 'good' negotiator is a person that is simply better at extracting more money from the company for their personal enrichment, at the detriment of everyone else, by refusing to compromise.

Why should that be rewarded with higher pay? Why is that good in a team member?

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 892

If they make the "best offer" and the pay gap disappears, then what? Will *you* go nuts?

I also don't believe that ending negotiations would result in decreased salaries on average - it could well result in increased salaries, since the default salaries can be set to be higher because there is less need of an allowance for unexpected changes due to negotiations. From a management perspective, that increased certainty would be worth paying a little bit more. Ending haggling in retail, for example, has enabled shops to offer on average better deals than previously.

It seems like a worthy experiment, in general.

Comment Re:It depends (Score 1) 486

For instance, their paper says that concatenating a million one byte strings into a single million byte string takes 274 seconds. That should take much less than one second

wtf. The only way it could take that long would be if they were concatenating them as immutable strings and had to copy the result repeatedly.

Comment Re:1984 (Score 1) 160

1984 was not a warning *or* a how to manual. It was a novel.

It was one guy, George Orwell's imagination, mainly commenting on Stalinist Russia, as part of the wider movement of the western Left's dissatisfaction and sense of betrayal over developments in the USSR. The Cold War drove the popularity of 1984 and its sister work, Animal Farm, because they could be used in the wider struggle against Communism.

Things that are slightly like what is depicted in 1984 are not automatically bad, nor are things not in 1984 automatically okay.

Comment Re:Yes, and? (Score 1) 178

BitCoins are too much in use to ever really go down in value for any length of time now that China is in the game.

They've dropped steadily for most of 2014, though. One could argue that that all of that was still correcting the bubble in late 2013, but that correction has lasted well over a year now. There hasn't really been a good time to hold on to Bitcoin since then, with a few short-term exceptions.

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