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Comment Re:Corporate lobby group (Score 1) 158

There are a few government interventions I'm in favour of. But they are mostly to do with the purist view of minimal government.

I am in favour of government interventions that:

  • * protect my life, my freedom, my property. This includes everything from the US bill of rights (I'm not American, so I'll just gloss over the fact that I don't have this much) to outlawing murder and theft and operating police and military.
  • * protect the functional workings of a free market (which, as someone else pointed out, even the US doesn't have today). This includes outlawing coercion and fraud. I have a broad-based definition of fraud - basically, lying to someone to entice them to trade. I am in favour of transparency, especially with the government, but also in transactions. I also think that implying untruths ("misleading advertisements") probably should fall under the term "fraud" based on the value I place on transparency. Selling vitamin water as vitamin water is one thing, selling vitamin water with claims it "might help" cure cancer is fraudulent.

I am not in favour of subsidies or bailouts to any business, whether that's fossil energy, green energy, big banks, or car manufacturers. I'm not in favour of targeted tax exemptions (normally known as "loopholes" - which is itself a false name, but I'm still against them) - while I can understand some of them, the problem is that we keep adding all sorts of stupid exemptions, and then they distort the market in inefficient ways. And most bailouts would be better spent as direct welfare to newly-unemployed than to bail out the business that should have failed (not that I'm promoting the growth of government-based welfare, but merely pointing out that, as far as I can tell, neither the left nor the right should like them).

I don't want the government telling Apple how to design their products. Only to ensure they participate in a truly free market. I bet Apple can come up with a way to design their products such that it still looks the same way but has serviceable parts where reasonably possible. It likely would involve the courts a few times to help define "reasonable" in practical terms, but the default should be, and the direction in law should be, to permits owners access to their own devices that they legally purchased.

Comment Corporate lobby group (Score 4, Insightful) 158

Repair.org is a right to repair advocacy group that is made up largely of small, third party repair shops, which is spearheading the effort to get states to consider legislation that will make it easier to repair electronic devices.

In other words, a corporate lobby group.

Just remember that the next time you see a lobby group you disagree with that happens to be funded by other corporations. Who funds the lobby group does not inherently change the value of the lobbying. Debate the issue on its merits.

In this case, as a right-winger, I agree with this lobby group, at least on the issue presented here in the way that it is presented. The right to purchase a good, and thereby own it, is a fundamental aspect of a fair, open and free market. If I cannot repair that which I own, then I don't really own it. Now, granted, as we shrink our circuits to the point of ICs, we may not be able to replace individual resistors or diodes or anything, but there does need to be some level of repair available, especially for parts that can wear out. Batteries, even rechargeables, definitely fall under that category. Screen glass probably as well, based on the number of cracked phone screens I've seen over the years.

Comment Re:Kids these days... (Score 2) 136

You guys all were way more involved than I was. My simple hack was to change the DOS prompt on one PC in a lab to some ANSI escape codes to save the current cursor position, move to the top of the screen, print out "You have been stoned", and return the cursor to its original location, and complete the prompt as normal. I then moved to another PC in the lab, watched a student boot up the "infected" PC, get concerned, talk to one of the sysadmins, a small team of admins come in and try to virus scan the hell out of the machine before reformatting and rebuilding it.

Within the next month or so, they changed all PC bootup procedures to start by reformatting the disks and copying from a read-only network share so that all machines would start off clean with every boot.

Ah, the days of DOS.

Comment Re:IRC vs Slack (Score 3, Informative) 93

Slack is a push technology that operates even when you're offline. Coworkers on the other side of the world can post, and you can pick up the conversation when you get up. Conversations you start from home can be continued at the office, or en route (as long as you're not the driver).

Slack has nearly everything IRC has, except netsplits, and builds on top: persistence, search (it's not great, but better than IRC), rendering, sharing of multimedia directly inline (images, videos, etc.), voice calls, including group calls, ability to thread messages even inside a single channel. And I'm probably missing some stuff.

What you don't lose compared to IRC: channels, direct messages, slash commands, bots (it has an API you can use to write bots of varying interoperability), multiple servers connected simultaneously (I am connected to 4 slack domains in my slack client now, which is coincidentally also the number of IRC servers I'm connected to in my IRC client). Okay, so your existing IRC bots won't work as-is, but I don't treat that as a fatal flaw.

What I do miss from IRC when in slack, especially a large slack, is individual operator access on a channel-by-channel basis. I don't need op access to #corporate-messaging, but as the team lead, it would be helpful to have some level of op restriction to #my-team-dev-chat. Then again, I don't see nearly as much eternal-september-type trolling, so it's not been a huge problem so far.

Comment Re:The Rainbow Scare (Score 1) 754

If you believe that one gender is inferior as engineers due to biological factors, what do you do about it? The logical conclusion is to use a discriminatory hiring policy so that you don't waste time interviewing people who are much more likely to be bad at the job due to those biological differences. Sure, there may be outliers, but it's going to take a lot more money and effort to find them.

So either he's an idiot, or he's advocating for a discriminatory hiring policy.

The logical conclusion is to treat each individual as an individual, find out what their strengths are individually, and hire based on that. And not to invent imaginary quotas to meet. If you get a group of all Indian women, but those were the best people you could find, then fine. If you get a group of all white men, but those were the best people you could find, then fine. Don't worry about aspects that aren't relevant to the job at hand. What they have between their legs is pretty much only relevant to sex work and acting (and not even always then). Since Google's business doesn't (I think) bring them into these areas, then hiring based on gender or race should never even come up.

Cut off the top of the resume where it has the name, evaluate the rest.

Mind you, I have the same opinion of nearly any job. Evaluate the candidates on the resumes / cover letters provided, minus the name. Perform the interview process without respect to irrelevant details. Relevant details should not be "dumbed down" for anyone. If a firefighter needs to be able to carry a 250lb person out of a burning house while carrying 75lb of equipment, that's the requirement. Don't lower it for shorter people. If a police officer is needed who can reach out to indigenous people, then that's the requirement, and a white guy might not be your best bet. The requirements of the job are the requirements of the job - you don't do anyone any favours by using criteria that are irrelevant to the job.

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