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Comment Re:Luckily these idiots didn't kill anyone else (Score 1) 340

by anonymous_echidna (#61287508) Attached to: Two Dead After Fiery Tesla Crash
It's not just the marketing department. The underlying problem is the inherent "you don't need to do much but you do need to stay alert and attentive just in case so you can leap into action". Very few people can actually do that: most of us lose focus and mentally wander off if we are not engaged in the action in some way. Only a small fraction of people are wired to be alert without something happening to keep their attention. No-one in the driver's seat meant they didn't give themselves a chance - but you can bet your boots the owner was overly-used to not paying attention in the first place.

Submission + - Uber must pay $1.1M for rides denied to blind person. (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: A blind person with a guide dog was denied rides and harassed because of her guide dog. She sued Uber, which tried to blame its contractors and deny liability. However an arbitrator has rejected that argument and found the company liable, awarding the blind passenger $1.1M.

The arbitrator found that Uber staffers coached drivers on how to deny rides to disabled passengers without it appearing to be a violation of the law. The staffers also advocated to keep problematic drivers on the platform.

Comment Re:Please don't use R (Score 1) 101

Thinking of R as a language sort of gets in the way. To me, it's a collection of tools that does a specific job - understanding data - well. It especially does plots better than Python, although the libraries are slowly getting ported. If I have a bit of data that I want to visualize and do some reproducible research on, I will still pick R every time. For the record, I do like Python.

Comment Re:Racist facts (Score 0) 605

Facts are not discriminatory, but Damore is. He makes it clear that if he sees someone that he would consider a diversity hire, then he would think they aren't as good. Damore complains about:

Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

You get a lack of diversity when people who do not look like what the hiring manager envisions are not even considered for the job even when they may be better qualified. A real-life example being female musicians for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

This stuff is pervasive, it's toxic to a workplace, and a female engineer like me has seen it all a thousand times. So many guys refuse to believe that I even know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver, or that I know my way around a computer, or that, shock horror, I might actually know a thing or two about my field of expertise.

Working with Damore would be the pits.
Privacy

More Than Half of People Believe Using Spyware To Snoop On Family Members Is Legal, Study Finds (betanews.com) 159

Posted by msmash from the grey-area dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A new study shows that 53 percent of people believe it's legal to install a program on a family member's phone to snoop on their activity. The survey of more than 2,000 people in the US and UK by software comparison service Comparitech.com also finds 57 percent would consider spying on their children's phone conversations and messages. [...] It is generally illegal to install an app on another person's phone without their knowledge. Though this does depend on the circumstances. "It's a legal grey area, in that the laws haven't been truly tested in this arena as of yet since the technology is relatively new, so as relevant cases move through the legal system they'll be decided on a case by case basis," says Josh King, a legal expert in privacy laws and the chief legal officer of Avvo, an online legal marketplace in the US. "Intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud claims -- all could be implicated, depending on the circumstances. It's also possible that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be used to prosecute someone who installs this type of app on someone else's phone."

Submission + - IEEE-USA opposes efforts to expand the H-1B visa program (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: IEEE USA says H-1B visas are a tool used to avoid paying U.S. wages. "For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000," says the current IEEE USA president, writing with the past president and president-elect. The outsourcing companies, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy in 2014 "used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Uber, for comparison, used only 1,763 visas, or 2 percent," they say. They do support expanding green card programs, stating "America was built by green card holders, not guest workers."

Submission + - City of Munich IT Lead: "There are no larger problems with LiMux"

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: As heise.de reports (German article), Karl-Heinz Schneider, lead of Munichs local system house company IT@M, responsible for Munichs IT setup, says that he was surprised about plans to decomission LiMux, the Cities staple IT project of migrating to mainly FOSS.

He goes on to claim "IT@M doesn't know of any larger technical issues with LiMux and LibreOffice." ... "We do not see pressing technical reasons to switch to MS and MS Office. [...] The concil [in their recent plans] didn't even follow the analysts suggestion to stick with using LibreOffice."

Furthermore Schneider stated that "System failures that angered citizens in recent years never were related to the LiMux project, but due to new bureaucratic procedures ..." and apparently decisions by unqualified personel at the administrative level, as Munichs administration itself states.

Raise your hand if this sort of thing sounds familiar to you. :-)

Submission + - SPAM: Writing an Unknown Unknowns Workshop for Novice Programmers

Submitted by peetm
peetm writes: I have to put together a 3 hour (max) workshop for novice programmers — people with mostly no formal training and who are probably flying by the seat of their pants (and quite possibly dangerous in doing so).

I want to encourage them to think more as a professional developer would. Ideally, I would to give them some sort of practicals to do to articlate and demonstrate this, rather than just 'present' stuff on best practice. I need some help.

If you were putting this together, what would you say and include?

Submission + - Will Montana become 3rd state to ditch daylight saving time? (missoulian.com)

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: ok...twice every year Slashdot disses DST...here's 2017's first:

A bill brought by Sen. Ryan Osmundson, R-Buffalo, would eliminate that biannual ritual. He introduced Senate Bill 206 in the Senate State Administration Committee last month, a bill exempting Montana from observance of daylight saving time and keeping the state on “Montana Standard Time” throughout the year.

Similar legislation in several past sessions to exempt Montana from daylight saving time, keep the state on daylight saving time all year, or put the question to the voters failed to advance even out of committee. But SB206 passed committee unanimously and once on the floor, more than twice as many senators voted for it as against it.

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