The commenters who are looking down their privileged noses at someone who jokes on LinkedIn are pretty funny, and probably represent the root cause of most diversity and inclusion problems in corporations today. But what I really came here to complain about... the summaries on my /. home page are getting ridiculous. This one has the *entire* article except for the last paragraph. Is that really what we're looking for in a tech news aggregator?

Yes. I wrote all my college papers in Ami Pro. The math editor produced great looking equations on my dot matrix printer.

Here in the USA, school sports practice and part-time jobs sadly often take priority over the actual classroom bell schedule.

Sheesh, I came to the comments section hoping for Nerd insight into Parler and apps like it, and instead it's like reading the comments of a fox news article. The election is over, can we get back to tech news? Please?

Agree with other Bolt owners; price, quality, comfort... But also because the console has actual knobs that I can reach for without looking, instead of a massive sheet of glass.

The citizen initiative system in California has lots of inherent problems, but I still feel a responsibility to research and vote on these damn things. Prop 24 has some minor protection improvements and one major flaw, in my opinion as a supporter of strong individual privacy protections online. Here were my reasons for voting against this proposition. (1) The California legislature already passed the CCPA law in 2018 that does a good job of improving consumer data privacy. CCPA requires businesses to (a) disclose to the consumer the personal information that has been collected about the consumer and the commercial purpose of the information collected upon the consumer's request, (b) not sell a consumer's personal information to third parties upon the consumer's request, and (c) delete the consumer’s personal information upon the consumer's request. Prop 24 defines some of these rules in more detail. What proponents call "closing a loophole" I would call "minor improvements;" for example, defining the ages of minors for whom parental consent is required. (2) CCPA was passed by the legislature, which means it could have been amended by the legislature (and has been a few times). By passing Prop 24 now these provisions can only be amended by another initiative according to California's rules. Proponents call this protecting and strengthening the law; I would call it an industry end-run around the legislature. (3) Prop 24 doesn't provide an "opt-in" to privacy waivers, which I would have preferred and might have convinced me to support it. (4) Prop 24 raises the CCPA exemption on small businesses from those with 50k customers to those with 100k customers. (5) Prop 24 adds a new oversight agency (i.e. more bureaucracy), whereas the CCPA law was enforceable by the state attorney general. And here's the kicker: (6) Prop 24 changes the law to continue to allow businesses to offered tiered services (different levels of service) for different prices, but changes the rule to allow them to base the tier pricing on the value of the personal data to the *business* instead of the value to the *consumer.* THAT was the Trojan Horse. Took me a while to find it. See Section 11 of the proposition, which amends civil code section 1798.125(a)(2) and (3).

...and this is rough for everyone involved. Not many details have been figured out because this JUST happened. 24 hours ago we didn't think this was a likely scenario. I can address at least some of the slashdot comments. My kid is a freshman living in the dorms (as do most undergrads at MIT), and we live in California. 1. While this seems, on its face, to be reactive and knee-jerk, it's not. The administration is doing this under recommendation from state and federal authorities based on data that shows that reducing density and socialization on campus can benefit the public health. This is not a measure primarily to protect the kids, it's their sense of duty to play their part in the health system. I'm paraphrasing from President Reif's letter to the students. 2. Parents on the various social media groups are naturally concerned about tuition, housing costs, storage, and the cost of flights home, but I think most understand that these questions will be answered eventually. The priority right now is taking action to move students out. 3. There are huge logistical issues concerning international students and kids who for one reason or another can't go home. From our kid's observation and from the social media parents' groups, it looks like many, many parents are volunteering to host kids. It think it's pretty low risk to host someone that your kid knows, or even a fellow student that they don't know well. Also, MIT is granting exceptions on a limited basis for international students who can't get home and don't have other options. Again, this is about reducing density, not completely clearing the campus. 4. With regard to the effectiveness of online classes, I think this will be a learning experience all around, and maybe even serve to advance online learning a bit. One example so far, a class that was doing a hands-on lab is going to review data from a previous study instead. They will lose out on the hands-on part, which is unfortunate, but will not miss the bulk of the educational value of the class and the professor. School will be closed for 2 weeks starting next week, and the professors will be expected to use that time to prepare their online material. 5. From a personal standpoint, our kid was most sad for the adMITted high school seniors (announcement day is March 14) who won't get to experience the very fun, very busy Campus Preview Weekend in April, and sad for the graduating seniors who have to completely pack up and leave in a week with little hope of coming back for a graduation ceremony.

I'm curious about IBM's best practices. We use slack at work, but there are no ground rules, no training, no cultural norms. Which means it's very hard to figure out how to find the channels you are interested in, the experienced users have to keep explaining to noobs how to use threads, and so many people (mostly in the executive ranks) feel that it's important to repeat all their slack posts on huge email distributions. Hopefully IBM has solved a lot of these problems in preparation for going company-wide... anyone have any knowledge to share?

Plex has always been a great platform for serving local content that the user owns. I've been very happy over the years as they added features to help me curate my own library, like filters, auto-tagging, and metadata downloads. Then it seemed like Plex saw the future and it was streaming, so they glommed onto Tidal for music and now they offer video streaming. I suppose that may bring in more people that are only looking for streaming, but I hope it's not at the expense of the excellent platform they have built for hosting local content. If my lifetime Plexpass investment gets eclipsed by ad revenue, and then Plex figures out they can make even more money with targeted ads by selling user data, it'll be a darn shame.

Dr. Pham at ThinkingNode (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkingnode.com%2F) is trying to fix the problem of black box machine learning without clear causality. Worth an investigation for those interested in this field.

I understand the need to wrap up this scenario in a nice package built from assumptions about the facts, a learned model of the world, and media saturation. But using Stallman's predicament/complicity/persecution/shaming/whatever-you-want-to-call-it to justify a view of society already concertized in one's brain is not productive. Here's what I plan to do, as a guy in the USA. Use this for your own purposes if you want. I plan to sit on this story, and whichever one comes out tomorrow about some other dude, for a few days. In the meantime, I'll talk to a female acquaintance, or several. Maybe my wife, mom, sister, co-worker, cousin, neighbor - anyone who might trust me enough to be honest. Ask her if she has ever been harassed, or felt like she wasn't taken seriously, or been overlooked, specifically because of her gender. Ask her how frequently that has happened. Ask her how likely it is that the arc of her life was strongly deflected from its natural path because of these experiences. Be open to the possibility that what she is feeling is completely real and honest to her, even if in my mind I can think of alternative, innocuous explanations for all of her examples. And I'll keep my mouth closed for the most part. What I hope is that some kind of understanding will allow me to check my opinions, words, and assumptions in the future before I say something that, to me, seems logical and obvious, but to someone else might seem myopic and hurtful. I suspect I'll have to do this exercise over and over for years before it becomes second nature, but I would like to get there.

Some newspaper publishers association took out a full-page ad in the San Diego Union Tribune the other day claiming that this will force them to treat paper delivery workers as full-time employees, and will cause small, already-struggling publishers to go out of business. Anyone have any insight into whether this is true or not? Much easier to ask here instead of trying to read the bill. Any "good riddance" comments are unnecessary.

The kids don't know we're saving it to give it back to them, so there is no incentive problem. Also, it seemed very draconian to just take their money, which often comes from birthday gifts from relatives, and use it ourselves. Also keep in mind that not all kids respond to monetary punishments; ours do, but some kids respond better to having privileges taken away or, who knows, being sat in the corner for an hour. Every parent has to tweak their methods to figure out what works. This happens to work for us. Also, don't get the impression that the cell phone plan is the only financial education we are giving our kids; it is one of many. We follow the "first national bank of dad" (from the book) method of giving them a virtual bank account with very generous interest rates and monthly statements, and an allowance that is specifically not tied to chores and other behavior. They have debit cards and we help them reconcile their accounts. They have bus passes and school lunch accounts, all of which they are involved with managing. We teach them how to budget and save.

For us, it would be more expensive to go with T-mobile, and for us the Fi coverage is better than T-mobile alone. Also the international roaming aspect is nice, T-mobile may or may not have that, I don't know.

Teens know how to use data but they can be taught to conserve it as well. We use the Project Fi family plan with 2 teenagers. The kids get 3GB/month for free, and anything over that comes out of their piggy banks. Don't tell them, but we're actually putting the money in envelopes and we'll give it back to them when they graduate. They haven't had to pay too often - they quickly learned the cost of streaming YouTube over cellular data. They have also learned to use the Fi app to monitor their usage, and how to use Android settings to automatically restrict apps from using background data, and other useful life skills like that.