liedra

I'm a technology ethicist, and (generally) we despise these sorts of codes of ethics. Not only do they not actually tell you what to do when something happens, but they are regularly turned into "checklists" which allow people to say "Yes, okay, dealt with ethics, done" without actually encouraging them to think about the real impact their technology might have.

We tend to advocate a more participatory, ongoing ethical evaluation that is context-sensitive and allows tech developers and designers to be able to actually solve ethical problems rather than just ignore them or ad hoc deal with them when they really become problematic. Of course, though, this is more expensive than just reading a website (or ignoring it), so it doesn't tend to get incorporated into much tech outside of specific university research projects.

I'm still with the first person I ever dated, almost 13 years later :) we're not interested in the marriage thing, or we'd probably be married! There's a lot to be said for good communication, shared experiences, and open minds. That probably goes the same for a startup too, haha. :)

Other: joined OkCupid for the silly quizzes they had way back when they first started, kept it around as a social networking thing before facebook. All the time I've been with someone I didn't meet online (same person), but without the internet we would never have gotten together ;).

As a woman, I get a very large number of messages & woots or winks or w/e they're called these days, all I can say is that the ones I bother to read are the ones that aren't just "hey baby" or weird soppy poetry. Though I'm not looking, so that could skew my opinion ;P

I'm actually sad that I didn't put my first website on geocities now! I had my own web hosting from my ISP, so I had a fabulously easy to remember url of "homepages.tig.com.au/~liedra" which was lost as soon as my family upgraded to a cable connection from dialup. And no, archive.org didn't manage to catch it :( I think it had a page devoted to Nick Cave and some terrible poetry! Go go websites of a 17 year old! :)

The interesting thing was that at the time my friends and I (who had ISP-based homepages) looked down on Geocities because it was "lame" comparatively. Now I'm sad that I don't have any records of that original page (possibly on an ancient CD-R though? but most of those early ones have degraded now...)

Sorry, only just got back to comments today. I'm in academia, so yes, not big on branding. The only attachments I like to receive are papers, calls for papers, agendas, student work, stuff like that. These tend to be important and can get lost in the pile if every email comes with an attachment.

Mail.app handles any attachments as attachments (even inline ones). If images are linked to as part of HTML email it will display them (but not by default due to spam tracking -- you have to click a button to display them), and not count them as attachments though.

Nice project! It'd be nice to have a link to who you are (an about page) on the site. Makes things a bit more friendly :-) You also might want to put a dedicated page for your privacy policy up (even if it's just a very simple one) since you ask for contact info.

This is the exact reason I never even opened an account.

It's super creepy (I'm a just-turned-30 y.o. woman and have dealt with these sorts of creepy people even without foursquare). People who need to know where I am know where I am, or know how to find out where I am. I never understood the appeal.

My bf and I broke into a property we were staying in for the weekend after we accidentally locked ourselves out by unscrewing the entire door handle (it was an old house and in the country). We tried picking it before we cottoned onto this idea but neither of us had any picking skills... then we noticed that the screws for the door handle section were entirely on the outside of the door! Many high fives were had.

Sorry, what's that got to do with anything? Email is not the same as web browsing. You can't compare the two.

Yes, I am sure, or I wouldn't have mentioned it. Not everyone uses Thunderbird. (I use Mail.app for OS X and roundcube webmail. Both display them as attachments.)

tbh, I don't pay attention to priority ever, since the only people who use it when they email me are spammers.

So the moral is: not everyone uses the same client as you, and not everyone uses email the same way as you. To piss off the least number of people, go for a lowest common denominator thing. This is also why I always use plain text email.

No, please no. Then it registers as an attachment and then I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment at a quick glance. Keep it short, sweet, and in 4 lines please.

What if what you're being asked to do is ethically questionable?

Did it ever occur to you that these people you have encountered (how many? 1? 2?) who cry excuses could just be stupid and/or jerks, and that people of all backgrounds can be stupid and/or jerks? Or perhaps it is your hiring practice that needs working on.

Racism and sexism (though you seem to throw women in as a second thought with little to do with the rest of your article, which is about racism) are issues, and it's writing like this that helps to make it an issue.

Instead of contributing to the problem, work on a solution. Work out why people are crying sexism/racism in your hiring practices or workplace. Maybe they have a point that you can't see? Take those you feel are unfairly accusing you through the court procedure rather than settling.

But don't just anonymously bitch at us.

Now I am getting visions of a bunch of Ladies huddled in a bunker somewhere while hordes of Creeps throw themselves against the doors and windows. Sort of Resident Evil style.

Terrifying. :|

Brilliant. Now change up the UI a bit, make sure you change the name to something like "CreepAvoider" and then it'll be marketable to the ladies :)

Yeah, and perhaps one that tells me where all the creepy guys who use this app "are at" so I can avoid them. :P

I think what is important here in the OP is the "at least give me a few options". Amongst my group of friends there has been a "quit facebook" movement in the last 6 months, and I can see why given the privacy issues that have been going on there. I probably would have joined them if I didn't live so far away from family and friends now. But really, it'd be nice to have a few options; lots of social sites allow you to use them to authenticate elsewhere, and things like OpenID which you can get from other places as well as rolling your own if you want to.

The only time you should be really concerned about whether your user really is who they say they are is if you are (or you are interacting with) some sort of official government or similar entity that legally and officially requires proof of identity. Otherwise it should be perfectly acceptable to have multiple, disparate identities on the internet.

Whereas I'm all for experiencing how others live, and thereby gaining a greater appreciation and experience of how the world works :) My argument isn't that Americans should be taxed more, just that Americans should come and see how the rest of the world works before having a good old whinge ;) (which is basically the theme of all the objections to this article -- I'm just expanding it out from rich/poor). 'tis the same with socialised medicine -- if those against it lived in Europe/Australia/Canada/etc. for a bit and saw how well it worked and how well loved it was in these countries, they'd probably have a different idea about it for their own.

This is ridiculous. Any American (or Australian for that matter!) who whines about their taxes should come and work for a few years in Europe. In Belgium, on an entry-level salary (for a post-doc academic position) I was being taxed at over 50% (my communal tax was at 8%):

"For 2010, marginal income tax starts at 25%, rises to 30% over EUR 7,900, 40% over EUR 11,240, 45% over 18,730 EUR with a top limit of 50% for incomes above EUR 34,330. Residents also pay communal and regional taxes at rates between 0% and 8.5% of the total income tax payable. The most common rate is 6%." (source: http://www.expatica.com/be/finance_business/tax/taxation-in-... )

Throw in a 21% VAT on top of that and watch most of your income go to tax.

Mind you, Belgium is one of the heaviest taxers, but coming from Australia, where it is significantly less hard-hitting (top tax bracket is 30% for 180k AUD, then 45% for every $1 after), it was astonishing. I don't think I got what I paid for in Belgium either, to be honest, but that's a different issue ;)

Australia too. Though you have to have done an "Honours" degree which is an additional year with a research thesis that is roughly equivalent to a Masters by research. You can also have done a Masters though to get into a PhD if you didn't do Honours.

Man, this makes an Australian PhD seem like a piece of cake comparatively.

1. No need to worry about funding: if you get an APA or an APA/I. If you don't get one of those, you'll be screwed. But they're not impossible to get either, if you're an Australian citizen. It's not $$$ but it's just enough to live on, if you are good at budgeting. If nothing else, at least you won't starve to death.

2. No courses. Just research your thesis topic for 3 years.

3. No teaching necessary. You can do it a bit on the side if you don't have an APA or the APA isn't enough. But you're limited to 8hrs/week of paid outside work if you're getting an APA anyway.

4. No defence. I guess it's too expensive to fly specialists to Australia, and those who set up the system did it in a time when video conferences didn't exist.

5. If you don't pass the first time you submit, you can just keep resubmitting until you pass. Of course, if you submit when your supervisor says it's not a good idea, that's probably going to be an unconditional fail. But you'd not do something silly like that, well, we'd hope not. The only other way to fail is to drop out. And there's a bunch of reasons to do that! The biggest ones are not being able to get a good research topic, or to not get a good supervisor.

Wow, Ryan Junee used to tutor me in first year computer science back at Sydney University... he's come quite a way since then it seems! :)

I hope it works out well for them, Australia needs something like that -- I have more a few friends who have left Australia to pursue cutting edge jobs in tech.

Hah, I was clearing out my dad's collection of computer magazines (not throwing them away, just making them not a huge pile in a corner!) and there were some absolute gems from the early 80s. I ended up getting half way through and just flipping through the magazines looking at the ads :) thousands of dollars for a megabyte of storage! that sort of thing :) I love this sort of nostalgia :D

This still doesn't make it a dialect though :) Sorry, but it just annoys me to see American English fanatics say how British English is "wrong", or a "dialect" of American English when it was the original base of American English to start with :)

I do agree with you, languages evolve. But that doesn't mean we should just drop grammar altogether. I was a little snappy in my original response, and I apologise for that, but the sentiment is still the same.

Just because lazy people in North America couldn't be bothered working it out any more doesn't mean Twitter shouldn't set a good example. Ignoring it is not correct, the distinction is correct. It's not a dialect, either, given that it's, uh, the original.

I was JUST about to write the same thing! I see this all the time on blog.(app) sites -- annoys the hell out of me!

That said, I love the idea of this. A nice way to say thanks to people without having to go through paypal hell :D Might also inspire me to write more than "what I did on the weekend" blog posts ;P

Ooh, okay, I think I see where the misunderstanding is: I was asking Alma (in questioning time at a talk at the IFIP/PrimeLife summer school ( http://www.cs.kau.se/IFIP-summerschool/program.html ), which was unfortunately not recorded) about website users' information, not the data of the website itself. Though it's a pretty fine line there, isn't it!

I told her that I blocked google analytics because I didn't want it to find out things about me for advertising etc. She responded saying that Google doesn't do that, but now that I think about it she was probably saying that Google doesn't profile me specifically, nothing about anonymised data... yeah, now I'm not so sure. :)

Who says anything about scaling up a franchise? It sounds like they're talking about a few small cafes rather than a new Starbucks. They're already doing that in Melbourne, so I don't see why it's particularly different.

I'm about to move to London... I'll have to check it out! Also it has a fab name, nowhere else knows what a flat white is, and the cappuccinos they make here in Belgium have fake whipped cream on top! :( :(

I await this with great anticipation! (I have been there but for a conference without much chance to get outside and experience the city - I am determined to return, however!)