sievebrain

You are correct sir, however the EU commission believes it doesn't actually have to follow the gdpr at all! They were called out on their non compliant website shortly after the law activated and announced that for "legal reasons" they didn't have to follow it.

Browsers already offered standardised UI for accepting or rejecting cookies. The EU didn't care and now every website has its own totally non standard popup that can't be scripted or automated away. It's a disaster that shows how clueless governments can be about this stuff.

There are a lot of zombie startups in the USA too. Look at how many valley firms never make a cent yet somehow go for years without dying.

It's a wider issue with feminists and arguments, not specific to computing. Look at the interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman. Newman constantly misrepresented and lied about what he was saying in the interview itself, right in front of him, to an absurd level ("are you saying we should model our society after the lobsters"). The whole thing is on YouTube, it's worth watching if you can get through it without stopping in disgust.

That happens to men all the time too.

Is there anything worth reading in these essays that is genuinely unique to women? Because so far it sounds like damore round two. The only form of unarguable, gender specific discrimination I see in computing is against men.

Yes. Read a conflict of visions by Thomas Sowell. It explains why people separate into these two camps across time, place and culture.

They're equivalent. People strongly encourage things they prefer. It would be a very Kafkaesque judgement that one can strongly encourage a certain gender to apply and not violate that statute.

Of course, it's also the outcome I'd expect, but biased application of the law is a separate issue.

This does imply the TSA are breaking the law given the story above about how they "strongly encourage" women to apply.

The dark ages usually refers to the periods from about 200-1000 AD. The middle ages are usually from about 1000 AD to 1700 AD.

And the dark ages aren't called that because human nature was "dark" during that time. They're called that because we know very little about them.

The replication crisis is larger than the social "sciences". Microbiology is also affected, and I've even seen evidence that occasionally computer science is affected, though to nowhere near the same extent and for different reasons.

And what does the word "brotopia" and "brogrammer" even mean? Is there anything to these terms except feminists being sexist and insulting?

It does happen. Both the largest supermarket chains in Switzerland are cooperatives.

However, small competing firms in a market where people vote with their wallets is already pretty democratic. The voting takes place at a different level - people choose companies rather than leaders or direct policies, but it works well enough.

That's not many companies actually but rather a tiny minority of firms that are exploiting their ability to make unusually huge profits to get investors despite poor and risky terms.

They already know that and don't care.

How can you possibly describe a chart that your link admits is the opinion of one academic "pretty standard and unsurprising"?

The idea that you can even estimate percentage of world GDP 2000 years ago is laughable.

How exactly do you even measure the GDP of such an ancient empire? Economists can't accurately measure GDP of western economies today despite huge armies of statisticians, even China's true GDP is a mystery, so I'd have to assume any such claims about the GDP of the Mughal empire are nonsense.

Companies pay if they want the services of the courts to resolve disputes. They don't get it for free

I'm reading the sequel now (Homo Deus) and I agree that so far I'm disappointed in his output. It starts by arguing that humanity has essentially conquered famine, disease and war. The first two are arguable but they are technical issues that can be overcome with technology. War isn't. It goes downhill from there.

Still he has a way with words and it's an enjoyable read so far even if large parts are academic humanities nonsense.

I think you should read a book on the history of the British empire. The point you're responding to is basically correct. The idea of the "noble savage" as it was once called is a fantasy. The countries invaded and conquered by the British were typically brutal empires with medieval or lower levels of development, and had been that way for thousands of years with apparently little or no cultural development. The British were encountering local rulers with spears and they had Gatling guns. These societies had no technology, no science, no education or healthcare, primitive to non existent infrastructure of state and oh, they were mostly slave-oriented societies.

Yes the empire was a dictatorship that conquered them and in the early era, bought slaves from the local rulers. In the late eras the empire built infrastructure, education systems, brought modern medicine, tried to teach civilised values like not beheading your political opponents and having votes instead, and in some cases as the empire faded, left the countries in a vastly better state than they were found.

Colonialism is easily one of the most complex and ethically grey areas I've found when studying history. There is no evidence or reason to believe those societies would have ever advanced were they not conquered.

Police protect people, by and large. Corporations don't benefit much from services of the state. Fire services would be a better example but they are often funded out of local rates rather than national corporation tax.

As a Brit I wish my country would give up on these boring and routine "outrage" stories. Amazon pays corporation tax in America because it's an American company. End of story. If my fellow Brits want a world beating firm like Amazon that brings profits back to the UK locally, they need to get cracking and make one.

Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable.

Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.

Haha, great answer, I'm impressed at how you aren't backing down on this. Three times with legal action in all cases sounds terrible though, glad you were ok.

No, it's getting quite common. The pence rule, they call it in America.

I've been on the pointy end of a false accusation by a woman in my team who was upset I insisted on supervising and double checking her work (which was extremely poor). Lucky me, the accusation wasn't sexual and double lucky she was a terrible liar. But if you think false accusations are rare you are pretty naive and probably just were never in a position to make an enemy of a woman.

Pay higher referral fees. Or did you think Firefox used Google search for free?

Not a joke. Google don't define search as web search but rather "search of any kind of data source you can imagine". Thus Amazon is a search competitor because people often go straight to Amazon and type in what they want rather than go to Google first and maybe see shopping results.

Your comment is still false. Google allows Android forks with their services installed. You just can't break the API, which makes sense, otherwise apps from the store wouldn't reliably work.

They needed each other. YouTube couldn't survive without Google's money and engineering ability, and Google didn't understand how to quickly iterate in social products.

I guess the issue is the definition of problem. If the law reaches a point where you need AI augmentation to understand it, that's a good sign it's being applied to problems it can't actually address or which may not even exist at all.

Look at GDPR. It's impossible to know what it really means. Huge efforts are put into action with no idea of whether it will be considered good enough or not. That's not a problem you can fix with ai. You need better law (in this case, no law would be better)

It does matter yes. Journalists have inordinate influence on politicians, if an outlet (much more likely the guardian in this case) is making nonsense claims about bots it can easily lead to legislation, especially if it lets politicians feel they're doing something.

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.