L.A. County Bans Use Of "Master/Slave" Term

SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."

For the love of all that's good and holy

Funny that my first instinct was to check Snopes, and what do you know but that's the provided link. Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.

Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered? How the hell am I supposed to shop for wires now?

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

shh, don't give them any ideas.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

They've got all the ideas they need. Our city government (I live in LA) has gone over the deep end. This is worse than their ban on "Lap Dances" at the local "mens clubs". The same solution used by the "Gentleman's Clubs" should work. Get enough signatures on a petition to force a ballot measure and FORCE the City Council to either spend dozens of millions of dollars to put it up for a vote or STFU about the issue.

Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.

Thank God for the referendum.

BigBlockMopar in University...

Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.

Tell me about it.

How about this, which happened to me in University. Note that I don't care about race, disability, sexual orientation - none of that is relevant to whether or not I like (or will hire) someone. But I *hate* political correctness and I avoid it at all costs.

Picture it. In the hallway, just after I missed a question on a math test, where I had to integrate a function of e * trig. (Otherwise, did okay on the test.) Chatting with classmates.

"Well, I think the problem is that I don't integrate very well."

Stranger in the hallway who overhears:

"Oh! That's *horrible*! You're a terrible person! No one chooses the color of their skin! You could have just as easily been born black, you know! It's people like you who keep society from progressing!"

So, in unison, we (all Engineers) looked at her and laughed. At her.

"You're *all* horrible people! This is university! Campus KKK! I'm reporting you to the dean!"

Suffering idiocy as well as I do, it was I who took up the task of dealing with her.

"I would invite you to report that to my dean, I'm sure he'll laugh at you at least as hard as I laughed at you. Let me guess, you're in an arts program, right? In my arts elective, the instructor started by asking our entire class if we had our purple crayons. Things only went downhill from there."

[Indignant gasps from the chick... who was wearing wooden sandals in late October.]

I continued, "...Now, seeing as how *you're* the ignorant one..."

Screaming now, "How *DARE* you call me ignorant! You're the one who said you didn't like to integrate!" People were stopping to see this woman lose it on me. This hallway connected two science buildings, an engineering building and one arts building, so most of them were starting to laugh at her, too.

"You're *ALL* in on this! What's wrong with you people?" She was getting worked up to tears, all the angst of a comfortable middle-class childhood showing.

A big black guy who had been watching and kind of laughing from the beginning told her that he hated to integrate too, then walked away, leaving her stunned.

Me again: "Now, seeing as how you're the ignorant one, integration is a mathematical process for finding the area under a curve. It's from a branch of mathematics called calculus. Your wooden sandals and amazing ability to jump to unfounded conclusions have only served to reaffirm my belief that calculus is the distinction between a degree and toilet paper. You, honeybunch, are an idiot."

And with that, we left. I think she was having a stress attack when we walked away.

Re:My Girlsfriend!!!

"You're the one who insulted my girlfirend, you insensitive clod! "

Are you saying he made the story up?

Re:BigBlockMopar in University...Similar event

I met this same girl at the just-off-campus pizza buffet joint. Maybe not the same instance, but class: self-righteous, pop-culturally correct, loud.

She was the patron just in line ahead of me. When she got to the register she demanded: "You will put out vegetarian pizzas, right? I'm a vegetarian and I do not eat meat" -- but loves cheese, I thought -- " and I refuse to kill a defenseless animal for my nutrition."

The cashier informed her that the store always provided vegetarian pizzas on its buffets for people who, for one reason or another, preferred them.

What happened next was purely by reflex and was not pre-meditated.

I said: "You will put out meat pizzas, right? I am a carnivore and I believe it is unethical to kill and eat defenseless little plants which are rooted in the ground and are unable to put up any fight at all against human harvestors. Animals at least have a chance to escape or mount a defense."

And there was much laughter and rejoicing.

Re:BigBlockMopar in University...Similar event

I was at a local dinner with my vegiterian girl friend at the time and I ended up ordering a hamburger while she got a grilled cheese sandwich. I then had to sit through a 10 minute lecture on how meat is processed and killed and that I was a horrible person for eating meat.

So I then told her "Do you know how cheese is made? They inject cows with so much hormones that their udders get so big that they can't even walk. Their legs break and they just lay in one spot for the rest of their lives giving milk for your cheese sandwich."

That was the best meal ever. I not only got to eat my hamburger but I also got to eat her grilled cheese sandwich.
Thing were never the same after that....

Re:BigBlockMopar in University...Similar event

Plants don't have central nervous systems. Plants don't feel harm.

Your supposition doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion. Many organisms do not have central nervous systems but do respond to stimuli that are harmful to them.

YOU are starving your fellow man.

Are you accusing me of eating someone else's steak?

A quick look at the human physiology (eye placement for binocular vision, types of teeth in the jaw - canines and incisors as well as molars and bicuspids, etc.) all indicate that humans are omnivorous by design. That means that humans were designed to eat both "meat" and "veggies". The choice of whether or not to eat from either classification of food is just that - a choice - because you *are* designed to take from both categories of foods, regardless if you like that fact or not.

I wonder what the vegetarian community thinks of the Atkins Diet :)

Re:BigBlockMopar in University...

Damn, you sure showed bigotry and intolerance in your description and assumptions about this girl. Maybe she misheard and embarrassed herself, but it turns out you are, in fact, an asshole.

Wow. Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on and jumped to conclusions about those.

*SHE* assumed that my friends and I were racists.

*SHE* demonstrated her naivete and hypersensitivity.

*SHE* is the one who started screaming at me.

*SHE* learned that I am, in fact, an asshole. And proud of it.

a proposal

Remember how the generic pronoun "he" was considered sexist, and now we're supposed to write the contraction "s/he" to mean "she or he"? Well, it's pretty clear that this discriminates against nongendered species as well as inorganic objects. Thus I propose the written contraction "s/h/it" to mean "she, he, or it." I'll contact the LA County supervisors right away with my proposal.

Singular They

In informal contexts, I always use the singular "they". Fuck, it's been part of the English language for seven centuries. Just because Latin-misinterpreting prescriptive grammarians didn't like it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

Re:Singular They

Fuck, it's been part of the English language for seven centuries.

But what about those of us in the United States? Around here, "fuck" is considered to be a *dirty* word, and an insult to address a person or persons as "a fuck" or "fucks".

Re:Singular They - Insightful my ass

Blockquoth the poster:

'They' must refer to more than one person, or you're wrong.

True in formal writing or speech... for now. Check back in a century and I'd bet you'll see the singular "they" accepted. It's easier than formulating a new, concise, elegant approach to "he/she". And rant all you want, but the world is never going back to the default "he".

Nor, IMHO, should it. Language evolves and no language does it better than English. The language expresses the needs of the culture -- if the culture as a whole (or even in large part) decides the old way is inadequate, the language will change accordingly.

Or, to put it succintly, the only languages spoken "perfectly" are dead ones.

I'm with Dawkins on this one

I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there is not) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as "she", a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say "he-or-she", and "his-or-her". That is easy to do if you do not care about language, but then if you do not care about language you do not deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the "reader" as "he", but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female. As a matter of fact I believe I do, more often than not, think of my readers as female, but that is my personal affair and I'd hate to think that such considerations impinged on how I use my native language

Singular They - not illegal :))

Act of parliment (1890? about then) made it illegal to use "they" for singular

It's wonderful to see how these things get garbled. There was an Interpretation Act around 1889. One of the things it did was to make it officially unimportant whether a singular or plural word is used in (UK) legislation. The aim there was to get rid of one kind of lawyers' delight (like arguing that if a law makes it illegal to steal horses, then could it still be legal to steal only one horse?). It had nothing to do with making the use of singulars or plurals illegal!!

Re:Singular They - Insightful my ass

"There is no such thing as the singular 'they'. This is a commonly mistake; 'they' is always plural."

If you check the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that "they", "them", "their", and even "themselves" are used in the singular and have been for at least six hundred years. The notion that "they" is only plural is a modern invention, not based in actual use. Shakespeare and Chaucer used these words as singular.

In looking at the older OED citations, such as "Bath ware made sun and mon, Aither wit ther ouen light" from the 1300s, it is remarkable to note the singularity of "their" has remained steady in the English language while so much else changed around it. Any feature that has survived so much change over so long a period is clearly well established. The notion that it is plural only is a myth that deserves to be dismissed.

Re:a proposal

Perhaps "he-or-she-or-it" could just be shorted to "HOrShIt"...

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

While they're at it, change all the web forms in the world so that they don't say SUBMIT, as it's far too S&M. Perhaps the generic ENTER or OK would do, they're just not kinky enough though.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

I personally would like to see the word "motherboard" replaced with the more politically correct "caregiverboard"

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce?

It's not total ...yet

When will it be okay to use the word 'slave'? It has a fairly distinct meaning. Should the possible offence, in this case, almost non-existent, cause the word to be abolished altogether because of what people connote the word with?

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

When will it be okay to use the word 'slave'?

More importantly, when we stop using the word, will people forget what slavery is and just make all the same mistakes?

Of other interest, I believe The Guvinator should now see his first target for cutting the budget...

How Asinine.

the grain of salt for those which are simply ridiculous

As is web weaver for god's sake. A good change? Ha. A master does not imply evil doings. A martial arts master or a master carpenter generally don't have slaves. Master implies that they the best at what they do. Yes, it also implies authority, but not cruel domination. Gah. People drive me insane. Some of these offended groups are probably the same ones that burn 'inappropriate books.' Pooh on them.

I'd rather have lived a hundred years ago. Except of course, for all my grumbling about rampant political correctness and other hogwash, I'd be much more pissed about the lack of women's suffrage, real racial inequality, and the other issues of the day. The moral? There isn't one really.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

Not that I agree with LA county on this one, but I think you are assuming that human slavery has been eradicated. It has not. [scientificamerican.com] Not even in the U.S.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

This is linguistic revisionism, and it has dangers. If you eliminate terms from the language because they make someone uncomfortable, you allow the public to forget or erase history. I think this ultimately does a disservice to those who were oppressed.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

The real issue here needs to be said. Isn't the person who even thought of this the worst kind of bigot? Let's face it- what's the real issue here? Historically, we know that nearly every race and nation has suffered under the yoke of slavery. The conqueror becomes the conquered. Yet some ignorant fool in L.A. county decided that slavery was an affliction exclusive to the black race- there's no other explanation for why master/slave is suddenly an insensitive term there. Well, I'm quite offended that the slavery suffered by the subjects of the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Roman, and Ottoman empires; medieval Feudalism; Islam; and myriad others I've forgotten is somehow IRRELEVANT when compared to that of west Africans.

If we allows fools like this to erase our history, then we will surely repeat it.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

As a non-American, it didn't even occur to me that the problem they had with the master-slave couplet had anything to do with blacks and whites. I just thought that they were offended by the concept of slavery. If it is true that they see the master-slave relationship as being non other than the white-black relationship, then these people are truly racist.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

The Civilian Conservation Corps.?

Concerned Citizens Councils. They had a similar relationship to the KKK that Sinn Fein has to the IRA. They are basically two sides to the same coin, the public acceptable face is used for recruiting and the other side of the coin does the threats and murder.

BTW The reason why Senator Byrd is not attacked by Democrats or the NAACP for having been a member of the KKK is that 1) it is now a VERY long time ago and 2) he has publicly and repeatedly repudiated both the KKK in particular and the idea of racism. Compare this to Senators Thurmond and Helms, neither of whom ever repudiated their seggregationist positions, they merely downplayed them.

As for the reason why the Democrats and Republicans changed places? It was a short term political gambit by Nixon. In the aftermath of the civil rights act Nixon launched the 'southern strategy'. This was centered on wellcoming segregationists into the Republican party. The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists.

I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party. There are not too many homophobes, racists and other bigots in the 21 to 40 age group.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists. I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party.

I disagree. I think that on the whole, if you were to take a sampling across the political spectrum and ask whether people should be treated the same regardless of their race or color, you would get a lot more "yes" replies from Republicans. Democrats, on the other hand, would reject this philosophy in favor of an affirmative-action approach, swinging the pendulum of discrimination the other way instead of putting it behind us once and for all. Unfortunately for them, I think the former position has broader (though perhaps less vocal) support among mainstream voters.

So if by "racists" you mean Nazis and Klan members, then perhaps they do vote Republican, but if you look at racism in the broader sense of basing the treatment and opportunities you give to people on the color of their skin, then the Democratic party would certainly be the larger bastion for racism in America.

slavery and racism are not synonymous

The term "slave" is commonly used in the scriptures, e.g.

When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. (Rom 6:20-22)

In these cases its about being enslaved to something or someone (the master) and has nothing whatsoever to do with the color of a person's skin.

Re:slavery and racism are not synonymous

oh no. You mentioned the bible.
You're infringing on my non-denominational beliefs that may exist, may not exist or can not be determined!!
I demand you have your post removed.

Politically Correct Bible Story

Since we're using scriptures, here's a great resource for uptight people who are offended by anything. Why not celebrate Christmas.... er, non-denominational holiday period with the Politically Correct version of the Birth of Christ. [omegafaith.org]

Here's an excerpt to wet your appetite:

Sure enough, the three wise men rode up.

The crowd gasped, "They're all male!" And "Not very multicultural!"

"Balthasar here is black," said one of the Magi.

"Yes, but how many of you are gay or disabled?" someone shouted. A committee was quickly formed to find an impoverished lesbian wise-person among the halt and lame of Bethlehem.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

For what it's worth, I find it interesting that folks always assume this is a racial (specifically, about black slaves) issue. Slavery has been around for millenia, as anything from a way to pay off a debt (fairly rare, and different from indentured servants) to the penalty for losing a battle in war.

This is NOT a concept that is 'owned' by any one group of people.

Incidently, I appreciate the work you are doing. It's pretty scummy the way some folks are still treated.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

I don't know about the IDE spec, but I did a quick search on faq.org for "master/slave" in the rfcs. I matched at least 16 RFCs (it also matches older versions of the same RFCs).

So, I guess you can't be RFC-compliant when bidding on LA County contracts...

Exactly missing the point. (and wrong to boot)

Well, you managed to put a nice technical sheen on supporting the error with an error.

It is true that as far as the user is concerned, the difference between master and slave on an IDE bus boils down to which drive is "first".

However, the terms "master" and "slave" directly relate to the two drives and how they relate to the IDE controller and system. Yes, they don't send commands to eachother, but the master constrains the clocking on the bus and the slave is, well, slaved to the clocking the master negotiates. That is why you must have a master even if there is no slave. Further, "cable select" selects the master via its position on the cable, but it is still the master.

Even a quick google on IDE handshake clocking [google.com] would reveal to you that there is *TECHNOLOGY* involved in the distinction.

For instance, you always make your fastest device on the IDE bus the master, otherwise, if the slower device were the master the faster device would be bounded to clock with the slower. (Etc.)

My full attention isn't being paid to this post, but it clearly trumps your "but the bios lets me switch them" level of investigation.

It is not so much the questioners that are causing the fall of this society, it is the persons like yourself, willing to answer those questions without even bothering to decide if they have the requsite knowledge.

sigh.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered?

There have always been male / female converters for cabling. If only humans were so lucky.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

There have always been male / female converters for cabling. If only humans were so lucky.

It's called a "strap on"

I realise that I run the risk of being modded (-1, Obscene) but I just had to say it.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

scripsit donscarletti:

It's called a "strap on"

Nah, that's female/male. What you're thinking of is called a `cleaver'.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

And remember that `cleaver' spelled backwards is revaelc...hmm...I guess it only works with `strap on'. Feel free to mod me up to 5 though.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable...

I'll never forget the day my coworker and I were talking by speakerphone with a coworker, doing tech support. He asked if the equipment had a "male or female" end. She, puzzled, responded "what's the difference?"

I had to leave the room as he explained "the female one has a hole..."

What about the sea horses?

What I want to know is how sea horses wire up their audio systems. I mean, if they go down to radio shack and ask for a male-male cable, which one is it? The male or the female? Huh? Which one is it? For the love of all things good, will someone please tell me which one is it?????

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

word cleaning not bad. Doubleplusgood.

Re:For the love of all that's good and holy

I thought the first amendment rights superceded such non-sense anyhow. I'll call it whatever the hell I want. Arbitrarily picking words to be offended with is a very silly practice. I'm offended by the word cheese, from now on, I want everyone to use fromage. Isn't that about the same caliber. Why do we even have the words master and slave if we can't friggen use them? It's not like anyone has ever referred in public to the jumper setting as "Massuh". Maybe they are trying to free the oppressed drives! They deserve their own channel to call home!

Next we'll have to free the symbology of having only female connectors on devices... Female connectors can leave home and lead very low impedance connections too!

Tolerance & Diversity

What doesn't surprise me at all is that someone found an (arbitrary) word to be offended with. Happens all the time. What does surprise me (or hmm, maybe it doesn't) is that this was picked up by some committee and acted upon officially. Where does it end?

We (here in Holland) live in a very diverse culture, with lots of different people crammed into a tiny country. Anything you do or say is bound to offend someone else. Politicians here preach tolerance until we're sick of it... they think being tolerant of other cultures means to adapt yourself so that you will not offend members of those other cultures. Not only is that impossible, but one cannot help but notice that this requirement to adapt is somehow never applied to the minority groups. Ie. I cannot say anything offensive about Muslems, Jews or other minorites (just an example!), but if they do or say something that offends me, I'm called racist or intolerant if I comment on it, and I will be sternly reminded that I 'should respect their culture'.

Tolerance is a two-way street, people. On the one hand, you should be aware of the fact that some things you find normal are going to piss other people off, and you try (within reason) to minimise that. But on the other hand, you (and especially the minorities and politicians) should accept that other groups will do things that'll offend you. Rather than expecting everyone to change to suit your world view, accept that you'll be offended from time to time and do not make a big deal out of it.

This isn't new.

Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.

Strangely, I didn't thin this was a farce, since I've lived through exactly this nonsense once before.

The year was 1993, and I was working as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in their High Flux Isotope Reactor. While I was there we got visited by the Secretary of Energy (Hazel O'Leary) and her "Science Advisor" Jim Hall (who later went on to chair the NTSB). The tour was notable for two reasons:

1. Jim Hall made a comment about how he was surprised that spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactor looked almost exactly like the new ones (aside from the inner and outer assemblies fresh out of the reactor, which were still glowing), since he thought "they'd look all black, like burnt wood."
2. A week later we got an official memo from Jim Hall, mentioning that during the visit "Hazel was disturbed by the use of the phrase 'Master/Slave Manipulator'" and suggested that "we shouldn't use that phrase anymore." I've still got a copy of this memo somewhere (along with the "radioactive frog" memo of some notoriety), if I find it I'll post a link to a scan as a followup.

Much lunchtime discussion over the next week resulted in a variety of alternative terminologies, including "master/bitch", "pimp/hoe", and "indentured servant." The last of these actually made it into some drawings, and the Powers That Be were not amused.

So no, I'm not surprised. Not one bit.

Re:This isn't new.

A number of years ago doing tech support I had to explain about the enabled and disabled folders in a Mac OS 7.5 system folder to a guy in a wheelchair who was sure I was making fun of him...

*sigh*

Sara

The Gimp?

a guy in a wheelchair who was sure I was making fun of him
Then he should really not be tought image processing on *nix.

Re:The Gimp?

a guy in a wheelchair who was sure I was making fun of him

Then he should really not be tought image processing on *nix.

Or about different MP3 encoders.

Re:This isn't new.

Reminds me of a marginally related college story.

It would take too long to explain everything but suffice to say the Band I was in in College had a crew in public loading and unloading instruments from an 18-wheeler truck before a football game, and to get into things this crew (friends of mine, but I wasn't on the crew) had nicknames on their shirts. One was called "Gasmaster" because... he farted a lot. Was his trademark. Could peel paint and clear rooms with it. Another got the name "Gestapo" because he looked a little Aryan (white, blonde hair, blue eyes) and was mean as Hell.

The Band Director got an angry letter from an elterly Jewish woman who nearly had a heart attack when she saw "Gestapo" and the "Gasmaster" standing next to each other. He was going to make them change the names, but since this was sort of a one-time freak occurence in another state, he dropped it.

Truth is stranger than fiction

Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered?

Courtesy of yesterday's opinionjournal.com [opinionjournal.com] Best of the Web Today (which also reported on the master/slave controversy):

Meanwhile, the

Chicago Maroon [uchicago.edu] reports the University of Chicago is facing a problem with students who aren't potty-trained. Nate Claxton, who appeared on a panel at the university's Center for Gender Studies, said that, in the Maroon's words, he "knew people who had contracted bladder infections because choosing a gender bathroom bothered them so much that they did not go to the bathroom all day." Here are some more highlights from the panel:

Members of Feminist Majority, Queers & Associates, and the Center for Gender Studies organized the panel as part of the Coalition for a Queer Safe Campus. "Going to the bathroom is a moment where definition is very important in choosing a door," said Mary Anne Case, one of the panelists.

She pointed out that many women's restrooms have a caricature of a person in a dress on it. "Going into it implies that we are willing to be associated with that image. There are only two [images] to choose from. This moment involves an act of self-labeling."

The feminists, "queers" and gender studiers want unisex bathrooms:

Ana Minyan, the moderator of the panel, said that bathrooms will be called gender-neutral, rather than co-ed, because, "this terminology is generally used to refer to two sexes while the gender-neutral tends to be associated with more diversity and fluidity within the sex-gender continuum. As our aim is to make everyone, no matter what their gender and/or sexual persona is, more comfortable, we are using the term gender-neutral."

One Roger Simon thinks it's a great idea: "I believe that if all parts of the body were treated equally, and there was not so much emphasis on genitalia, than people could move beyond gender differences and grow mentally and socially." Well, call us small-minded, but the idea of going to the bathroom and having a girl at the next urinal doesn't exactly put us at ease.

Political correctness, like other totalitarian ideologies, demands absolute purity.
-- James Taranto

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

It won't work.

See, fellas don't talk in the bathroom. Unless it's to talk about sports in grunts, or "what movie are you in? It good?" types of coverstations.

On the otherhand, women talk about everything under the sun in there, the public bathroom for men, at least in my experiance is a temple of silence, albeit silence punctuated with "Dude! I'm hammered!" or long deep farts echoing on tile.

That said, I may not be honoring diversity because I've not used the john with some some sex-gender continuum benders. Perhaps Gender-Bender can shed some light on it, I'll look to my DVDs.

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

This is ridiculous, because the notion that women should be allowed to choose whether or not to wear a dress is a completely Eurocentric philosophy, and is certainly considered offensive to those from more traditional cultures. Such practices are discriminatory to those from a traditional Vietnamese, Korean or Chinese upbringing, where women are expected to wear dresses. This blatantly violates their right to have their own cultural identity.

You see? You can pick any extremist point of view, whether you actually believe it or not, and justify it just as these people have, whether it's liberal or conservative. The pendulum swings both ways, babycakes.

Re:Truth is stranger than fiction

She pointed out that many women's restrooms have a caricature of a person in a dress on it. "Going into it implies that we are willing to be associated with that image. There are only two [images] to choose from. This moment involves an act of self-labeling."

Replace the pictures of people with a rooster and a cat. Problem solved

No Master/Slave?

To verify that this wasn't a hoax or an internal joke which mistakenly escaped to the wider world of the Internet, we called the Purchasing and Contract Services division for the County of Los Angeles, and they informed us that yes, they did issue this message, and yes, it was meant seriously. The representative we spoke with said that someone within the County bureaucracy -- a person who probably didn't understand computer terminology -- had taken offense at 'master/slave' references and complained to the board, whereupon the Internal Services Department was obligated to issue notification requesting that vendors refrain from using that terminology.

Okay, how about "Pimp/Bitch"? The guy who recommended this needs to be fired before his ideas continue to procreate.

Re:No Master/Slave?

Seriously... what the hell are we supposed to call them? Master/Slave is the most accurate way to describe the damn things! Maybe to be PC they'll just call them the dominant and submissive drives instead?

Actually not, the Master does not tell the slave what to do.

However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'.

Levity aside, there is a serious issue here. There is a lot of Political Correctness talk that is trivial, some that is serious and some that is downright evil.

The trivial stuff is mostly harmless. Sometimes what appears trivial on the surface is actually a major cause of resentment. The word 'redskin' was used in pretty much the same way that 'nigger' was. If you know that you can see how a football team called the Washington Redskins might be unpopular with native americans the way a team called the Atlanta Niggers would be unpopular with african americans.

I recently had someone make me rewrite a paper on spam control to call 'blacklists' 'blocklists'. I objected because changing the terminology obscures the connection between blacklist type activities and McCarthy type activities which is actually central to the debate as I see it.

The downright evil use of PC is when it is used as a partisan gottcha. The 'niggardly' episode is a case in point, the use of the phrase was not the reason the person got sacked, it was merely the excuse. The extreeme example of this was in the UK where the campaign agains Rushdie and the Satanic Verses began as a PC type protest, a small bunch saw the opportunity for self-promotion.

There is also the downright evil use of PC card in the reverse direction. Take the recent advert from the Republican National Committee that equates disagreement with the President on any grounds with 'support for terrorists'. Forgive me, but I would be astonished if any of the Democratic Nominees is running on a platform of support for Bin Laden. It is not clear exactly which policy consistutes 'support for terrorists', it could be beleiving in the constitution rather than John Ashcroft, it could be beleiving that the Iraq war was and is a mistake, for that matter it might even be believing that war profiteers like Halliburton should be investigtated. We don't know because the President's party isn't making it clear. What is clear however is that they seem to be bringing us a sort of fusion McCarthyism, part Lenin (originator of the line 'whoever is not for us is against us'), part political correctness, part opportunism, part desperation.

Re:No Master/Slave?

Except that the primary/secondary notation is already used for the cable arrangment. Currently it's the:

Primary Master
Primary Slave
Seconndary Master
Secondary Slave
Tertiary Master ...

So we should be calling them the Primary Primary drive?

Re:No Master/Slave?

In the terminology of IDE/ATA chains, chain #1 is primary and #2 is secondary. I think primary master makes more sense and looks less idiotic tham primary primary.

I like to think that pieces of hardware won't get offended if I call it a "slave". Unless you think that harddrives now have AI? It would certainly be different if I started referring to humans in that way.

I think people that get offended over how frigging hardware is referred to need a smoking break, preferably pot.

Re:No Master/Slave?

You get over it. There is nothing you can label something that will not eventually offend somebody. Period. There are so many thin-skinned people out there that would rather get offended and raise a ruckus rather than spend ten seconds educating themselves as to the real meaning of something that it is rediculous.

Here's a test for you. Try using the word "niggardly" [reference.com] in a sentence and see how many thin-skinned feebs decide to tar and feather you for being a racist.

People need to get over their accute desire to be offended at every stupid little thing and just get on with life. And governements, of all sizes, need to stop wasting time and taxpayer money on useless, pointless bullshit and work on real problems.

Re:No Master/Slave?

The infamous "niggardly" case is a bit different, IMO. Yes, it's a perfectly good word, and yes, it has nothing to do with race -- but it's also a rather archaic word (I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone use it in a sentence, except to discuss the case) and, obviously, has a lot of potential to be misunderstood. As I said at the time, using "niggardly" in a room full of black people is kind of like being in a room full of homosexuals and saying, "It's cold in here -- throw another fagot in the fire."

All that being said, the person who complained about "master/slave" on racial grounds is not only an idiot, but also a racist. Slavery is not and never has been confined to any one group of people based on the color of their skin. There have always been, and unfortunately still are, slaves of every race.

How about Government/Taxpayer?

Seems like an appropriate alternative.

Re:No Master/Slave?

Pimp/Bitch is actually a bit of an improvement, since it implies that the controlling device is actually providing an interface to the services of the controlled device. (This is not implied by Master/Slave unfortunately)

I'm not in L.A. (thank the powers that be), but I strongly recommend we move to this new terminology nationally for the sake of clarity and political correctness.

My response to the county

From: Dave Schroeder <[e-mail]>
Subject: Computer terminology
Date: November 24, 2003 12:27:14 PM CST
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]

Regarding the recent memo sent to a county vendor regarding "master/slave", it may interest you to know that this is, and has been for years, the accepted and only terminology that refers to the hierarchy of the most commonly used computer hard drive interface in the world, known as "IDE" or "ATA". It may also interest you to know one of the definitions of "master" and "slave" according to Merriam-Webster:

master - 3 a master mechanism or device
slave - 5 a device that is directly responsive to another

And from the definitive reference on the English language, Oxford University's Oxford English Dictionary:

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry /00303043
master - e. A component of a system which controls or regulates the operation of one or more of the system's other components. Cf. SLAVE n. 5b. See also master-slave, sense C. 6.

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00227171
slave - c. techn. Used to denote a subsidiary device, esp. one which is controlled by, or which follows accurately the movements of, another device.

master-slave a. (attrib.) (b) chiefly Electronics and Computing, designating or relating to a system in which one component controls the behaviour of one or more other components.

The names "master" and "slave" are codified in the official ANSI ATA-1 interface standard, X3.221-1994, titled "AT Attachment Interface for Disk Drives". You may be aware that ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, is the largest standards body in the United States. It would seem odd that a county purchasing agency would want to throw out well established standard names created over years of cooperation and deliberation by scientists, engineers, and standards experts. Further, almost every hard disk currently in the possession of the county has the words "MASTER" and "SLAVE" printed directly on them. Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to destroy this labeling on each drive, spending thousands of manhours and voiding manufacturers' warranties in the process. Your next computing equipment bid will likely be an interesting one, since all hard drive manufacturers refer to their drives using the same terminology.

Insisting that vendors comply with the requirements in the memo makes the county look extremely, extremely foolish, and directly flies in the face of accepted, descriptive technical names for device interaction. You may also wish to caution your vendors about using the words "male" and "female" in the description of plumbing and electrical fixtures.

Regards,

Dave Schroeder
Los Angeles County native

cc: County Board

Ref:

ATA (ATA-1)
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/std _ATA.htm

Single, Master and Slave Drives and Jumpering
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/c onf_Jumpering.htm

INCITS Technical Committee 13 (T13), responsible for X3.221-1994
http://www.t13.org/

Re:My response to the county

For millions of Americans, the "master-slave" relationship means one thing and one thing only: over 200 years of institutionalized, legal American slavery.

Then those Americans are ignorant.

Slavery -- human slavery, I mean, not the machine kind -- is a curse that has afflicted humanity throughout its existence, and continues to do so today. To limit one's viewpoint of the word to a specific period in the history of a young nation is to pretend that the suffering of the (at a guess) tens of millions of slaves throughout history who were not black Americans has no meaning ... and to pretend that slavery is a solved problem, when in fact, there are probably more slaves worldwide today than at any previous time in history.

Two-thirds of my father's family died in the Holocaust, but you don't see me acting as though genocide is something that only happens to Jews.

They think that's bad

Wow, I wonder what they'll say when they realize why some computer cables ends are called male and female.

Re:They think that's bad

"Wow, I wonder what they'll say when they realize why some computer cables ends are called male and female."

Wait 'till you tell them said cables are being used on a computer running a "stoned beaver" OS kernel!

Name Change

So now we have to have dominant and submissive hard drives???

Re:Name Change

I personally am hoping for oppressor/oppressee. It's much for fun to use, and it's even less politically correct. =)

Re:Name Change

Someone's gone and added a ridding crop to my HD icon..

sex shops too?

what about all the sex shops in LA County?

eh?

It's not an "interesting twist" on political correctness, it's just another example of it.

graspee

Politically Correct Unix

(abusing your highly modded post)

1. "man" pages are now called "person" pages.

2. Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime."

3. To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped."

4. To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored.

5. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command.

6. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers.

7. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather".

8. The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command.

9. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX".

1. SHELL COMMANDS To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanise."

2. The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones.

3. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory."

4. "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced.

5. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."

1. TERMINOLOGY From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text".

2. The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides."

3. There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable.

4. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.

5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS).

6. No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users.

7. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System.

8. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged.

Your forget one:

"finger" -- try using that in a sentence amongst a group of people, "Ummm, hey John did you try to finger him?".

One example is one too many

Being a resident of England (or should I say 'United Kingdom' in order not to alienate my Irish/Welsh/Scottish compatriates?) I have seen more than a lions share of political correctness. It seems like every week that I open up the newspaper to find a half amusing/half irritating article written about a particular group of people who seem to have a beef with the way they are 'labelled'.

Example Old Age Pensiors (OAPs) - 'We are offended by the name given us and see it as ageist. Therefore we would like to be known as Senior Citizens' (um, cause that doesn't refer to your age?)

I'm sure everyone out there in /.dom has has experienced the mailman/mailperson debacle.(milkman, garbage man etc. are all also valid)
Hey while we're at it, why not plurally refer to ourselves as Personkind! One small step for a person, one person-of-irregular-height leap for Personkind!

And it doesn't stop at there! A school in this banned sportsday because it is deemed as unfair to those who don't win. Aww boohoo so your little snotty kid lost the egg and spoon race, we better give 'em all a medal, cause 'EVERYONE'S A WINNER!'

Mothercare [mothercare.co.uk] have, or were going to, release an updated version of Humpty Dumpty in which the poor egg shaped fellow was put back together and lived happily ever after in order to protect children from a perilous dilemma. I know I'm taking this political correctness thread off on a bit of a mollycoddle tangent, but they're all related to one thing - The Bubble Wrapped Society.

Re:One example is one too many

'We are offended by the name given us and see it as ageist. Therefore we would like to be known as Senior Citizens'

'I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals, who remember the gold old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive.'

Re:Fuck political correctness!

There's a difference between political correctness (dumbass term) and using racial slurs. The former is an overreaction to a potential slight, the latter is an attempt to offend.

And yeah, I know it was probably for effect.

What does the county prefer?

Daddy/Bitch

Political Correctness is pure egotistical B.S.

I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with. It is twisting our language too rapidly and preventing the free exercise of speech. Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin. They must realize that a language develops because people make new terms and apply new definitions to existing words based on events with which they are familiar. You cannot force us to speak differently just so a puny minority will not be offended.

Politicians, I think it is YOU who are offended, not the minority which you claim to represent!

Re:In California

That's Dom/sub, you insensitive clod!

mixed priorities

This is sad and funny at the same time. I can see where someone could potentially be offended to merely hear the terms used, but use some common sense people! Hasn't anyone heard of context? When political correctness stretches so far as to have government offices relabling hard drive configurations to imply that while some drives may not be as gifted as others, all are created equal...I laugh. I've been through my share of drives in my day, and I can guarantee that not all are created equal.

How pathetic have we become? Something like this can only be laughed at, and never really measured.

Pathetic.

Damon,

Well...

...they could always go all SCSI.

Re:Well...

...they could always go all SCSI.

And risk offending the homeless?!

Re:Well...

Then maybe the Governator's Office will make sure everything is properly terminated.

First things first

LA County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave'

Is this the same LA County that has rampant police corruption and brutality problems?

The one in the state, California, that is facing a massive deficit?

Glad to know they have their priorities right.

It's just a request

Even so, it's a pointless request, and if enforced would probably mean that LA County couldn't buy hard drives at all, since most drives have clear labels on how to set the "master" and "slave" jumpers.

Uh oh, this post is probably officially data non grata in Los Angeles COunty now.

Female/Male next?

"I need a mouse adaptor, please. Female to male."

"I'm sorry, sir, but that is politically incorrect language."

"Uh, ok, um, lemme see. Can I please have a mouse adaptor where one end has pins sticking out and one end has holes to fill."

"You trying to be funny with me, boy?"

"Ugh, ok, never mind. Just give me a master/slave controller."

"That's it, I'm calling the police, pervert!"

Alternative?

AsksPolitelyDrive / HappyWorkerDrive?

PresidentDrive / VicePresidentDrive?

KingDrive/ViceroyDrive?

(My favorite...)
WillyWonkaDrive / OompaLoompaDrive?

There's the obvious "Parent/Child" possibility, but since the actual standard uses the terms "Master/Slave", I really think this is overreaction on the county's part...

hrmm so

one of these days, prison is where all the thinking people are going to end up and run the outside world from. and our prison utoptia will be the land of guarded walls and milk and honey and high speed internet, and we'll all hang out all day reading books and surfing the web and writing more laws to keep us safer from the outside, while they slave away paying to keep us incarcerated, blissfully unawares of their own capture, as the walls grow outwards and the outside becomes the inside. and our uniforms will regress to suits and the the mobius strip will turn once again. btw im drunk

Request or require?

"L.A. County Bans use of Master/Slave Term. ...
LA County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references."

Contrast this to the snopes article, which says: The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term "Master/Slave" in product descriptions and labelling.

There's a big difference between request and require. And banned? Hardly. I doubt anyone's going to get fined or sued over this.

Master/Slave should be phased out

Master/Slave should be phased out. Edge-triggered logic is more modern and robust.

Help Help I am being repressed!

All I can say is thank god! Now we will have liberated hardware able to do its own thing. Write when it wants to write, read when it wants to read and just in general do whatever it likes, regardless of what it was supposed to do.

Much like Windows.

G'dammit!

2003-11-21 21:06:11 LA County bars "Master/Slave" labels on ha (articles,humor) (rejected)

Geez, first I get this story rejected last week. Then I have to reject so many cookies from snopes.com that I miss getting first post when it does appear. Then some new spyware the IT fuckwits installed on my work desktop slows the system to a crawl again and I have to switch to my laptop just to whine!

But is their money where their mouth is?

Will L.A. County officials put their money where their mouths are and buy all new equipment to replace any that uses this offensive terminology? Or are they too niggardly?

Oh yeah?

Well, I ban the word "County" because "Count" is a title in an archaic nobility system that has no place in modern American culture. Take that, L.A. *****y!

Other funny tech words

At my first programming job, we shared an open office with the sales people. We started designing this large system with small group meetings in the common area of the office. We kept talking about "forking children" and "killing children" and our master process was called the "mother." Finally one of the more ditzy sale women came back and asked us to explain our disturbing terminology. She didn't think that "forking babies" was proper office talk. She was okay with it once we explained the terminology.

Re:Other funny tech words

My girlfriend was similarly confused when I was typing commands like man kill | more and killall. To make her feel better I made a symbolic link so that I could use happysunshine to disconnect the modem rather than killall pppd

I never used those words anyway

That doesn't worry me in the slightest. I have never had a master and slave on any of my IDE chains. I simply have "the butch" and "the bitch".

This means that I would have no problem moving to L.A. But I think my hard drives would feel more at home in San Francisco.

In Socialist California

Here in America, you label drives "Master/Slave" for correctness.

In Socialist California, the label correctness slaves master YOU!

Automobile clutches too

The clutch assembly in cars have a master and a slave cylinder (well I'm not an expert, but at least manuals do).

Mine went out once. You can't engage the clutch anymore!

Insert snarky remark about oppressing the auto industry here.

Of course it's offensive!

Look at the labeling. Point of Manufacture on these things are Malaysia, Thailand, Hungary, etc. They're shipped 20 and 30 to a 3'x4' packing crate, against their will. Forced to endure this trip without food or water, these poor mass-storage devices are then forced to spin at 5400 and sometimes 7200 revolutions per minute, without breaks, in dusty and hot environments.

I'm glad someone in California has at least taken the initiative to keep them from being referred to as slaves. The next step is a move to an 8-hour workday (although I think IBM already recommends that on some of their Deskstar line), and two 15-minute breaks per work period (I can do without swap for a few minutes, I guess). Of course, I hope they realize the negative connotations of the term "Server"

Re:Of course it's offensive!

and two 15-minute breaks per work period

Tried two 15 minute water breaks. Didn't work. In fact, the second one turned into more of a smoking break.

I don't want a PC PC!

Sorry. I should have resisted.

I have an idea.

How about balance your fucking budget, THEN worry about stupid shit like this.

For the love of God...

...please, think of the hard drives!

Broader Racial Conspiracy

I was just inspecting my IDE cables and I noticed that the connector denoted master is a light gray, while the slave connector is black. It seems that the people who designed this standard were part of a conspiracy to bring black slavery in the United States. I should have seen it all along.

Let's not stop there...

I have been scanning my technical documentation and I have found several similarly offensive and discriminatory terms. I propose the following modifications:

1. Server/client - please use transactor/transactee.
   
2. Ones/zeroes - please use numerically-advantaged/disadvantaged
   
3. directory/folder - please use facilitator/facilitatee
   
4. physical/virtual - please use reality-enhanced/disenhanced.
   

I, for one, welcome our new facilitators.

car/truck manufacturers

Of course this should also be sent to the big auto manufacturers and parts vendors who provide master and slave cylinders (part of the automotive brake and clutch systems, respectively).

I've never been comfortable with the term either

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't make a federal case out of it. But I wouldn't mind using a different phrase.

Free at last!

I removed the slave jumper from my hard drive, then plugged it in to the connector directly adjacent to the mobo on the ribbon cable. You know, so it wasn't at the back of the bus anymore.

Life Imitates Jokes

I've joked about this a few times at work when the (military) instructors I work with discuss the latest in command directed PC nuttiness. They can't use the term cockpit, it's a flight deck. Neither can they say white board or black board. Those are now officially marker boards and chalk boards. I used to joke that we can't use master/slave anymore due to a NAACP lawsuit against the computer industry. Guess it ain't a joke anymore.

My tax dollars at work

Gang warfare, poor policing in the Sheriff's department, a school district that produces idiots, and a fire department in the highest wildfire area in the world that doesn't own a single airel tanker. Yep, those board supivisors are earning their money alright. They have eliminated a benign yet useful bit of global computer nomenclature to sooth the feathers of some psycho religious county employee.

This reminds me

of the time I had to fight a ban on the word 'deamon'.
Fortunatly, I won that. Some people thought I was the spawn of satan for using that term.

When one of the women confronted me and told me should would not say deamon, and that it was offensive to her belief.
I told her "If you allow a simple word like Deamon direct how you live your life, Satan has already won."

Pretty much the same thing I tell people when they get upset becase they have to give out 6.66 in change.

What I want to say is "Stop being such a twit."
Followed up by spinning my head around.

Re:This reminds me

One of my previous bosses bid a job at $666.00 for parts - unfortunately, as it turns out, to a devout Assemblies of God believer.

Quote (and I couldn't make this up): "I ain't payin' the devil-number!"

He was less than pleased that my boss's suggested fix was to round up to $667: "you mean I have to pay extra?"

Charge for it...

Sure, go ahead and change the labels. And charge 3 times more for everything your relabel. Make it not worth their money to do it.

-Foxxz

Fed up with PC speak?

Orwell wrote an interesting piece entitled Politics and the English Language [resort.com] which shows how much more concerned people are with how things are said than successfully delivering the actual content of the message. It's an interesting read, check it out.

I fail to see what's "offensive" about it

Seems to me the terminology is descriptive and easily understood. Why should the use of slavery as a semi-descriptive term for a particular technology be offensive?

We also have "dead man switches", "sacrificial electrode", "vampire taps", and "kill switches", and a lot of other terms in technology that refer to things that, when they happen between humans, are unacceptable. It seems to me that the use of such terms to describe the relationship between inanimate objects or even non-human animals does not mean endorsing those behaviors for humans.

Oh, that's nothing...in San Francisco..

The San Francisco City Council recently passed Ordinance 2002-11-78b, which prohibits the sale or manufacture of pinouts and connectors that are exclusively "male" or "female".

Apparently, there were those who felt that having seperate male and female connectors was somehow discriminitory. In the words of Douglas Fillmore, spokesperson of a citizen's group that endorse that ordinance, "Technology, and our terminology that describes it does not only mirror life - it also helps guide it. By creating devices that can only be used in one method, to the exclusion of others, and to further use such value-laden terminology to describe them, sends a clear message that "there is only one accepted way to mate." This metaphor can be very injurous to groups we wish to show our support for."

So, go into a Radio Shack in San Fran and as for a male db25 pin connector. They'll sell you a connector that comes with a seperate mating collar, just incase you choose to mate it with another male. Or, if they're out of stock, they'll refer you to the Fry's Electronics in Oakland.

I'm just kidding. I hope no one believes this.

In the interests of equality..

Drives should not be dominant and submissive. Nor should any other componentry (also consider Bus Mastering on PCI, or even USB requiring a host to master all devices).

No, all are equal. Any collection of devices with connection should either take turns making the decisions, or should hold a voluntary election where all devices have equal influence.

Of course, the devices "backed" by larger companies will have more money to campaign for votes from other devices.

The machines are taking over, and dang, the terminator has gone into politics...!

This happened in 1985 (maybe early 1986)

I was just out of school at Data General (minicomputers) in 1985 and we were told to stop calling the paired CPU's for a fault tolerant system master-slave.

We started calling it Father-Son, but someone complained again so soon it was Mother-Daughter.

Fortunately, the FT portion of the project was cancelled and we were able to get on with things.

Frankly, I thought master-slave was obnoxious. However it just kept going, there were other names as well that kept getting squashed.

Let's hope they don't start looking at code...

Somethings tells me these might not go over too well either:

#define SIGABRT 6 /* Abort (ANSI). */
#define SIGKILL 9 /* Kill, unblockable (POSIX). */

But being California, I suppose this one's fine:
#define SIGTERM 15 /* Termination (ANSI). */

Replace with Label/Artist?

Seems to fit...

Colored Paper and Manholes

About 15 years ago my town (Ithaca, NY) started recycling paper and every school had two bins in each classroom, one labeled 'white only' and one labeled 'colored' - since, at the time, the recyclers didn't want the two mixed when pulped. As a joke, a kid scrawled the word 'racist' on one of the bins, and the administration freaked out. Within a few days the labels were changed to 'bleached' and 'dyed'.

Around the same time the city was exploring alternative names for 'manhole' and 'manhole cover'. Many suggestions were submitted, but none were euphonious to be adopted ('sewer hole', 'conduit entry point') and in the end nothing happened.

So, sometimes offense can be avoided when simple and obvious alternatives can be found, but sometimes it can't. In the case of 'master'/'slave', the nomenclature is too established and there is no obvious alternative, so I doubt anything would come of this.

(In the case of 'male'/'female' cable connectors, we could just as easily get along with plug/socket|jack)

Ithaca is the same town where there were serious debates about eliminating the word HIStory, as it was gender-biased. A simple counter of the bias of the word HERitage was enough to stop that.

Let's take it to the next step.

Let's stop using that "Spanish" language in any public documents. This is a language that unfairly assigns a 'gender' to every noun.

Unless the Spanish speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles county agree to replace the 'le' and 'la' with something more gender nutural, then all people working with, or receiving services will have to do so in the English language.

You sexist pigs.

[the rant light is on]

Master/slave is just the latest. California is a minefield for this kind of crud, I should know I live in the Bay Area inside the Politically Correct triangle formed by Marin, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. I want to be as sensitive as the next bloke, but sometimes I pick up the paper and read something that just makes me want to puke. My wife is of the same mind and we rail against the PC fascists most mornings listening to public radio and browsing the newspaper.

PC fascism extends to pets, races, bums, unwed mothers and sexual deviants (not to lump anyone together...trying to be PC here as you can see...) who must be correctly refered to (respectively) as fur friends, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, single mothers and GLBTG (for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered crowd, though we used to call them all by the PC term "Gay" rather than homosexual but recently they each wanted in on the game so now we have this horrid acronym which I guess is itself more PC than PC. Barf).

Our everyday lexicon is scattered with taboo words and topics. Unless they are white the authorities cannot refer to a suspect criminal on the run by their race not even to facilitate apprehending them. And a vicious dog is never a dangerous animal that needs to be destroyed (as opposed to being a family member needing therapy) and you cannot discuss GLBTG "gay rights" issues in any manner other than as a political movement for justice even if that means they can demand the opportunity to explain their lifestyle choice at whatever level of detail suits them in front of a classroom of 13 year old children (to the horror of many who can do nothing to stop it...which is why increasingly we homeschool or private school and leave the public schools to the activists).

A middle class white person has to keep their head down. The best approach is to join a splinter group and start claiming your rights as a minority as loudly as you can. Some claim to be suppressed Native American. Others claim to belong to suppressed religions like Paganism (I happen to claim both, but that is because I happen to be both ;) while others wave the flag of immigrant seeking fairness, or are non-English speakers, while others have been abused as children, or are incest survivors, or are food or chemical or medication sensitive (so don't wear perfume or cologne to the office, or bring a PBJ sandwich for your own lunch, or you'll kill them on the spot and just see if you don't) or had absent fathers, or absent grandparents, or didn't have cable TV when they were young, or are dyslexic, or corpulent, or are in some other way special and are a victim and not "part of the problem" created by the oppressive power elite (who BTW are increasingly Native Americans, immigrants, pagans, GLBTG, food/chemical/drug/fat/bilingual/disabled awareness lobbyists and for all I know family pets.)

Though it seems democratic and diverse, ours is a culture of identity politics and is rife with narrow interests. Nobody pulls together except within their narrowly defined identity group (though I can't imagine how the GLBTG manage it.) You cannot believe how much it sucks. It's a wonder there can be any progress at all on anything important, and it appears that more often than not there is no progresss at all. Where it is all headed I cannot imagine.

Re:This is a good thing

Basically you sound like you want to use / establish a vocabulary that is guaranteed not to offend anybody in the workplace, ya?

Easy : keep on using your existing vocabulary and just don't hire niggers or bitches. Voila! nobody at the office gets offended, guaranteed!

An alternative, of course, is to expect that all employees work in the existing environment and accept that words may be used that if they really, really wanted to they could twist into totally unintended meanings and be offended by them (ie, Master/Slave hard drive settings, cylinders in automobile settings) - by accepting the existing work environment as it stands ensuring that they (and others like them) are welcome to the workplace now and in the future.

This Politically Correct crap has done nothing towards making work environments better for the 'oppressed' (ie, blacks, latins, women) and has done quite a bit towards making hiring managers very, very biased against hiring any of those and being very, very subtle about working towards that effect. I will give you a 100% written guarantee that none of the above are ever getting past zillions of employment screenings in corporate America, and the hiring managers know better than to admit my true motives in which candidate gets chosen.

They are all totally upset with the direction employment is going in corporate America, and yet they are bringing it on themselves. They scream about not being able to get a job, and yet the ones that did get hired pull this PC shit. Well there we go - can't say they weren't asking for it. Big time.

Take a note from Depeche Mode...

Rename it "Master and Servant".

Tee hee!

Okay. So, when I was working for Georgia Public Health on some clinic management software, we decided that reindexing all those Clipper .NTX files should be a distributed task. One machine was set up as the controller, and other PCs on the LAN asked it which table to reindex next. During the implementation discussions, we always referred to the machine doing the telling as the master and the machines doing the work as the slaves.

The team on this project was about half black and half white. I was having an animated discussion with another of the (white) programmers when a couple of the (black) programmers came in. They watched the discussion for a little while. I looked up at them, and one said, "Don't say slave."

"No?" I asked.

"Nuh uh," he replied, with just slightly too straight a face.

So I bet my career: I turned to the other (white) programmer and said, "Fine. So the Massah machine needs to hold record counts in the array so it can..." and everybody cracked up. We discussed terminology a bit, and decided to call the controlling box the "controller" and the indexing boxes the "indexers." About 70% of the folks actually using our application were black, we figured, and not too savvy on computer terminology, so fuck it: we caved, just to be on the polite side.

Moral: we all had a good laugh. Here in Atlanta proper, there are more white than blacks. In state government, there is plenty of minority representation. And we all get along pretty damned well---I was voted the second whitest white boy in the office by the (mostly black) administrative staff (and damn was the whitest white boy pissed).

I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words. Most actual black people can look after themselves, and, having better things to worry about, tend not to give a damn.

BIOS screens

Alright who is going to rewrite all the BIOS screens to make them politically correct?

I can't laugh at this stuff anymore

The saddest part is that no one in any position with any influence or power will stand up against things like this. Everyone, including the vendors, will bend over and take it hard and long. The marching morons will forever triumph as long as ideology rules the mind of humanity.

We can make fun of it all day here on Slashdot, but nothing will be done about it. The idiots will win this one, just like they win all the others.

It's far past the point of not being funny anymore.

Role reversal

Didn't this guy notice the designated 'master' connection on the cabling is black?

And in other news....

"Master and Commander" narrowly escapes being banned under this provision, as well, thanks to a large generous cash donation by Russell Crowe to the Democratic Party.

Taking action

This is clearly ridiculous. The county of Los Angeles expects an entire industry to change accepted and known terminology because 1 person ( ONE! ) thought something was offensive.

I think several things need to happen here:

First, I encourage anyone and everyone to write to all the hard disk manufacturers you can think of, and strongly discourage them from changing this naming convention. Politely explain that the entire world should not change because of one person's lack of familiarity with the master/slave relationship of hard drives. (This terminology is actually used in other fields besides hard drives, to denote any mechanism or device in which this relationship of control is found.)

Second, if you've gone as far as doing that, you should consider writing to the county of Los Angeles to let them know how ridiculous and silly their request is.

I do not usually interfere in things like this, or ask anybody to do so, but I strongly believe that this is a frightening trend that is growing in too many areas. For example, a book called "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" by Diane Ravitch gives example after example of things that school textbooks cannot say because they are politically incorrect. If you read this book, you'll eventually ask yourself, "Well, what exactly can you talk about?" That's the problem. If the entire world needs to change each time one person (or a small group of people) is offended by some terminology, then we will eventually live in George Orwell's nightmare.

As other Slashcrackers have noted, soon you won't be able to call a connector male or female, because somebody with an as-yet unknown gender (like an alleged child molester named MICHAEL JACKSON, though it's unlikely you've heard of him) will be offended at that.

ran into this at work recently

in our case, a member of the team was giving a presentation explaining how our LDAP servers were set up to allow for load balancing and failover. the presentation referred to the master and slave LDAP servers. a member of the audience told him that was offensive to her, and demanded that they cease using those terms.

god people piss me off.

Discrimination

I find this blatant attack on the SM community offensive, particularly in light of the recent sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws passed in California. What happens behind closed doors between me and my hard drive should not be subject to government approval. Come, Slave. ---Je-je---Jesus Christ...

Here's my bid...

jumper removal for 50000 hard drives - $457,000
25000 new IDE cables - $1,250,000

Making them pay for their own stupidity - priceless.

Endian?

Someone better not let them know that the machines they are using also store data in Little Endian and Big Endian byte orders.. Will this offend some Native Americans and Indians?

The Politically Correct Dictionary of Computing

"Master/Slave Devices" become "Partner Devices having ID Numbers 1 and 2"

"Shut down" becomes "Put into a dormant state"

"Zombie Process" becomes "Perpetual Process"

"Kill the Process," "Terminate the process," and "Abort the process" all become "Cause the process to end, regardless of current state."

Motherboard? - offending orphans?

But "Motherboard" could offend the poor orphans who never had a mother. Obviously some of these orphans would be unwhite! and some may even be doubleplusunwhite! OMG! quick, lets change the term motherboard to be "genderneutralboard", i think you will agree this fits nicely into the following phrases.

1) First you need to flash the BIOS on the genderneutralboard.

2) Ahh yes there is a jumper on the genderneutralboard for that

3) The usb ports have become detached from the genderneutralboard

See easy, smooth flowing, Come on LA its up to you to fix this! People of no particular race colour creed or geographical location are being offended as we speak!

(We've always been at war eith eurasia, eastasia are out friends and have always been our friends)

seems that there are some doubleplusunclever people making up laws, is there really nothing better that they could be doing in this time of war?

Free the hard drives!!

Master and slave drives!? Let my storage devices go!