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Comment Re:extremists (Score 1) 278

You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA

And in fact I do.

the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself.

True, but the solution for "too little" is not "too much". When I drive into the city, I see a lot of free parking spaces all the time - for disabled people. It seems there's half a million disabled car drivers in this city, except that they're never parking anywhere. I understand handicapped parking. But when you can mark the times you see these spots actually used in a calendar, then maybe the amount is not right?

And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.

Again, to some degree, yes. As with everything in life, there's a balance. The rest of us take a little inconvenience or additional cost upon ourselves to help out the disabled. We shouldn't be punished for making an effort just because that effort is not 100% perfect.

Comment extremists (Score 2) 278

I understand not being an asshole to disabled people. Not making their life intentionally more difficult than it is.

I understand helping others if possible. Adding captions when you're doing subtitles in other languages anyways, putting ramps next to stairs when you're rebuilding the entrance anyway, that kind of thing.

I understand you might want to add these things by themselves for a bigger market or because of customer loyalty, or just because you can and it's not a big expense.

What I don't understand is this extremist approach of having the entire world change for your specific need. Old buildings that need to be damaged and reworked to cater to wheelchair people. A lawsuit not because you refuse to do captions, but because you don't have 100% coverage of them. This kind of crap gives people less desire to be friendly to disabled people, and very soon they'll do it only because the law requires it and only to the extent that the law requires.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

An interesting read even though I have to admit I understand but half of it. What I didn't get is if there's a treatment path without medicine, something like the proper food, excercise regime, etc. -- because I find it hard to believe that the proper conditions cannot be created by the proper lifestyle.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 3, Insightful) 447

If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.

The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.

Comment Re:Conditional recording (Score 1) 447

There could be streaming capability to the ground

Because never in the history of the world has any such capability been abused.

In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude.

And then do what about it? Collectively praying that FSM picks up the plane with his tentacles?

t stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.

Technology is not a panacea. Add one thing to make flying more safe (locked cockpit doors), create another problem without which a catastrophy could have been prevented (locked cockpit door).

Something I learnt in my first leadership position: When someone has an idea, ask them about the downsides and potential issues. If they can't think of any, they haven't thought it through enough.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

Follow the money. Who is asking for video cameras?

The last thing you would have seen would have been a smug face and a victory sign. Maybe not in this crash, but in the next. That, my friend, is headlines material. That's a breaking story right there. That picture is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, even if you print it on the most heavy paper you can find.

Comment Re:Ikea (Score 3, Funny) 71

That's a meme, but also a lie. As IT people especially, we can take a big hint from IKEA in this regards. Their documentation is short, mostly visual, always step-by-step and gives the user exactly the information he needs, with none of the unimportant blabla that many blow up many other documentations from the necessary 3 pages to the actual 30.

If the instructions for Windows were made by IKEA, thousands of IT support people would be out of jobs because users could actually do simple tasks by themselves.

Comment Re:Ikea good points (Score 1) 71

And don;t forget to put a price on convenience: instead of waiting 4-8 weeks for your new stuff, you get to take it home and use it right away

This.

When my girlfriend moved in, we needed some new furniture. The huge wardrobe took three weeks to be delivered, and then one more week to exchange an (important) part that was broken in transport.

We both dislike IKEA a lot, but we went there to buy some dressers. Half of what they have on offer is trash and the other half ugly, but we went home with two pieces of the one dresser that's not a shame to have in your bedroom. Because we didn't want to have her clothes in luggage and bags waiting for furniture to be delivered. It's not the 16th century anymore where people had to go into the forest to chop down trees every time they wanted to have a table.

Comment bullshit (Score 1) 267

This is total bullshit, and dangerous at that.

Firstly, a lot of software out there still has password length limits, sometimes silently discarding additional characters. You will still need ordinary passwords now and then.

Secondly, no normal human will type a five, six or more words passphrase every time they want to unlock their screen. They will do it for three days while they're hyped on how secure they are now, and then it'll become something they hate, and then they'll change it back to "123".

Thirdly, this is a bit more tricky, the real world security of almost every password scheme I've come across in 15 years of IT security experience is several orders of magnitude lower than the mathematical assumption. Because we consistently forget to take the human factor into account. Maybe some extreme nerds will actually follow this guideline, more normal people will discard words they can't remember for words they can, change things "a little" for convenience, and generally sabotage the whole system without even realizing it. It's the same as with passwords, all over again. Yes, on paper, a password has on the order of 10^16 possible combinations. But in reality, taking into account how people actually choose passwords (even ignoring the whole "password" and "123456" problem!) the actual diversity is more on the order of 10^9. Same here. You think using dice removes the human factor. omg do you underestimate humans!

Comment yes, they are (Score 1) 159

In fact, they're ridiculous. I've given a couple presentations on password strength, and password meters are to password strength what the TSA is for air travel security - a better-than-nothing baseline approach that is mostly for show.

The problem is that we have nothing better to offer at this time, even though most security experts agree that passwords are a solution whose time is over.

Comment ethics (Score 2) 177

For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation

Or maybe it would follow better moral reasoning. Ours is not perfect, it's just whatever evolution came up with that gave us the best species survival rates. That doesn't mean it's really the most ethical solution.
For example, in a post-feminist society, let's assume for arguments sake that gender discrimination has been overcome, wouldn't we also do away with "women and children first" - which is a suitable survival approach in a species fighting for survival in the african prairie, but hardly for the dominant species that already is overpopulated.

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