Act I

A FA on the front page laments that more potholes have gotten fixed in wealthier neighborhoods in some city because their residents were more likely to own smartphones and download the report-a-hole app.

My thinking of course was, yeah, the squeakiest wheel tends to get the grease. That's just how it is, if there's not the gumption or resources to proactively/preventatively frequently attend to every wheel. Such as in city services.

I would think there'd still be a phone number to call to report them, since smartphones haven't always existed, and most everyone has at least a land line. So those who are bothered by them the most get them fixed first.

Doesn't sound terrible, but it's only a meant to serve (and does so very poorly) as just one example of a greater, overall concern: Data analytics could end up reinforcing inequities in housing, credit, employment, health and education.

Act II

I'm reminded of a popular, smarmy retort of the past to the accusation of Left-wing bias in the media: Life [itself] has a Liberal bias! The implication intended for conveyance, but not really believed by the utterer, of course, was that Left-wing slant in the content of reports about things in life was not actually injected, but innate. I.e. it's not a problem, it's what's normal.

Well, then: Life reinforces inequities.

Act III

But if all these naturally-occurring inequities are bad, shouldn't all naturally-occurring inequities be bad?

How about some we never hear about:

1) The number of news sources

The Left occupies 90-some percent of the news dissemination sources in the country, from news networks (like CNN) to non-news networks (like Comedy Central). Given that probably about 1/3 of the country is solid Left, that should be their quota on programming that distributes news. Or at most 2/3rds of all news-distributing media outlets, since you can also argue that the political middle has been lost to the Left.

2) Positions in (public) education

Leftism is grossly over-represented in academia. Why is diversity in the student body so important but not in the faculty?

3) Voter registration

At least in this state, even in so-called Republican areas the # of registered D's easily outnumbers the # of registered R's. And around here I've heard something to the effect that we've gotten rid of runoff elections being between the highest vote getting D and the highest vote getting R, to just the top two highest vote getters. Which will probably take that disparity and tend to make it even worse.

Maybe Democrat registration should be effectively capped at the current level of Republican registration in a district. For example lets say a city has 4 million residents with 45% registered D and 30% registered R. That's 1,800,000 expected D voters and 1,200,000 expected R voters. To make things more fair, shouldn't the number of D votes counted be stopped at 1,200,000? This still wouldn't guarantee equitable outcomes but it could be a start. Then it would be a matter of absolute turnout, on a level playing field.

4) Intelligence (that is, you never hear about this except from "racists")

Inherited wealth must be confiscated, for redistribution by the state, because it's too much of an advantage those of future generations. Well intelligence is passed down as well, and that's an even bigger factor. Maybe mandatory IQ testing should be performed at an early age, with forced dope ingestion in formative years to "equalize" the IQ of those more gifted.

5) Work Ethic

Cultural and home-life attitudes towards achievement also greatly factor in to outcomes in people in life. Jewish and especially Asian households are guilty of placing expectations and pushing their children to successes in life. Public school alone is insufficient in completely counter-acting this parental-instilled drive.

Maybe Child Protective Services' mission should be expanded. Not only do children need protection from their bad parents, but they need protection from others' good parents, who in raising their own children puts others at a disadvantage.

Some type of mandatory foster care in addition to public schooling might do the trick. Say state-run boarding schools, where you have to send your kids to go live 2 years for every 1 year they live with you, or whatever ratio is needed to eradicate the unfairness.

That is, "business developers" in contrast to "software engineers".

I'm at a place with them now, since returning to work after the Great Recession. (And I fear that I might be working with them, when I can find work at all that is, from now on.) I worked with them at my 2nd startup during the dotcom boom (a VB shop). During my time there I once overheard some of the senior developers talking amongst themselves and making fun of C/C++ devs for being nerds, and how in constrast they're "passionate about solving business problems", and not wanting to "get bogged down in the technology". I saw that again in the "about me" section of someone's blog years later, so I suspect it's an actual culture, that I've only bumped into a couple of times in my career so far.

They call themselves "developers", not "programmers". One person at my current shop felt the need to say out loud to the group once that she is definitely not a nerd. I concur. She's a mommie, not a technologist.

They talk about watching sports, and getting blitzed on beer. These aren't kids, some of them are early 50's, so they're not "bro-grammers", they're not the Jersey Shore of developers, they were just probably frat boys in college in their time. They're normals, not nerds They have zero awkwardness in speaking (they make BHO look like a stumbling, bumbling imbecile, in comparison, which he certainly is not), and always know what to do given the social situation.

They generally graduate with IS or MIS degrees as opposed to CS degrees. Or they get a CS degree but at one of the colleges in California's lower tier university system. Like I did*, but unlike me, they generally had to rely on a circle of friends/classmates to help them get through it. You couldn't help but notice these people; they were like wildebeests, always in proximity to their herd, for protection from carnivorous technical coursework trying to overwhelm and weed out the unfit.

*I transferered out of the upper tier system because I didn't want to pay that much/couldn't afford to (running up college debt wasn't what we did back then) . And I didn't want to work that hard, at that point in my life, since my thinking then was it was just to acquire the stupid token piece of paper to finally start my career and stuff of actual importance. (I don't totally agree with that now.)

I remember a classmate who I worked briefly with on a project I think in senior year. (At that school, sometimes larger programming projects were where you could optionally pair up with someone on it. But I never did, thinking that I'm going to have to be able to do this on my own in the real world. But some analysis & documentation assignments were sometimes mandatory pair or group assignments.) He was not a geek/nerd/pinhead/intellectual. He dressed well, spoke well, was smooth, he could be a CEO by now.

Now some people want to do something with computers in their career, not on computers. And that's fine, but they should go into QA or documentation on the way to management or whatever. For things like programmer, sysadmin, network admin, and DBA, that require real technical commitment to nerdy stuff to be able to excel at, the rest of us would appreciate if they'd stay away from those. So we can get our jobs done.

And some apparently have settled on working on computers, maybe giving up the aspirations of ever becoming a suit, but don't want to get too involved with them. A hybrid suit/developer, but 67/33 suit/programmer.

So you get what I have where I'm currently at. Managers love these people because they look and act and talk well, just like them. I hate them because I have to work with them, and on the code that they write (topics of part 2). So it's occurred to me, I'm not just a little out of place, I'm actually in a sense underemployed right now. Not as severely as if I was flipping burgers right now, but still.

In pay and also in what I can do. So I'll probably start looking in another year or so. There's a few more books I want to read to get myself at what I perceive to be a good foundation in this newer (to me) stuff I'm doing. The environment of the business developer has actually been a good place to start, as simplicity and just straightforward grunt it out coding is the rule, so it's good for someone coming up to speed in different tech for a somewhat career shift.

But like I said, since I'm doing web development in a managed language now, vice desktop development in lower-level more hard-core languages before, I fear that I'll never be working with what I consider to be my peers anymore.

Somehow, ideally, I need to find a C# shop where the propensity of them came from a C++ background and not just from Visual BASIC. And where they're not afraid of just a sprinkling of design patterns, and actual software engineering concerns like SOLID, DRY, and (gasp) OWASP. I need to think about a way of determining in an interview what kind of shop it is, without giving it away and offending in my question. (Any suggestions?)

Life sucks sometimes.
You know?

So...what's been going on?

The most metal performance with a non-traditional instrument since I discovered there was such a thing as an electric violin. (The second group is much cuter though.)

I used "social engineering" in a sentence a few minutes ago and wanted to look up some kind of official definition. Dang it is getting hard to find the definition that's not just the technical, hacking one.

On a second page of hits I found that Webster's still retains its historical definition:

Management of human beings in accordance with their place and function in society.

(Hey, what could be more moral than that, right?)

I say historical because it no longer describes an alternate state, rather now being concomitant with existence. I.e. it's no longer an "ism", it's an "is". So therefore it's not really notable as its own word anymore.

In general I lament when words, that already have a distinct meaning, get hijacked by the ignorant, and it catches on. Because then we lose the original meaning/no longer have a word to describe the first thing. (Which, of course if you're on the Left, don't mind at all if the politically manipulative meaning of that word pair gets obscured by the technology meaning one.)

"Hacking" is another one. As someone who went through a Computer Science program at a university in the late 80's/early 90's, its original meaning in computers meant to skip desiging and thinking about a program and just diving in to coding it. But I figure some journalist heard the term and grokked that it related to computers somehow but didn't know how, and made the incorrect assumption that it related to breaking in to computers, wrote an article, and the rest is histoire.

And for the latest example, Pest Buy is now running commercials that you should come in and buy Windows tablets there because they've handed some out to their employees first and they've taken them home to learn it, presumably to be better able to tell you how to use Windows 8. But they're referring to this process as "beta testing". Gah!

I've seen my 2nd news piece in days trying to besmirch North Dakota.

I barely remembered we even have such states, until the Right started talking about it, how in this shitty economy there are supposedly jobs there and good paying ones, in oil industries. Hmm, someplace where capitalism hasn't been suppressed and is very successful, tapping our natural resources that are fossil fuels, well no wonder, it could only have been a matter of time.

Like supposedly a large army of muckrakers descended upon Alaska when Sarah Palin became a perceived threat to the ongoing advancement of Progressivism, it wouldn't surprise me if a Leftie swarm has descended on North Dakota to dig up or invent whatever's needed to counter the message of the possibility of free market prosperity and usage of the planet that's been provided to us.

And the fruits of their labors are starting to come out.

On the way to work this morning a co-host of some local radio station made an interesting point I thought. While "Republican In Name Only" traditionally meant a Liberal Republican, and therefore one who didn't really belong in the party, as the GOP nowadays seems to just want to be Democrat Lite, then to be a Republican is to be a moderate Progressive. Making me not a real Republican. Now I'm the RINO.

...I'd start my own news network. I yearn for there being available push-model (i.e. TV and radio) news of a drastically different what and how. So that I can stand it again.

I'll start with FNC. The one good thing about that network is that they cover the suprisingly large number of things that all the other networks will short-shrift or outright black out. Unless you like to have a tremendously skewed or giant blind spot in your perception of what's going on around you... It's sad that the acquisition of the other half of balance is single-source.

FNC's failings:

A) The hear both sides and then decide thing. It was an admirable experiment, but it's predicated on a crucial, yet only implicit assumption, and one that is its fatal flaw; that both sides will tell you the truth about their side, enabling you to make an educated choice. Leftists can and do exhibit occasional moments of candor about Leftism in private, one-on-one conversations, but as the amount of broadcast inherent in the situation goes up, the hesitancy towards doing so escalates almost instantaneously to infinity. (And this makes sense, if you understand that side.)

B) Their Left-wing bias. Not in slant within a piece, not in selection of pieces to run as news, but by voluntarily co-habitating in the box that is the boundaries the Left defines for us on how we think about things. Readily pulled examples include "income disparity" and "the Republican war on women". Both are transparently cheap wedge vehicles that are defined as not a problem or not existing by the Right and an untainted Center. Why would I want to hear more news delivered in the terms of Leftist manufactured thought fences, cornering and corralling my mind.

My news network would be characterized by the following pillars of approach:

1) No quotes. For example, a defense attorney saying "My client is innocent and we are going to defend against this scurrilous lawsuit vigorously." Of course they're going to say that. That's not news. That doesn't make me more informed. Same for Obama saying he wants to get the economy going again, or the Lindsey Graham verbal posturing Right-ward before his re-election time.

Besides, they're too often taken out of context, something the Right is also egregiously guilty of I'm sad to say. If a journalist is bent on twisting things, they can easily do it without the ellipses. I'm already at the mercy of the reporter, so I'd much rather they just tell me in their own words, distilling what happened to the key points.

2) No human interest stories/interviews with the neighbors/et al. Somewhat related to the first. I'm sorry that some kids are dying of cancer, but an expose on how one got to live their Batman dream for a day is not worthy of my time. Neither is "he was a quiet boy and seemed nice enough" about a murderer, or "she loved life and gave it her all every day" about a murderee.

3) The Left's side of the argument given only by Right-wingers. That is, damn knowledgeable, and willing to be fair in the interests of spelling out the whole issue to the listeners, kind of Right-wingers. Which might be hard to find and recruit enough of, in that proper interpretation of the Left seems only an occasional fancy of the moment to most on the Right.

Differing conclusions about the Left-wing side or sides would even be fine, and particularly welcome, but only if backed up by sound reasoning about demonstrable Left-wing traits. No hyperbole, just what can be supported. Food for thought.

A difficulty in this would be in how to deal with newer viewers. Those already much further along in their understanding and seeing would find a lot of boring redundancy in things taken as givens, but that are foundational and new and necessary for any kind of comprehension of the rest of the material, for such as those who inadvertently hit the wrong channel on a Daily Show ad break.

I.e. my fledgling network would face several formidable, known challenges. Summarized as not looking like any other news network that presumably anyone had even known before.

4) A late-breaking one: No sports. What can match it in the ratio of the time spent reporting on it over its immaterialness. Many daily newsish type things, like horoscopes for example, are just as inconsequential, but get nowhere near the coverage. Similarly for entertainment news.

Strictly only things of edifying qualities. I think my network tagline would be "News That Improves". Come ready to parse and analyze, or go somewhere else to any number of sources to pass idle time vegetating.

p.s. I now read at the threshold of 1. Any would-be AC's and trolls: do the math. I think I'll be much happier this way, knowing that I've eliminated at least some of the wasting of my time.

p.p.s. I've been away from this place for about nine months.

I'm a masochist. No, not of the sexual variety. Of the slashdot variety. For some reason, not only do I still continue to read this site, I click on links to stories about cars and phones. The raging stupidity and arrogance is amazing.

And yet I come back.

I took the RHCSA exam this morning, and managed to pass it on the first try.

And the villagers rejoiced.

Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?

If every day goes like this, how do we survive?
We're working late on the night shift to get peace of mind.

Eric Prydz, "Every Day"

I can relate to this one all too well, especially of late...

It has been close to a year since I have bothered to post anything on here. I still read almost daily, and once in a great while I find something on here that entices me to comment though it's rare. Anymore the room is quiet, with the occasional political post or the intermittent technical post.

I am not really sure why I have stayed. I guess part of me is comfortable here and just cannot get motivated to move on, even though there isn't too much holding me here. At one time I had a good number of friends here (a few of whom I actually met in person), but I have slowly and steadily lost connection with almost all of them. I know it's my fault.

So why am I posting now? I am not really sure, to be honest. I think I am just reminiscing about times past, friends that have sailed for bluer waters and a portion of my life that has slipped through my fingers. *shrug*

My car ins. is thru State Farm. They've started asking for my mileage periodically, apparently to move away from a two-tier pricing system (regular (avg 12K/yr) or low-mileage (under 7500 mi I think)) to better-matched tiers. (Thankfully they're not yet quite as "Progressive" as to ask to put a device in my car that spies on my driving.)

I've haven't gotten around to making my password manager program (and I don't want to have to trust someone else's, and I am a programmer afterall so I shouldn't have to), so unimportant things like this get put on stickies, which invariably seem to be eaten by my desk like socks by my dryer.

This is no problem as I can just request that login credentials be e-mailed to the address they have on record, like Slashdot does. EXCEPT when they implement those stupid "security questions".

My take on them is that they're a huge security hole in an otherwise fairly secure (if you choose an obscure username and a strong password) system. They typically necessite answers in common words (if you want to be able to remember your answers, that is), and on topics that are susceptible to public records and social engineering techniques.

So I do what I think is the best I can do to mitigate this weakest link in all-too-common login schemes and fill these fields with random garbage characters.

So on State Farm's web site I find a # for "technical support". So I call asking for a password reset, and the lady asks me the same questions as the auto function for doing this on the web site. I explained why I'm incapable of recalling the answers to the security questions, and was told they couldn't help me without them.

Well what good is their so-called tech support dept then? If they're just monkeys reading scripts, and can only type things into the public web site like I can, then that's not "technical support".

I called technical support for their web site because I was locked out of my account. I'm still locked out of my account, because their technical support couldn't offer any actual technical support!

After that I found a comment/suggestion form, and typed in my contact info and the current problem and gave my background explano, and got:

Technical Error

We are unable to complete your request due to technical difficulty.

Please click on any navigation link at the top or you may return to State Farm homepage.

With an organization this technically inept, I don't even want to risk having an online account with them. Now I want to close it, and just do everything thru my agent (a system that's been working fine for around 20 years now).

p.s. I guess from now on I should alter my behavior slightly and type in and write down strong passwords (and record which question I "chose" (in case a given site ever changes the order of which one appears first/chosen by default in the dropdown)) for these fields.

p.p.s. Another consideration in using these fields as intended is that I don't esp. want to give away to companies (and their partnering companies?) answers to some of these kinda personal questions. If I were devious I would've tried to corner the market on security questions way back and urged web sites to outsource them to me like that Discus or whatever for web comments, and then build dossiers on people and sell to Google and other such bastards who only generally know about us by what we give away in our searches and emails.