Comment Is there a non-free-as-in-beer Free Beer? (Score 1) 118
Any free/open source beers?
Any free/open source beers?
In real life this can only be a factor when women join a male team.
If a white joins an all black team, you can't get away with imposing a culture. Same as when a black joins a white team.
Substitute any other characteristic, religion, teetotaler, smokers, income, political affiliation, what ever.
You can't get away with imposing a culture.
Then you have a limited understanding of "real life." I know for a fact that groups of women, or mixed groups of men and women can also impose such a culture on a newcomer. In fact, this pretty much always happens in some way. The key is that it doesn't happen in a way that's non-consensual for the newcomer.
But if a woman walks into the shop all of a sudden a work environment is "unsafe" if there is one picture of a girl and a car anywhere in the service bays or the lunch room.
I'm staying in San Francisco's "Castro," also known as "The Gayborhood." If you are a hetero male, I bet I could find an environment where playful "ribbing" from the crowd could make you feel at least "a bit weird." In this place, I pass by posters of scantily clad men all the time. I'm sure most heterosexual males wouldn't be enthusiastic about their workplaces being festooned with such decorations.
Well to hell with their "realness" and their "feelings". Their attitude is pathetic.
I could imagine members of that group saying exactly that to the newcomers. Presumably this group adds real value to the business. The fact that they have real cohesion and esprit de corps is also valuable. People are people, not monsters or 2D toons. The real challenge is simply to get everyone to realize this.
Which is why the far easier route of adhering to a accepted standard of maturity and professionalism is the way to go. Don't harass people. Don't have your "fun" at the expense of someone else's ability to their job without unwanted and needless distraction.
This group probably feels that everyone who comes to work with them has somehow bought into their particular cultural standards. The business can either ratify this culture, or convince them to adjust. The former is probably going to limit hiring and open the business up to legal action. The latter can also be disastrous if it's handled badly.
I think the key is consensual behavior.
I'm not against off-color or horrible jokes -- in the context of my close friends and family. Total strangers coming out of the woodwork and imposing things like that upon me isn't acceptable, and feels wrong. Right now I'm staying at a Hacker Hostel in "The Castro" in San Francisco. (It's also called "The Gayborhood.") There are places aplenty here where the gentlemen being discussed could go and experience some "kidding around" of a sexually charged nature, much of which might not be to their personal preferences. I wonder how they would feel being the subject of such non-consensual kidding.
One person's idea of "good clean fun" isn't necessarily the same as another person's.
There's plenty of things that make me uncomfortable but I don't expect them to be enshrined in law. Businesses should be able to decide what is and isn't acceptable for their business. Keep the government out of our lives as much as possible. These are social issues, not legal issues. Hurt feelings do not equal broken bones.
Yes, I was talking about this in the context of the business and what the business can do internally. And yes, hurt feelings aren't like broken bones, but they can be especially critical to the operation of knowledge based businesses.
Social and legal issues are all enmeshed. It's the consequence of living in a world based on evolution and emergent processes. In the end, no one pure principle rules all, and we really just muddle through in some pragmatic fashion.
...It is guaranteed that there will be remarks, double entendres and innuendos with huge potential of getting worse...
So you work with a bunch of unprofessional animals?
You should *already* have a policy that makes such comments and such a work environment unacceptable.
Let them know that this type of childish behavior is not only unacceptable, but will result in being canned.
End of sentence.
This man's coworkers probably just think they're having good clean fun and that they're "keeping it real" in the face of what they feel to be phony soul-tarnishing political correctness. However, it's hard to really walk in another's shoes sometimes. Points of view are intellectually challenging. (Which is why scientists use the mirror test as a marker of sentience.)
One person's idea of "good clean fun" isn't necessarily the same as another person's. It sounds like there's a group there who has been enjoying the camaraderie and other benefits of a tight-knit "workplace culture." of their own. As the workforce at your company gets larger, the likelihood of everyone new liking all aspects of the original group's "culture" are going to diminish. So either you're going to have to impose the same "culture" on all new employees or this group "culture" is going to have to change.
Again, it's a point of view thing, so it's going to be very hard to convey what it truly means to be on the other side of their "ribbing." A good professional trainer might be in order. (But a bad trainer is likely to only make things worse.) Change also needs to be backed up by authority. It's probably only going to work at all smoothly with buy-in from the social leaders of that group.
Start a serious Thorium energy program, and US Rare Earths would be even cheaper to produce. We might even solve the carbon emission problem at the same time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=tyqYP6f66Mw&NR=1
Start a Thorium energy program. This makes lots of heavy rare earth deposits in the US economical to mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=tyqYP6f66Mw&NR=1
None of the above.
Agreed. Historically, organizations vary in their quality and relevance over time. They tend to start out fresh and idealistic, then end up having outlived their usefulness. Anonymous, being an "un-organization" might be able to avoid this fate. I suspect, by the time, if ever, Anonymous has become stale, another such media-stunt group will adopt their methods and pick up such activities under their own banner.
At the same time, Nintendo look increasingly like a successful toy manufacturer, who have feet of clay when it comes to actually making interesting games - and in attracting decent third party developers.
This will only be a success as a way of tying interactive content with TV shows. Unfortunately, established game makers have managed to accomplish a mathematical paradox: they've made tie-in into a 4 letter word.
Still, I see tremendous potential for folks like Zynga doing tie-ins with big media events. How about "Drinking Game"? People publish sets of rules before an event. (Academy Awards?) Then, you get to watch a set of virtual college students get sloshed playing the game. Viewers will vote up or vote down claims that rules were triggered. Drinking with the virtual students is entirely optional, of course.
No wonder Gibson and Stross quip that we're living in the sci-fi future already. This was in Empire Strikes Back
Does it come with missiles?
For police use, a TASER would be a better idea. A quadrotor drone equipped with a TASER would be very useful to police. Once you've identified a perp using gyrostabilized telescopic video cameras invisibly from 1000's of feet in the air, you can wait until the perp is alone, then swoop in and stun the perp while a patrol car is called in with the GPS coordinates to take him in.
Hilarity (read police atrocity) ensues
It's a hybrid. Unfortunately hybrid is very unambiguous as well.
To be precise, the Chevy Volt was originally a Series Hybrid that added a capability to add about 15% of total power output through a direct mechanical connection, because this turned out to be more efficient. So it's a combination between series hybrid and parallel hybrid which makes it a kind of hybrid of hybrids -- a meta-hybrid!
(The Volt could probably run just fine as a series hybrid, with most of its range, power, and efficiency if the direct mechanical linkage were disabled. In contrast, a Prius can run only on electric motors but with a pretty piddling range.)
A series hybrid car with turbine generators would rock! People have proposed additional generator modules for series hybrids which can be added as needed for long trips. Turbine modules could be made small, so that they could recharge your vehicle while parked during the day, though this wouldn't be the most efficient use of the fuel. Conversely, one could add additional turbine modules for specific purposes, like towing cargo or driving on very steep roads. Cars would become configurable!
Just base the machine's emotions on a ruthlessly efficient Sang Froid covering up a tremendous inner pain of loss.
We'd all end up dead, but the world would be run in a ruthlessly efficient fashion, with a techno James Bond theme playing in the background.
My money's on the Maker / DIY crowd! Hopefully, it works better than the Arduino powered Bedazzler.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
