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Comment Re:alogrithms aren't racist (Score 4, Interesting) 352

I followed the link and looked at the photos. I could see how it would make that mistake.
1. The Color balance was off: What we call black people are actually just a richer brown. the color balance gave their color more of a real Black/Gray color, the natural color of a Gorilla.

2. The Angle of the shot. The tilted Angle makes it appeared that they are not upright but slouching in.

3. They were making unnatural facial features for humans. They were making funny faces at the camera.

4. The dark hue of the gentleman who was behind shirt, combined with the ladies hair style, makes it seem the body with much broader shoulder.

I expect the combination of a lot of factors created the wrong choice. But computer decision making, while getting good, isn't perfect, but it is often better then not having it because then it wouldn't be possible to catalog the millions of images. We need to accept that computers make mistakes and there should be a way to fix them when they are found.

Many of our derogatory comments come from the fact that we find similarities with something else, so it come to reason that a computer may make an actual mistake that will reinforce such derogatory meaning.

Comment Re:Makes sense. (Score 4, Insightful) 278

You are implying that ones political stance is an indicator of their intelligence?

There is a huge group of people who's opinion is based on what the party says, I am a loyal Democrat/Republican so my stance will match what they say. There is no attention of the detail of the message nor any attempt to challenge the notion brought up. So the Democrats say Global Warming is a problem, people will blindly follow. If the Democrats say GMO foods are bad, they will blindly follow. Intelligence isn't the issue, it is just the current polarized nature of the two party system which will normally make one side right and the other wrong (assuming one side is right)

Now the Democrats vs Government view on funding. Democrats prefer more of a blanket funding in scientists, So Scientists who are funded via the Democrats policies have invested interests in that party, so they are making a living off of researching climate science due to Democrats funding, so they will be friendly to that party, and in turn that party will listen to their studies. The Republicans will more likely fund Military or Energy science. Where there is less science and more engineering. Thus you will find a lot more Right winged engineers. As their main means of living is due to Republican policy. So the Republicans will more likely push ideas of a new Military Technology or Energy Extraction technology.

It is interesting on how your political views change depending on where you are living and who is controlling your purse strings.
Now they are crazies on both sides. You got the Leftist hippie type who wants to change everything to match their utopian vision where everyone is all happy because they follow one idea of a perfect life. Then you got the Far Right densest who thinks we should go back to the "Leave it to Beaver" life style, that he fondly remembers as a child (too young to realize the pressures of the world). These guys can often get into the House or Representatives thus get enough media attention to direct "The I have to do what the party says" people.

   

Comment Re:Iran is not trying to save money (Score 1) 409

Well, you have to factor in the Iranian cultural mania for disagreeing with each other. The Shah couldn't keep them under his thumb, neither can the mullahs, who have their hands full disagreeing with each other.

From a tyrant's perspective Iran is ungovernable, which doesn't mean elements in the government don't give tyranny a go on a regular basis. It's an ideal setup for producing martyrs. The futility of cracking down means you have a little space to rake some muck before official anger overcomes reason.

Comment Re:Project Management or Business Analyst (Score 3, Interesting) 250

+1

Not to be sexist, but most women prefer jobs that include more interaction with people and less time spent in solo problem solving, so it's not terribly surprising that she does't love coding. This isn't to say there aren't women who really like coding, or even introverted women who find working with people all day to be unpleasant. There are all kinds... but on average my observation is that women prefer more human interaction.

So, assuming that your wife falls into that category, there are lots of roles in and around software development that are more people-focused. Project management requires an additional set of skills, both people skills and management skills, but it's eminently learnable, and having a technical background is very valuable -- as long as it doesn't cause her to second-guess what the developers are telling her (always a risk with PMs, and even more with those whose technical background is shallower than they think it is. There's a tendency to assume that everything they don't know how to do is easy.)

Business Analyst is another good one. It, again, requires some additional skills she probably doesn't have but can learn. Industry knowledge tends to be important, but most companies are okay with analysts learning that context on the job. She also needs to learn how to gather and document requirements. A technical background is useful there because good requirements need quite a bit more precision than most non-technical people are used to. There's also a risk; formerly-technical BAs have a tendency to overspecify. An important skill for this role which isn't so easy to learn is writing. Good BAs are excellent writers, able to concisely and accurately boil complex issues down to simple statements.

Another option that might be excellent if she can swing it is Systems or Application Architect. Companies generally want experienced, senior developers to move into these roles, but smart but less-experienced people can do it as well. Architects take the business requirements and convert them into high-level technical plans/architectures. Architects tend to spend less time interacting with people than PMs or BAs, but still quite a bit since they provide the primary interface between the technical and business teams. Architects need to have good technical skills and good "taste", meaning a good feel for what sorts of structures are easy to build, easy to maintain and flexible, and for how to intelligently trade those issues off. They also need to be good at translating technical issues into language the business people can understand. Honestly I expect that your wife probably doesn't have the depth of experience needed to make a good architect, but I thought I'd throw it out.

Another that might be good if she's a good writer and enjoys writing is technical writing. Good tech writers have greater need for writing skill than they do technical skill, but the latter is very valuable because it enables them to more quickly and accurately understand the information that needs to be documented.

In smaller companies a lot of these roles get mixed and combined with other business roles, so another good option is to look for a position that isn't necessarily directly related to software development, but could benefit from having a deeply IT-literate person.

Finally, the option that I've long thought I'd take if I ever got tired of writing code is the law. It's a lot of additional training, but I think there is a deep and growing need for attorneys who understand technology. This is especially true in the areas of patent and copyright law, but I think it applies in many areas. Of course, the law may not have any attraction whatsoever for your wife.

Whatever, I'd really encourage her to take the time to figure out what she wants to do, and do that, rather than settling for something she doesn't really like. We so much of our lives working that it's really a waste to spend it doing something we don't like.

Comment College != Jobs (Score 3) 133

The problem in the US is the impression You go to School then you go to College with the college degree you can get a good job.
The marketing for the the For Profit takes advantage of this, and tries to make a Job focuses curriculum. But because employers are expecting a college degree, there is a bunch of other classes and stuff that is needed to take, which overall doesn't help out that much.
The traditional colleges, may have their marketing team say this will get you a good job, once you get into the school it is the impression "College is for learning, not job training"

The real solution is to give a better status of vocational training. So someone who wants a job in a particular field can get job training for that field. It isn't necessary for a Computer Science Degree to be a programmer. Also a Computer Science Degree shouldn't need to focus so much on programming, but more on the abstract concepts, that we normally wont get to until grad school.

College should be for learning. We should have a better quality and more positive few towards vocational schools for the Job training.

Comment Re:The founding documents present a path... (Score 1) 161

The electorate fully agrees with him.

This is completely untrue. The electorate is pretty divided, and whether you can find a majority depends which poll you look at, and which week. The fact is that there is a significant part of the electorate that thinks bulk surveillance is fine because they have nothing to hide and it keeps us safe. That they're wrong on both counts doesn't change their opinion, or their votes

Congress mostly agrees with him.

And yet they passed the USA Freedom Act which, although better than the PATRIOT Act, still authorizes way too much surveillance. And in the process they failed to do anything to curtail article 702 of the FISA, which is the basis for the FISA court's ruling -- as was completely predictable before passage of USA Freedom. The argument is that while article 702 authorizes only surveillance of foreign people, the court considers it perfectly reasonable for the NSA to hoover up ALL the data and then figure out later what they can and cannot look at. This all comes back to the NSA's choice to define "collect" as "look at", since the law hadn't defined the term.

Congress had a perfect opportunity to define "collect" as "collect", and chose not to.

Yeah, we have a problem here. And the "democratically elected government" ain't it.

The problem is fundamentally the electorate, which isn't sufficiently convinced that bulk data collection is a bad thing. If 80% of the voters wanted it shut down, enough to make it a major election issue, it would be shut down. But as is Congress knows that with a slim majority (at best) concerned about data collection, if they shut it down and then Something Bad happened the voters would turn on them like a rabid dog.

The system isn't perfect, but it is basically working as intended. We just need to convince more of our fellow Americans that surveillance is bad.

Comment Re:adjective choice (Score 1) 133

That is a general argument against most not-for-profit organizations. Because they NFP do seem to spend a lot of time and resources towards collecting money, and investing their "Excess Revenue" into sources where they can bring in more revenue.

For Not for profits do have to deal with being under a fine tooth comb and do not enjoy the same freedoms a for-profit will.

Comment Re:Apples and oranges (Score 2) 107

... it's just a little more than 1% the size of OpenSSL...Notably, s2n does not provide all the additional cryptographic functions that OpenSSL provides in libcrypto, it only provides the SSL/TLS functions....

So then, aren't size comparisons between OpenSSL and s2n at best useless, and at worst intentionally misleading?

No, but this particular comparison is. Besides all of the stuff s2n doesn't provide, s2n actually uses OpenSSL's libcrypto to provide the implementations of all of its crypto algorithm. A useful comparison could be made between OpenSSL's TLS layer and s2n, with some caveats listing the TLS features s2n doesn't provide.

Note that none of this means that s2n doesn't have value. If you don't need the other OpenSSL features, it's a lot less code to audit.

Comment Re: Assumptions are the mother of all ... (Score 1) 172

OK.
So you may had good reasons to stick with Windows 7. My place at work is using Windows 7, the UI change to windows 8 would cause way too much issues. Also we just migrated a few years to windows 7. And there was a huge compatibility issues that needed to be address... I do expect it is much easier to go from Windows 7 to Windows 10, as this time we didn't jump from a 32bit OS to a 64 bit.

Comment Re:Assumptions are the mother of all ... (Score 1) 172

I expect it is more from the Small business white box community. Yes they still exist. So they save money by getting Windows 7 Licenses and upgrading to Windows 10 by the time they sell their PC's.
I expect technically this would be against some agreement with Microsoft. But these guys are such small fries. The the cost of investing and fighting for it is more then then small pocket change these companies have for profit. If it were a Dell, HP or Lenovo doing this, that would be a different story all together.

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