on the issue of racism, no

i do not know many things about many topics. all of us are ignorant of many things

but i know enough about racism to understand that racists are not intelligent people. i am absolutely certain of that

oh i am certain you can find some mathematician who can do complex topological analysis in his head who is a fervent racist. there's also mathematicians who can't balance their checkbooks or know how to talk to girls. much like autism, extreme intelligence in a small domain does not often extend to basic social intelligence. on a site like slashdot, i am certain there are minds brilliant in small esoteric areas that are social morons, aspergers syndrome types

but anyone of average social development and of ordinary iq can easily spot the logical fallacies with racist "thinking"

and so you must be socially retarded to be a racist. i am certain of that to an absolute degree

there are certain beliefs, like creationism, antivaccine, racism, that to believe in those things *requires* you to be mentally deficient and socially stunted

if you are racist, you are a low intelligence individual. truth

Someone used a hammer to drive a screw. We should consider using more useful tools for the problem at hand.

Meetings can be made efficient. My meetings usually are. I invite people for their topic to the correct minute. Yes, minute. Give or take 5, but it's patently USELESS to have someone sit in a meeting for an hour if all the matters to him is about 10 minutes thereof. I don't need the design crew to discuss security matters, even though I do need them in the meeting in general. The meeting has an agenda and it has a time slice for every topic to be discussed. If you think you need more time, tell me in advance, but during the meeting, you will have your time slice and what you cannot get done in that slice will either have to wait 'til the next meeting or you will have to discuss it outside.

It took a few meetings for people to get a hang of it and it was a VERY fierce uphill battle (and I'm glad I had a lot of support from higher up or it would never have had a chance to fly), but now we get more done in a single 45 minute meeting than we used to do in a 4+ hour meeting. Yes, that also means that people have to come prepared and that they have to be PRECISELY on time. But their benefit is that instead of sitting around for hours and staring holes into the wall 'cause things are being discussed that are of no interest to them they come to the meeting, can talk about their topics with everyone they need and be gone again within less than 15 minutes.

Plus I now need much smaller meeting rooms since few people are going to be around during the whole meeting.

What? No graphics? No vanishing effect? How 90s!

In the average ITSM it should be good enough for a B rating, and that's usually good enough, most other departments struggle to get to a B anyway, so we needn't overdo it. Hammer away!

But then we'd notice that about 90% of the managers are useless. And please consider that most of them can't do anything else than create Power Point slides, you can't even retrain them, they ARE already at the bottom of the usefulness ladder. What would they do, especially in this economy?

Won't someone PLEASE think of the useless?

I have a tool that's way better than PP at creating interesting, topical and informative slides. It's called "sharpie". It does need some skill to use it, though.

That must be the pinnacle of the art form of how to waste time while looking productive. You get to waste time hearing how to waste time. But how to waste time more efficiently!

As long as I may take my laptop to the presentation so I can get some work done while the markedroid, manager or other useless waste of oxygen is causing some pleasant background noise, I don't mind meetings that much. It's just like working in the office just with a different kind of background noise.

Consultant: Ok, engineers, what makes you unproductive?
Engineers (unisono): MEETINGS!
Consultant: Great, we have a start. Let's all sit down together and discuss the matter!

Their zeal to push their bullshit in a vain attempt to still appear relevant. Kinda like dinosaurs in a tar pit... how fitting.

Maybe someone should tell them that nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious? I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. Hell, even our ultra-conservatives would not even touch that shit with a 10 foot pole, knowing that they'd be looked at like they just claimed the tooth fairy existed.

Still, even a partial solution (e.g. one that matches the train's GPS location, if known, against a table of specified maximum-safe-under-any-circumstances speed limits for that location) would prevent a train wreck in certain cases (such as the recent one that prompted this article). I'm all for full PTC, but I don't think the perfect needs to be made the enemy of the good here.

They suffer from a condition called "being human". It causes occasional failures in an otherwise operational controller-human, some very small percentage of the time. Even the highest-quality controller-humans have a non-zero failure rate.

That is actually a pretty good idea, and it's more or less what PTC is intended to do, at least as far as the "avoid accidents" part of the job is concerned. Automating things further than that is also possible, although probably not really necessary.

Mandriva still sounds like a gay porno.

we're dealing with racists here

to believe in racism is to be a stupid person because to believe in it requires falling for a logical fallacy

if you don't understand that you are indeed a stupid person. objectively true. to hold a belief that requires low iq is to be a stupid person. objectively determined truth of low intelligence

i don't really give a shit what you think of me. because i am 100% correct here. racists are stupid people. you have to be a genuinely dumb, low iq, moron to believe the borken "if... then..." bullshit reasoning behind racist beliefs