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Comment Re:Obsession of process over that of goals (Score 1) 310

One of the underlying problems is the network effect, where an environment populated mostly by a particular demographic is seen as normal and comfortable, where everybody can expect everybody else to look and speak and behave like them. So candidates to join that environment will be evaluated in part based on how they conform to the expected stereotype for that environment. Those who do not conform will be, if not rejected outright, at least subject to greater scrutiny to ensure that their qualifications more than make up for their peculiarity. None of this is necessarily intentional or even visible to those already in the environment. So the overwhelming majority demographic will naturally tend to persist and become even more exaggerated over time, and others will find it very difficult to enter that environment or to thrive in it.

This problem can be solved, in theory, by forcing diversity and breaking that presumption of a stereotypical demographic for the environment. By aggressively promoting exaggerated diversity we can make traditionally invisible or suppressed demographics, whoever they may be (people of color, women, homosexuals, Muslims, etc), more normalized in the environment, whatever it may be (the workplace, college, entertainment media, etc). The idea is that over time this forced diversity will be seen as normal and people will no longer be judged based on their conformance to a demographic stereotype, and everyone will have equal opportunity.

Initially the environment will suffer, as there is a limited pool of people outside the majority demographic who have done the years of preparation to qualify themselves for an environment in which they are unlikely to succeed, or who are underqualified and willing to submit themselves as subjects in the forced-diversity experiment, lowering the quality of the environment and suffering resentment from those more qualified. Proponents of forced diversity consider these costs to be affordable and a good investment toward a future where the candidate pool comprises more than a single demographic, and highly qualified candidates who would have been ignored or suppressed are allowed to participate and succeed.

Comment Re:Why do you think it's dead? (Score 1) 168

Recovering "unrecoverable" data from a degraded hard drive is waaaaaay easier than brute-forcing a bitcoin key.

In the process of reading data the drive firmware is making notes of which sectors are "weak" and to give them a fresh write during an idle moment.

[citation needed]

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