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Comment Re:Implicit Association (Score 2) 446

Thanks for this info, it would be nicer if the article was clearer on what it meant by bias. It's not what they think about obesity, it's what they associate with it, and that's an important difference.

I like to think of myself as a fair person, but I'd probably have at least a mild bias as well. I've had a lot of friends and family who have had and struggle with obesity in different ways, and had associated health problems (my father died of a heart attacked and spent his life dealing with health complications mostly stemming from obesity and smoking). Then I watch people who work at my hospital, but are grossly overweight, go to the cafeteria and get three donuts for breakfast. Also, while not universal by any means, there are frequently apparent physical differences between those who stuggle with weight, are trying to manage it, or have health problems which contribute to weigh gain, and those who simply don't care what it does to them and choose to be that way despite what it does to themselves, their family, and worst of all their children when they pass those habits on.

So yes, sometimes when I look at very obese individuals I can't help but feel little respect for them. Travelling to other countries where people are more active and obesity is less of a problem just reinforces that feeling when you come back to the US and see "Walmart specials" all around you. Similar thoughts go through my mind about smokers, especially heavy smokers - not only did both my parents have health problems from smoking, but two of my grandparents died of lung cancer. At least my parents taught me not to make the same mistakes, but it makes it really hard not to have some preconception about what others are doing to their own bodies.

Comment thinking enterprise has its benefits (Score 1) 555

Understanding this isn't mozilla's unilateral view at the moment, this is a common problem with the mozilla projects and others. I spent a couple years jury-rigging mozilla and firefox installs for a university setting, and the only reason we couldn't use it sometimes is because the devs refused to fix known bugs that caused problems with windows' roaming profiles.

The thing is, when you take the time to think about how your product will perform in the enterprise, you tend to use better overall practices in your design - clean modularization, consistent registration and setting storage, better documentation for admins, more robust choices for library usage, better securities design so the software can run properly in heavily restricted user environments.... It's a matter of paying attention to how your software interacts with the whole computing environment, and in the end what you get can be a better and more manageable product that will survive the long haul - even outside the enterprise.

It doesn't have to be everyone on the team, but it's worth having people that seriously think this way, and work together with them.

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