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Comment Re:I hope he pounds the shit out of google (Score 1, Insightful) 711

by sciengin (#54985495) Attached to: Fired Google Engineer Says Company Execs Shamed and Smeared Him

Non sequitur.

He makes many propositions on how to improve the well being of both men and women at google, chiefly he advocates for the reduction of stress or the intruduction of pair programming. If anything his memo came of as a bit too progressive and too forcedly PC. He sounded as if he was walking on eggshells, making sure not to intrude into anyones safespace.

If he had said "we have reached a plateau and I think this is the reason why things are not continuing to improve for women at Google" it would have been fine

Would his memo have been better received if he had claimed that we should just go one as if nothing was wrong?

Instead he ignores that things are getting better

ok, go on...

and that things used to be even better when the proportion of women in CS was much higher

How the hell does that even make remotely sense?
Things are getting better but they were even better once? would things not have to be worse to become better first? Is the percentage of women in tech unacceptably low or is it not?
Not to mention that the proportion of women vs. men is misleading: Today more women than ever before are working in tech, its just that the total number of men has increased faster than the total number of women.

He ignores that in some cultures women and girls don't fit these averages that he maintains are likely biological.

From historical data, particularly from east-bloc states from before and after the fall of the iron curtain, we know that the percentage of women in tech tends to decrease once they have more choices. The decrease was measurable in Russia, but it was truly massive in the GDR, the soviet part of Germany.
Now of course we could go back to having people pressured into assigned jobs or risk arrest by the states secret police, but that seems somewhat... non-optimal.
The presence of large percentage of women in tech often correlates with pressure, weather direct or merely economical. Remove the pressure and the percentage drops.

but I think at best you could say that show shows some naivety, with his apparent unfamiliarity with decades of research and how these arguments were considered and rejected multiple times in the relatively recent past.

Is that why he quotes so many academic papers and findings?
Or did you actually only read the censored version that was spread in the mainstream media where they "accidentally" removed all the academic stuff he had so carefully researched?

Comment Stop spamming (Score 1) 1

by sciengin (#54984369) Attached to: Reactions to My Own "Google Manifesto"

This is the second submission to this exact subject ("my own manifesto") already. Stop spamming!
It was biased, trite and dishonest garbage the first time and it has not improved.

First: actually read the google manifesto before you react to it, your post shows that you did not even do this.
And no, reading the modified version without all the impotant academic sources that is spread by the slanderous mainstream media does not count.

Submission + - Scientists create DNA-based exploit of a computer system. (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Archeron
Archeron writes: It seems that scientists at UW-Seattle have managed to encode malware into genomic data allowing them to gain full access to a computer being used to analyze the data. While this may be a highly contrived attack scenario, it does ask the question whether we pay sufficient attention to data-driven exploits, especially where the data is instrument-derived. What other systems could be vulnerable to a tampered raw data source? Perhaps audio and RF analysis systems?

Comment Re:Do you want people to ignor Global warming? (Score 1) 292

by sciengin (#54983449) Attached to: Global Investment Firm Warns 7.8 Degrees of Global Warming Is Possible

Unless you can argue precisely and based on the collected data why such an event should only, and apparently suddenly, occur after more than 4C warming, I will stick to the assumptions and predictions of established climate science until new evidence becomes available.

Comment Do you want people to ignor Global warming? (Score 1) 292

by sciengin (#54982859) Attached to: Global Investment Firm Warns 7.8 Degrees of Global Warming Is Possible

Because thats how you get people to ignore global warming.

Meanwhile we had a 1.5C increase in the last 250 years: http://berkeleyearth.org/data/ (I like those guys because of Richard Muller who is not afraid to change sides if the data contradicts his theory)

This here only talks about the recent findings:
http://berkeleyearth.org/berke... (2014-2015ish)

They estimate that there could be another 1.5C increase within the next 50 years, so 7.8 is completely ridiculous as that would mean almost double that.

source on the 1.5C/50years: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-...

Alarmist news like those may be well intentioned in trying to wake people up to the real dangers of CC, but in the end they will just dull the senses of the public to the doom and gloom of it all. Worst, people tend to realize that occasionally they are being lied to or fed exaggerations and may even come to reject CC completely because of that.

Submission + - SPAM: China working on 'repression network' with unprecedented accuracy

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Researchers at a Chinese university have revealed the results of an investigation aimed at creating a "repression network" which can identify cars from "customized paintings, decorations or even scratches" rather than by scanning its number plate.

Essentially, it works by learning from what it sees, allowing it to differentiate between cars (or humans) by spotting small differences between them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Password Power Rankings: A Look At The Practices Of 40+ Popular Websites (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Nothing should be more important for these sites and apps than the security of the users who keep them in business. Unfortunately, Dashlane found that that 46% of consumer sites, including Dropbox, Netflix, and Pandora, and 36% of enterprise sites, including DocuSign and Amazon Web Services, failed to implement the most basic password security requirements. Most troubling? Researchers created passwords using nothing but the lowercase letter “a” on Amazon, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Venmo, and Dropbox, among others.

Comment Re:Leaked Political hit job masquerading as "scien (Score 1) 452

Thats odd, why does this timeline start only at 20000 bc when earth and therefore weather is billions of years old (well, granted weather might be a bit younger).
We know of multiple ice ages and of multiple "hot periods", some of which were indeed hotter than today, fruit trees were found near the arctic circle for example. Those would not have grown there if it had not been much, much warmer than today.

Yes, the warming in our time is almost surely man-made, nonetheless this graphic reeks of intellectual dishonesty.

Submission + - Almost 300 people join class-action lawsuit for age discrimination at Google (bizjournals.com) 1

Submitted by BrookHarty
BrookHarty writes: 269 people have joined a class-action lawsuit against Google claiming they were discriminated against in the workplace based on their age. The lawsuit originated in 2015 with plaintiff Robert Heath and was certified as a class-action in 2016. Google has stated it has implemented policies to stop age discrimination but still has an average employee age of 29.

In 2004 Larry Page fired Brian Reid 9 days before IPO costing Ried 45 million in unvested stock options. Reid was fired for lack of "cultural fit". Ried has settled for an undisclosed amount.

Submission + - New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017 (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas.

Submission + - SPAM: Monsanto Was Its Own Ghostwriter for Some Safety Reviews

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Dozens of internal Monsanto emails, released on Aug. 1 by plaintiffs lawyers who are suing the company, reveal how Monsanto worked with an outside consulting firm to induce the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology to publish a purported independent review of Roundups health effects that appears to be anything but. The review, published along with four subpapers in a September 2016 special supplement, was aimed at rebutting the 2015 assessment by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. That finding by the cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization led California last month to list glyphosate as a known human carcinogen. It has also spurred more than 1,000 lawsuits in state and federal courts by plaintiffs who claim they contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma from Roundup exposure.

Monsanto disclosed that it paid Intertek Group Plc s consulting unit to develop the review supplement, entitled An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate. But that was the extent of Monsantos involvement, the main article said. The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company, according to the reviews Declaration of Interest statement. Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panels manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Developers Explain Why iOS Apps Are Getting Bulkier (ndtv.com)

Submitted by joshtops
joshtops writes: From a report: Apps are getting bigger in size, in part because developers add new features, something their users obviously appreciate, developers say. "Apps are getting bigger because iOS devices are more powerful, and developers are building more and more complex things for them without considering the impact the size will have around the world," developer Stephen Troughton-Smith tells Gadgets 360. But in part, it is also happening because developers are being careless, and adding more than one instance of files, Troughton-Smith added. "So Facebook, Twitter, and other large companies have perhaps tens or hundreds of people building their iOS apps. A lot of the components for these apps are developed independently as components, or frameworks. For each additional component you glue together into an app, there is some overhead," he explained. "Some of the teams will duplicate functionality some other team wrote. Images and other resources end up being duplicated." The high-resolution image assets that developers are required to add also contributes to the size of an app, two India-based developers, and Peter Steinberger, founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a dev kit that is used by several popular PDF apps, told Gadgets 360. Apple can itself take some blame, too. Developers using Apple's Swift language, which the company introduced in 2014, are required to add several components to their apps that make them heavier. "Apple's new Swift language, for example, requires a bunch of components to be embedded each time it's used, because it's not yet 'ABI stable,'" Troughton-Smith explained. This means developers need to embed the versions of libraries they've developed against, and not count on the one available on the system. Another developer who didn't want to be identified said a typical app built with Swift language requires as many as 30 Swift runtime libraries to be stuffed within the app. On top of this, he added, "you will be surprised at just how many apps use common code found at places like GitHub. Developers often don't care about removing the bits that wasn't relevant to their app," he added. In a blog post published in June, marketing and research firm Sensor Tower wrote, "The total space required by the top 10 most installed US iPhone apps has grown from 164 MB in May 2013 to about 1.9 GB last month, a 12x or approximately 1,100 percent increase in just four years." The phones' storage capacity has not changed at anything close to the same rate, with the base iPhone version only recently going up from 16GB to 32GB of storage." [...] San Francisco-based developer Ben Sandofsky, who was part of the team that made Twitter's iOS app and has served as a consultant on HBO's Silicon Valley show, resonated our concerns and said often "employees at these [Western] companies live in an 'early adopter bubble.' They have LTE connections, fast Wi-Fi at home, and phones with 64 gigs of storage. This creates a huge blind spot around your average user." Sandofsky, who recently developed popular third-party Halidi camera app for iPhone, added, "another issue is advances that have made the lives of engineers and managers easier, without understanding the burden on users. It's gotten easier than ever to reuse code between iPhone apps. With a few keystrokes, an engineer can add thousands of lines of code to an app. In theory that's good, because engineers shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately things have gotten crazy in the last few years, with engineers pulling gigantic libraries that add megabytes to their app's size, when they could build something much smaller to solve the task at hand in under an hour."

Submission + - SPAM: These 42 Disney apps are allegedly spying on your kids

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Walt Disney Co. secretly collects personal information on some of their youngest customers and shares that data illegally with advertisers without parental consent, according to a federal lawsuit filed late last week in California.

The class-action suit targets Disney and three other software companies — Upsight, Unity and Kochava — alleging that the mobile apps they built together violate the law by gathering insights about app users across the Internet, including those under the age of 13, in ways that facilitate “commercial exploitation.”

The plaintiffs argue that Disney and its partners violated COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law designed to protect the privacy of children on the Web. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California, seeks an injunction barring the companies from collecting and disclosing the data without parental consent, as well as punitive damages and legal fees.

The lawsuit alleges that Disney allowed the software companies to embed trackers in apps such as “Disney Princess Palace Pets” and “Where’s My Water? 2.” Once installed, tracking software can then “exfiltrate that information off the smart device for advertising and other commercial purposes,” according to the suit.

Disney should not be using those software development companies, said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “These are heavy-duty technologies, industrial-strength data and analytic companies whose role is to track and monetize individuals,” Chester said. “These should not be in little children’s apps.”
Link to Original Source

Comment Could we please stop parroting the MSM first (Score 0) 1021

by sciengin (#54973651) Attached to: Google May Be In Trouble For Firing James Damore

He is not anti-diversity, even though the mainstream media like to repeat this as if it had any basis in reality, in fact he comes up with many interesting ways to increase diversity. Its the current methods that do not work at google for increasing diversity that he is criticizing.

Also linking the original, unmodified memo might be a good idea too:

https://diversitymemo.com/
https://assets.documentcloud.o...
And for those that use Zeronet:
http://127.0.0.1:43110/1MUeJj6...

This is what drives people away from mainstream media and leads them to label them wholesale as fake news.

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