Posts by Citizen of Nowhere 78 posts • joined 20 Mar 2019
Difficult (for me at least) to fathom how someone who specifically points out the potentially lethal results of data of/about Afghanis collected under the previous regime falling into the hands of the Taliban and still comes the conclusion "Not Yet" rather than "Not Ever" in answer to the question being polled.
>Anyone working with datasets knows that anonymised data can easily be de-anonymised. The higher the level of detail in a dataset, the easier it is to find unique points that can trace back to individuals.
This. And the fact that datasets can be combined and once they are, what appeared "securely" anonymous in only one of them may not remain so after the data is combined.
> if the data is anonymised, using it causes no harm whatsoever to anybody, regardless of consent.
Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee that anonymised data cannot be de-anonymised. In fact, there was an article on El Reg a short while ago showing that in many cases doing so was a trivial exercise.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/anonymising_data_feature/
>I have seen plenty of deep fried pizza, however, and even tried it once. It was truly disgusting.
No doubt true if you take some shop-bought crap and ram it into a fish fryer. Done right, the Italian way (or more correctly the Pugliese way), fried pizza is delicious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerotti
No, I'm saying that contrary to your statement otherwise, it is not a government agency. I'm not a lawyer, let alone a US constitutional lawyer, so I doubt my opinion on whether that amendment applies is of much worth. I'm fairly confident that working with government agencies doesn't make a private corporation a government agency, on the other hand.
Back when I did tech support, a lot of the bugs we came across were related to text encodings and how they were (mis)handled going between different applications and systems. Once got a box of beer sent to me from Norway after I managed to identify a bug with the handling of the thorn character used in Norwegian and get it squashed. I guess I don't have the right mindset (cybersecurity researcher/cybercriminal) because I would never have figured out how to systematically exploit them.
Where I live the authorities do not cut back growth on many of the public grassed areas, nor do quite a lot of owners, right here in the city. Nobody seems to mind. It allows insects on which we depend rather badly to thrive. It is cut at the end of the season ("late cutting"). Makes more sense to me than all those lawns cut with stripes and bushes pruned into ridiculous geometric shapes. Of course, as in most things, opinions and local ordinances vary.
>I think it's a sad reflection on society that we have to call everything outside the managed and risk-averse city as "wild something"
Perhaps it is because far more than the city is managed and risk-averse, coralled and commercialised. Places we visited and activities we enjoyed spontaneously must now make money for someone. The fences and gates have been put up, the ticket sheds built and the "fun" organised.
The article states that once completing the program and going on to work on the same footing as other Google employees, their salaries and bonuses start and stay lower than that of their directly-hired colleagues. Of course, there could be many individual factors involved in that. But it would certainly look a little strange if it were the case in every single case, as it were.
>It's funny you say that, because there's an important part missing from the article
Yes, the background and a great deal of context is missing. I am not sure how, journalistically, one would justify reducing important aspects of the situation to a single unilluminating sentence: "The policy changes provoked fury both internally and externally."
Without knowing who thus reacted, why they felt such a reaction was justified and what the actual content of said reactions were, the article is at best incomplete, and might at worst be highly misleading.
>I find it quite remarkable that you've somehow managed to draw a link between a suggestion that workers should expect better protection from harrassment by colleagues without being contractually silenced, and a decent into Sharia Law.<
To be fair, the hyperbolic ranting about wokeness, anarchy and kangaroo courts was something of a give away as to the general direction things were heading ;-)
Fairly sure it is British nationalism which gets the free pass.
In the 2014 referendum, the population of Scotland was enfranchised to decide on their future. Not Scots. Anyone, regardless of whether they were Scottish, English, Polish or anything else, as long as they were stably resident in the country and should therefore have a say in its future. If the Scottish independence movement is xenophobic, they sure have a strange way of showing it.
In the Brexit referendum on the other hand millions of people resident denied a vote on the future of the country where they were stably resident and a lot of people who had not even lived in the country for up to 15 years and little stake in its future enfranchised.
Still, the kind of trite misrepresentation and hectoring condescension you exhibit continues to fuel support for independence, so feel free to continue.
>He hasn't harassed any women though to my knowledge
His harassment of women has been an open secret for decades. Brushed under the carpet, certainly; lots of blind eyes turned, for sure; but evident and remarked on time and time again, definitely. He can say whatever he wants as far as I am concerned. His attempts to justify the idea of consensual sexual relations between children and adults were hardly original and really quite vile, but he has the right to say them I guess. It's his behaviour which is, and long has been, a problem and why he should not be on the board of anything.
Nobody is asking for the software he created to be destroyed. Nobody is asking that his ideas and contributions to free software be somehow expunged. Some people are saying that perhaps he should not be on the board of a free software foundation given his well-known previous behaviours towards women.
Well, let's just say that continually asking women out even after they have communicated their lack of interest seems like fairly shitty behaviour, at best, to me. Nor did he limit such behaviour to social settings. Nor even stop when asked by the organisers of events he was attending, Not the kind of person I would want to work alongside. If that's the FSF board's idea of a role model, good luck to them. They'll probably need it.
So it would definitely matter who was right at the top in the US, then. We have quite recent evidence that citizens of the US will vote in large numbers for individuals who cannot really be described as cautious, evidence-driven and well balanced. Might matter after all ;-)
>Since we consider the human race which inhabits the Earth to be a valid example of intelligent life
Well, relatively evolved life anyway. We remain violent and irrational primates who live in tribes which regularly try to wipe out other "competing" tribes, That and trashing our planet's environment. Perhaps we should stick to "potentially intelligent life" as the verdict is not in yet. Joke alert as I am kind of, half joking ;-)
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