If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure there’s really settled legal opinion on this yet. Iirc it can’t be patented.
You might enjoy Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction by Fred Ahl (https://a.co/d/ditCwg5). It explores this idea, concluding that Oedipus’ investigation is flawed, but the audience is primed to believe it because they know the myth.
I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?)
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.
It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.
We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."
Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.
Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.
I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith -
Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?
Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes?
How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies?
Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic faucet, a skin-toned band aid, face login (or whatever apple calls it). There are obvious benefits to hiring or doing studies within your target market.
Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like.
"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"
I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.
I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].
Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.
> The most important products don't care about what you look like
The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.
DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.
"should have just talked to the damn floor workers. "
You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??
I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0].
There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.
I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.
Lets make a deal: I'll read your diversity books if you realize that meritocracies will never go away. You might be able to suppress them, but the smart people (and they're not just white people) will reorganize behind your back and be better than whatever you are doing. See INTC vs. TSMC for probably the best example since you're into references.
Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?
Hmm, I would hope that you want to read books that challenge your way of thinking to strengthen your beliefs and help you examine them through a lens you haven't considered before.
I wish I could agree in good conscience that we are currently in a perfectly meritocratic system, but alas (sorry to drop another reference on you, I guess I just enjoy having evidence to point to for justifying my beliefs), there's many cases where minorities are being unfairly passed up on [0].
Regarding pulse oximeters... maybe, maybe not. Seems like it would be an interesting field of study, the research of the different levels of light absorption between skin with different melanin pigments, and whether tanning or genetics plays a bigger role. If only there was more funding for something like that, huh? :)
> if you realize that meritocracies will never go away
I understand the DEI stuff as partially trying to get more diverse input, but also as a way to help make up for disadvantages that minorities have had historically. Of course a white person from a wealthy background has more chances to get in the "merit" club.
Are you seriously suggesting that really tanned white people have a similar skin tone to Black people?
r.e. tsmc VS Intel, is tsmc much more meritocratic than Intel? I haven't really heard this anywhere. I've heard they're an extremely hierarchical org and work insane hours for comparatively low pay.
Dont deflect, the example is meant to show that your criteria for diversity, why and how, is dumb. Please give a better example or answer my original questions. I never said a diverse workforce is bad, I simply asked for concise examples on why its good.
You can make whatever excuses that you want, but Asian companies are not diverse at all and they are doing pretty well and show no signs of slowing down. Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?
I gave 2 examples - automatic faucet and women sized crash test dummies, your response was seriously that they could use very tanned white people. As if that is not "deflection".
> Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?
"A company from a homogenous country is homogenous. They are the best at XYZ, therefore DEI must be bad because how else could they become number 1 without diversity"
This is a bad argument because there's a million other things that other companies, diverse or not, are best at. It doesn't really tell us much.
I'm sad your profile says you joined to talk fpga, since I used to do that and you don't seem nice to work with.
Diversity does make a diff but it depends on the problem. Its sort of the Explore-Exploit trade off.
For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.
Bandaids are a bit of an ironic example. They were probably made the skin color of their majority customers, and not that of their inventors, but someone might have been in a position to ask whether there should be more than one color.
You said you were astonished. Parent poster is just explaining how some people view the world in an attempt to make it a bit less astonishing to you. Why not read it through that lens instead of calling it a binary strawman?
> We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity.
The word ‘merit’ is doing a lot of work here. What traits/aspects of a person would you use to calculate into their merit? I’ll argue that between two people who’ve crossed a finish line at the same time, the one who started furthest from that line is more meritorious. From a hiring/placement perspective however, especially during the first screening, there isn’t a good way to determine a candidate’s starting line.
The dichotomy is a bit wrong as well, but I’ll get into that once we get past the first hurdle (for the curious, it is about a selection bias after an initial screen).
The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.
That only shows your flawed understanding of the issue. Nobody is saying that everything was meritocratic throughout history and that's why the most successful people in the west were white. However, there was a move towards meritocracy that did help many people in disadvantaged groups and throwing that away is foolish and short sighted. Meritocracy was a hard fought win by people who were not white and or male, throwing that away now will not lead anywhere good. It wasn't in societies best interest before meritocracy, why would it be now?
If you want to understand the opposition, you should start by reading and listening to the arguments put forth instead of assuming racism. The fact that you seem to default to that conclusion is showing that your not listening to opposing opinions, and instead utilizing your inherent bias to make a judgement call. Which then reinforces your idea that the other side has no argument, is racist, and therefor should be ignored.
We've been digging this hole for awhile that it seems like we've hit china. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but things are coming to a head (vis-a-vis recent supreme court rulings) and we're not togetherizing we're dividezizing.
I don't think it's hard at all to understand the opposition. Just reread what you wrote what the straightforward good is. I mean to say, be wary of the paving stones you're laying on your path.
> intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin
I can't recommend the article either, it's just a casually-interesting premise to which the author then attaches a trailer of the usual half-wit cries of oppression by some invisible conspiracy threatening the author's narrow comfort zone.
But in doing so, the article does illustrate the characteristics of the loud and untethered lunacy of the libertarian, petroleum-inhaling populist factions that are occupying so much space in social discourse today.
the UK is unitary state, not a federation or confederation
the previous sovereign states that were dissolved to form it are called "countries" for historical reasons
the referendum was 1 person 1 vote
populations:
- Scotland and NI (voted Remain): 7.5 million
- England and Wales (vote Leave): 60 million
allowing 7.5 million to override 60 million, simply because they physically live in an area that was formerly a different state several hundred years ago would be disenfranchisement on a vast scale
> allowing 7.5 million to override 60 million, simply because they physically live in an area that was formerly a different state several hundred years ago would be disenfranchisement on a vast scale
Like how in the Electoral College here in the US, one vote in Wyoming can have almost two orders of magnitude more impact than a vote in California when it comes to electing senators, as each state gets two regardless of population [0]. Similarly, when one looks at the extent of gerrymandering, it’s clear that the winners, and especially one party in particular, love to redraw the lines to cherry-pick the voters that will elect them while excluding others that might challenge them [1]. For presidential elections, the difference between a Wyoming voter’s say and the average say of a voter from any other state is around 3.18:1. Worst-case is of course California, where it’s about 3.6:1 when compared to Wyoming, or said another way, a vote here is worth 27.7% of a Wyoming vote. [2][3]
My favorite thing about Hibernate is that it’s sophisticated enough that it has its own query language, which is very, very similar but not identical to SQL. Makes me want to take a drink just thinking about it.
reply