'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

[0culus]

So if a drunk driver kills an innocent person, was murder (vehicular homicide) sufficient punishment for the unfortunate person caught at the wrong place and time?? Give me a break.

[Fred Basset]

Master and slave might seem ugly words now, but they do clearly give an idea of what each board or circuit is doing.  Primary and secondary seem good, but it could just be referring to the sequence in which they process a signal - Not making clear one controls the other's response.  The problem is that I cannot think of any answers either.  The best I came up with was Mother and Daughter as in computers Motherboards and
Daughterboards.  Clearly that would be unacceptable also, so my best answer is now "Base" and "Module".  Does anyone find any merit in those descriptors?

[paulca]

[TimFox]

A quick review of Roget did not give me any appropriate terms to replace "Master" and "Slave".
["Motherboard" and "Daughterboard"], and ["Base" and "Module"] relate to physical configuration, since the latter normally plugs into the former, but do not really specify the logical and causal relationship.
"Commander" could work to replace "Master", but the other would have to be "Commanded", and the use of two forms of the same root would cause confusion.
"Sergeant" and "Private" seem silly.

[tom66]

So if a drunk driver kills an innocent person, was murder (vehicular homicide) sufficient punishment for the unfortunate person caught at the wrong place and time?? Give me a break.

When they kill someone they can be punished with the equivalent punishment for vehicular homicide.  And drink driving should still be punished.  The man shouldn't just walk free.  But I don't think shooting twice in the back is a proportionate response, giving him a DUI and forcing him to drive with a breathalyzer or pay a income-proportional fine or do 30 days labour would be all more appropriate than murder.  And all of those can be done at the speed of normal justice. Where is the guy going to go? Do we really think it would be impossible to track down someone with an 8yr old daughter, family, car, job, house and implement an appropriate response through the system that exists...? 

[vodka]

I'm completely against the antifas and the BLM movement, but in the USA you've got a problem with the police guys:

That stupid guy got what he deserved. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you want to live, you don't punch a police officer in the face, steal taser and then shoot with it at police officer.  BTW he was a felon on parole, not some innocent guy.

Are we really saying a guy fleeing deserves to be shot?

Yes, and this is my justification .

The young woman who tried to kill a "mosso" in Tarragona, jailed for six months

The Tarragona guard court has agreed to internment in a closed regime for 6 months for the 17-year-old girl who on Tuesday afternoon took the weapon of a "mosso" after a frustrated robbery at a bookstore on Gasòmetre street and tried to shoot her.

Before the incident, the young woman spat the agent in the face, rushed forward and assaulted him with blows and kicks. When the agent was reducing it, the girl took the pistol from the holster by surprise and pulled the trigger a couple of times while uttering death threats. The weapon, however, had the safety mechanism activated and no one was injured.


https://translate.google.es/translate?hl=es&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.diaridetarragona.com%2Ftarragona%2FLa-joven-que-intento-matar-a-un-mosso-en-Tarragona-internada-seis-meses-20181220-0038.html

On resume, the classic juvenile criminal  with a endless dossier, she robbed material by value 100 € .That is "minor crime"(when there isn't violence) because is below of 400€ and therefore you don't  go to prision. Only she should pays a fine or comunity jobs. I think that she would not pay because she is insolvent neither works for comunnity because she would be missing.
Now,which the sense to kill polices when the spanish laws protect more to criminal than the victims.

Now, we put  the case that the officer is murderd. The criminal is minor therefore would be judge by the child law, adding the other crimes .  The conviction  would be 6 years in child correctional.
 

[DimitriP]

If you haven't wittnessed the lady at the market paying for groceris with an EBT (aka food stamps), the booze with cash ,  while talking on the late model i-phone and putting the groceries in a late model shiny Mercedes its hard to explain.

I don't know anyone in this country who is on benefits/state aid and actually lives anything more than a basic lifestyle.

I never got this argument, usually from the political right, because sure, there are probably scroungers out there.  But if you say that person sucks $1,000/mo in state assistance, why do they not get equally pissed off at Amazon dodging billions in tax, or Walmart barely paying above the min. wage so their employees have to seek state aid to pay the bills and live a half way decent life.

The usual argument is, these corporations are "smart", they are entitled to do whatever they can to profit. Even the POTUS has said that he is "very smart" for organising his tax affairs in such a way [1].  Yet it is not "very smart" of the woman at the grocery store to take advantage of the aid available to her?  Why is there a different standard here?  It is either OK to leech from the state or not.  I would say it is worse when billionaires and mega-corps do it. 

[1] Youtube: "Trump: I'm 'smart' for paying no taxes", CNN, 26 Sep 2016.

There are two ways this works.
Very little oney can get you finacial support, usually using other people's money (it has to come from somewhere, yes?)
Lots of money. That's where the fun begins. You can spend a lot on accountants and buy lots of financial wizardry , which in the end costs saves you lots of tax dollars. usually there is still an excess...so you make donations and you get labeled a philanthropist . A win win from a certain point of view.

As far as the UK goes regarding assistance...
I may have heard that unlike the US, its more expensive to be married than single. 
And you get more money by being a single mom on paper even when living with the kids dad .
There is problem there somewhere. From over here it seems to be more of a class division large rich families grow to become even larger rich families and individual "commoners" and their kids stay exactly that...

[james_s]

Master and slave might seem ugly words now, but they do clearly give an idea of what each board or circuit is doing.  Primary and secondary seem good, but it could just be referring to the sequence in which they process a signal - Not making clear one controls the other's response.  The problem is that I cannot think of any answers either.  The best I came up with was Mother and Daughter as in computers Motherboards and
Daughterboards.  Clearly that would be unacceptable also, so my best answer is now "Base" and "Module".  Does anyone find any merit in those descriptors?

I just don't get it. They don't seem like ugly words to me. I mean they are ugly words when used to describe a relationship between humans but that's not anything to do with their use in engineering. Does this boil down to a fundamental (wilful?) inability to understand context? People seem to obsess over words when it's the meaning they carry that we should be paying attention to. Context is everything.

[Ccandrews]

This is interesting reading, and anything less than the standard bell curve of opinions would have been (statistically) disappointing.

This argument comes up at least once a decade, but the world is in a different place this time.  I grew up in a part of the States that was barely a territory in 1860 and where black slavery didn't exist (or at least wasn't widespread).  As a result of history, people here had very limited phraseology or idioms that reference race or slavery.  As a result, I never understood the argument that this could be an offensive term.  However I later spent the better part of 30 years in the south I came to realize how many people were still re-living the civil war and slavery and for whom racial idioms are a part of the vernacular. 

So now at least I can see the argument for changing these terms that reference the relationship.  As it is usually used to refer to talker/listeners or primary/secondary the term master/slave isn't even that accurate unless the master is off-loading a process to the slave as in a sub-processor or numeric processor situation.  Bus master's are in control of the bus but hardly a stereotypical master of slaves.  For many bus master/slave combinations even Marco/Polo is more accurate.

Slavery existed in the past and, in similar forms, continues today.  It was, and is, not limited to blacks.  Also the western world has done other things every bit as bad as black slavery, the wars/slaughter/suppression/slavery of natives and the medieval crusades come to mind.

[james_s]

Are we really saying a guy fleeing deserves to be shot?

No, but in this case the guy was not simply fleeing. He grabbed the officers taser and pointed it at him while running. This could have ended very differently, had he succeeded in incapacitating the officer with the taser he could have grabbed the real gun from the officer and then who knows what his intent was. It's not like you can stand around and see if the bad guy is gonna kill you and then respond accordingly. I was always taught that you never touch a police officer, ever, and you certainly don't try to grab any kind of weapon from them, lethal or not. It's not as if police officers are never murdered by suspects. This guy made a choice, he could have cooperated and gone to jail for intoxication and been out in a few days but instead he decided to do an obviously very dangerous move and it ended badly for him. It was 100% his choice, it's disingenuous to say he was fleeing, that implies he was not a threat which he clearly was, he had a weapon capable of incapacitation of someone with a properly deadly weapon and was actively trying to use it. This does not appear to be a case of brutality or unnecessary force.

[Kjelt]

I just don't get it. They don't seem like ugly words to me. I mean they are ugly words when used to describe a relationship between humans but that's not anything to do with their use in engineering. Does this boil down to a fundamental (wilful?) inability to understand context? People seem to obsess over words when it's the meaning they carry that we should be paying attention to. Context is everything.

I agree completely and I am thinking ( a bit wrong I know) that the people that say they are offended by this don't have and never will have an engineering degree. Alfa and Gamma scientists that have nothing better to do than nitpick the dictionaries for words that might be offensive to those who will never even use them or be exposed to them.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

and the medieval crusades come to mind.

The medieval crusades what? Because they came first to invade us. Eight centuries in Spain no more no less.

[magic]

Crusades were fought to fend off slave raids, among other things.

[Marco]

Are we really saying a guy fleeing deserves to be shot?

Ignoring what he deserves ... do cops deserve to come home in one piece?

It's part of the job only goes so far. The more violent situations a cop has to contend with, the more they will err on the side of their own safety. That's another reason why you can't really compare say UK cops to US cops as a lot of people are want to do, even ignoring the cultural differences for their criminals and the much smaller amount of guns they will run into.

Bayesian mathematics as always is not very politically correct.

[vodka]

and the medieval crusades come to mind.

The medieval crusades what? Because they came first to invade us. Eight centuries in Spain no more no less.

Medina didn't belong to Roman Empire. What did we invade?

[magic]

It's nice to talk about people deserving to live because you believe that theoretically they could be helped but here's a simple problem: there simply isn't enough committed money and, ahem, personpower to actually help all of them. And never will, get over it - we have been hearing this talk for decades. So somebody has to be thrown under the bus, so it might as well be one who steals a taser and attack the police with it.

Leftism is based on completely unrealistic premises and neverending generalizations of irrelevant edge cases. Just because you have seen an inspirational documentary about a criminal on whom a ton of effort in some pilot program had been spent to straighten him out, it doesn't mean there aren't ten others who will never receive anything like that and would better be dead for all practical purposes.

Sad but true.

[DimitriP]

and the medieval crusades come to mind.

The medieval crusades what? Because they came first to invade us. Eight centuries in Spain no more no less.

Oh boy ..Tell me who "us" is and then we can have fun.

[tom66]

It's nice to talk about people deserving to live because you believe that theoretically they could be helped but here's a simple problem [..]

I agree that some people are beyond help but the evidence from Norway and some other countries that have a reformed prison system shows that, with the right support,  *many* people can be reformed and better people.

Look it at this way. Say it costs 50,000 EUR to reform a prisoner that can be reformed.  But they pay taxes for the next 50-60 years if they succeed.  Does that not sound like an economically sensible thing to try on those who are most likely to respond to reform (petty criminals, youths, drug addicts, etc.)

On the other hand I think we should recognise many-repeat offenders as irreparable and at a certain point not release them into the general population because they bring more harm than good.  If someone does not respond to the help and support available then they need to be moved out of the "moderate" facility and into the more serious facility, possibly for the rest of their life.  Until we have a way of fixing brain chemistry, we're kind of stuck with these individuals.  And capital punishment isn't appropriate for an illness, although I think we should offer voluntary euthanasia for them.

[james_s]

I agree that some people are beyond help but the evidence from Norway and some other countries that have a reformed prison system shows that, with the right support,  *many* people can be reformed and better people.

Look it at this way. Say it costs 50,000 EUR to reform a prisoner that can be reformed.  But they pay taxes for the next 50-60 years if they succeed.  Does that not sound like an economically sensible thing to try on those who are most likely to respond to reform (petty criminals, youths, drug addicts, etc.)

I'm sure our prison system has much room for improvement and reform, but that doesn't seem to be part of the debate lately. What is front and center right now is a general attack on the police who simply enforce the laws, there seems to be a highly concentrated effort to show the police in a negative light and do everything possible to undermine their efforts and ability to do the job they're tasked to do. Additional efforts to cancel any TV shows or movies and silence anything that shows the police doing positive things is also disturbing. Whether that's part of a larger picture I don't know but it does seem strange to me that the same crowd that has been trying for decades to disarm the general population is now trying to disarm and cripple the police too. On the outside it has the appearance of openly siding with the violent criminals rather than the rest of us who just want to go about our daily lives without being robbed, mugged, stolen from, etc. I have no idea who the people who want to get rid of the police think should be in charge but it's probably not going to end up being anyone most of us want running the show. Organized crime and the nutty right wing militants seem the most likely contenders to end up on top in the unlikely event that anarchy prevails in the short term.

[DimitriP]

What is front and center right now is a general attack on the police who simply enforce the laws, there seems to be a highly concentrated effort to show the police in a negative light and do everything possible to undermine their efforts and ability to do the job they're tasked to do.

Nope. You are behind.  What you are describing is old news, being worked on already.
The new front and center is  syrup and rice. Gotta keep them consumers happy!

[PlainName]

there seems to be a highly concentrated effort to show the police in a negative light and do everything possible to undermine their efforts and ability to do the job they're tasked to do

I think that's just a consequence of where we're at. As an example, an acquaintance will often neglect to do something when asked and normally that's just one of those things, but at some point another issue will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and then all the things that have previously had a bye get brought up. After that, for a period, you ask him to do something and he says he will but you don't believe him and he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt now because experience tells you what will happen. It will take quite a few 'successful' requests to get to trust his word again, but in the meantime he thinks you're now picking on him.

That's where we are with the police, I think. Up until now they have got away - literally - with murder. All those instances where a detainee 'fell down the stairs' and they got away with it because there weren't half a dozen civilians with phone cameras taping them. Their word against a crim, and police wouldn't lie, right?

I just read about some chap that crashed a truck into a police car and the police shot him. Took him to hospital with a punctured lung, etc, and the report just said he got injured. None of the police put in the report that he was shot by them.

So, yes, a majority of police are great people doing a difficult job but right now there is distrust in the police as an organisation because of all this stuff that's finally seeing the light of day. There is now real proof that some are power-crazed, and psychologically if you kit them up with tanks and stuff, just like an army at war, they're going to see the people they police as the enemy.

This latest one, the Rolfe chappy, is a good example. Without the video it would clearly be a justified shooting of a drugged-up criminal intent on shooting the police. Even if it was, there is surely no excuse to kick the bloke when he was dying. Or  how about that recent one where some chap asleep in his car got shot thirty-five times by six cops as he woke up.

There's an argument that the police are only human and mistakes can be made, it's the heat of the moment, etc. But these are people given special powers and with those powers should come special responsibilities. They should be held to a higher standard than mere civilians because of that, and they should suffer harsher penalties when they do wrong because of that.

[cdev]

Slavery is not a joke, it still exists. This picture is from the North Carolina Dept. of Justice. This person was enslaved and was tattooed with a bar code on the back of her neck presumably to allow her to be identified among other slaves by her tattoo.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I'm completely against the antifas and the BLM movement, but in the USA you've got a problem with the police guys:

That stupid guy got what he deserved. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you want to live, you don't punch a police officer in the face, steal taser and then shoot with it at police officer.  BTW he was a felon on parole, not some innocent guy.

Watch this:

[bsfeechannel]

Coming up next: The Linux Foundation puts a ban on the kill command on allegations that it entices admins toward violence.  The next versions of Linux will come with a new command: dearnastyprocesswouldyoubesokindastoterminatepleasethankyou.

[DimitriP]

Coming up next: The Linux Foundation puts a ban on the kill command on allegations that it entices admins toward violence.  The next versions of Linux will come with a new command: dearnastyprocesswouldyoubesokindastoterminatepleasethankyou.

Hmmm ... looks like powershell !!!