91–100 of 115 posts
What is the real reason Microsoft is doing this? Companies don't do anything just because it's the right thing to do. Putting out a fire? Trying to kill a lawsuit? Perhaps the good ol' economical incentive? What have made Microsoft to lift a finger? And which finger?
I don't see any direct economic or legal upside for MS doing this. However they've now got a very positive NYT article on it and the associated positive PR, so there's certainly some economic benefit in the long term, even if it's impossible to measure.
It's probably just not Satya Nadella, but ever since he took the reigns at MS, things have gotten better and better. Of course I may have missed something.
>Of course I may have missed something. Yes, you missed telemetry (which is impossible to disable) and unskippable updates. Nadella's Microsoft is more hostile to their users than ever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your opinion of Title IX? (Forgive my assumption that you practice in the USA.) My understanding is that it has college campuses hearing criminal cases. (I'm British, and only learned about this yesterday.)
So during the Obama era, rules were put in place to force colleges to deal with sexual assault accusations. The basic idea is sound: the university needs to do something when one student accuses someone else. Applying a criminal standard of proof is incredibly unfair. In the case of a false negative, that results in some student being forced to continue attending classes with her rapist, or to give up educational opp…
> The basic idea is sound: the university needs to do something when one student accuses someone else.
No, that isn't sound. It's a criminal matter. You don't inform your professors, you don't inform your employer, you don't inform your gardener, you inform the authorities. We're not talking about plagiarism here, we're talking about a criminal offence.
As a Brit, the idea that a college should have some sort of mini criminal justice system, seems utterly absurd. The only institution with its own criminal justice system, is the military, and they take it every bit as seriously as the civilian world.
> Applying a criminal standard of proof is incredibly unfair.
We're talking about adults dealing with crime. How is the criminal justice system any more unfair simply because both the victim and the suspect are both students at the same institution?
> Unlike in the criminal context, a false negative (incorrect acquittal) has a direct prejudicial impact on the victim.
That's a nasty attribute of rape, and of various other crimes, not of colleges.
Aren't most rapes committed by someone the victim already knew? You seem to be treating the college case (where both are students of the same institution) as categorically different from a case where the suspect is a friend (well, 'friend') or colleague of the victim.
I don't see it. I certainly don't see it as a justification for lowering the burden of proof, or for letting the suspect escape ordinary criminal-justice proceedings.
> But in a college context, the victim is seeking something that can actually help. Not punishment of the accused, but freedom to continue her education without the threat posed by the accused.
Again I don't see a category difference here. If the suspect is a colleague, or a member of a social circle shared with the victim, the same issue arises.
> Once you realize that false negatives are as harmful as false positives
Of course false negatives are harmful, it would be absurd to deny that, and no-one is doing so. That is the case for all serious crimes. It remains necessary to insist on a high standard of proof, and on presumed innocence.
> sexual assault is far more common than false accusations
You seem to be assuming that this ratio is set in stone. If you make it easier to make a false accusation 'stick', we would expect them to happen more often.
> In this context, it’s not about deciding whether the accused is guilty of rape
But it is. The consequences of the accused being found guilty can be severe, no? If a rape has occurred, a crime has been committed. Dealing with crimes is not within the purview, or the competences, of a college.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories. There are several good recent examples of this: - the project veritas employee trying to shop a false abortion story to the post - the schumer accusation that was shown to be falsified - weinstein's fake accuser that was planted by his own team to discredit investigations When people come with false information, it…
News organizations aren’t immune from getting it wrong though. The Duke lacrosse case and Brian Banks are two prominent examples.
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Creating a hostile work environment that constitutes discrimination on sex is absolutely, unquestionably, a federal crime, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (see Supreme Court cases Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson , Ellison v. Brady , Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services , etc. etc. etc. - and Meritor and Oncale had no dissents, and Ellison only had one dissent from a justice who felt that the…
You should seek legal counsel as well, because it is clear that you are not an attorney (or, if you are, you should be disbarred for incompetence). The statue is clear; it plainly states the Government can only bring a civil action to enforce Title VII. Did you actually bother to read it? As an actual attorney (this is not legal advice), I advise you to stick to what you know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So during the Obama era, rules were put in place to force colleges to deal with sexual assault accusations. The basic idea is sound: the university needs to do something when one student accuses someone else. Applying a criminal standard of proof is incredibly unfair. In the case of a false negative, that results in some student being forced to continue attending classes with her rapist, or to give up educational opp…
Wasn't planning on batting politics here on HN, but - I'm inclined to agree with asfd... who has apparently deleted their comment. How annoying. > The basic idea is sound: the university needs to do something when one student accuses someone else. No, that isn't sound. It's a criminal matter. You don't inform your professors, you don't inform your employer, you don't inform your gardener, you inform the authorities.…
What distinguishes criminal matters from civil matters is the remedy sought. For example, OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder, applying criminal standards of proof. But he was found liable for wrongful death, and ordered to pay damages to the families, applying civil standards of proof.
Criminal law and civil law address different concerns, and the same conduct can raise both criminal and civil issues. Criminal law vindicates the government's interest in retribution, deterrence, or rehabilitating an offender. It does not generally address the victim's personal rights. Thus, the government can prosecute when the victim does not want to, and vice versa.
In a campus rape case there is a criminal aspect. But there is also a civil aspect. Students have a civil legal entitlement to pursue their education at schools receiving government funding free from harassment. Forcing a student to either continue attending classes with her rapist, or to leave the school is undoubtedly an infringement of that legal entitlement. That civil concern is wholly distinct from the criminal question of punishing the rapist.
> That's a nasty attribute of rape, and of various other crimes, not of colleges.
No, it's a distinction between civil and criminal aspects of a course of conduct.
Say you hit me with a car because you were driving drunk. There is a criminal aspect to the case (driving drunk is a crime), but there is also a civil aspect to the case (hitting someone with a car due to negligence is a tort giving rise to damages liability). You being erroneously acquitted of drunk driving under a criminal standard of proof doesn't hurt me. It's a moral loss, nothing more. But you being erroneously found not liable for negligent driving does hurt me. It means I'm forced to bear my medical costs, and have been erroneously denied compensation. The false negative (an wrongfully injured person being forced to bear their own medical costs) is just as bad as the false positive (a wrongfully accused person being forced to pay someone else's medical costs). So in the civil context, we do not apply the maxim of "better to let ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent man." Because it's not better to find 10 people not liable for drunk driving when they did so than to find one person liable for drunk driving when he did not. That results in 10 victims who are wrongfully denied compensation for their injuries. So that's not the standard we use. Instead, we weigh credibility under a "more likely than not standard."
The same is true for sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace or the school. Applying criminal standards of proof in that context, what you're saying is: "it's better to force 10 people to continue to attend classes/go to work with their harassers/rapists than to force 1 person to quit their job/school due to a false accusation." But that doesn't make any sense. In both cases (false positives and false negatives), someone is wrongfully denied educational opportunities. Saying that it's okay to have 10 of one outcome to avoid 1 of the other outcome basically just says that false accusations are somehow worse than sexual assault.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about innocent-by-default is that false accusations are also a serious crime with serious penalties (for good reason), and if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. The reason that courts, specifically, do not have this paradox is that "innocent" simply means "we do not have the evidence to justify using the extraordinary punishment powers res…
...if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. This is not strictly or even practically true, but you acknowledge that later. When the defendant prevails in a court case, we don’t turn around and lock up the plaintiff. You go on to say: ...a world in which all who accuse people of sexual harassment are effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent in the court…
Yes, I do.
The reason I mention sexual harassment is that a lot of people are making accusations of sexual harassment. To believe that the accused are all innocent until I hear evidence otherwise until proven (i.e., to treat the accusations themselves and their consistency as having no information value) is to believe that all the accusers are lying. Very few people are making accusations of, say, piracy on the high seas, so I don't feel like I'm really believing that anyone is lying by holding the belief that piracy on the high seas is rare or that the average person is not guilty of piracy on the high seas.
There are a couple of other accusations I hear regularly. Some of them are things like "Police can murder citizens with impunity" and "The NSA is spying on us." I do think that those accusations should be heard and understood, and not dismissed in the court of public opinion on the grounds that the police and the NSA are innocent until proven guilty.
There are other accusations like "A pizza shop in DC is running a child-trafficking ring under its basement" or "Antifa poured concrete on Amtrak rails, causing the derailment earlier this week." For those I don't believe in holding the accusers guilty until proven innocent, either; a small amount of research can demonstrate to public opinion that the accusations are false on the merits and the accusers are guilty because of specific reasons. (Or, perhaps, the court of opinion can find that the accusers are generally people who make up stories, which still avoids applying a standard of guilty until proven innocent to similar accusations in general.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't planning on batting politics here on HN, but - I'm inclined to agree with asfd... who has apparently deleted their comment. How annoying. > The basic idea is sound: the university needs to do something when one student accuses someone else. No, that isn't sound. It's a criminal matter. You don't inform your professors, you don't inform your employer, you don't inform your gardener, you inform the authorities.…
> No, that isn't sound. It's a criminal matter. What distinguishes criminal matters from civil matters is the remedy sought. For example, OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder, applying criminal standards of proof. But he was found liable for wrongful death, and ordered to pay damages to the families, applying civil standards of proof. Criminal law and civil law address different concerns, and the same conduct can raise…
The consequences of a finding against the accused was ruinous to that person's career, and wasteful of their previous investment in their diploma. The consequences of the process itself, where the accused was subject to treatment that would grossly violate the Bill of Rights if it were the government's doing, was likely to prejudice any criminal prosecutions or real civil cases. And yet it was the government mandating this treatment.
This is different than an employment situation, where the at-will relationship is understood to govern and employees aren't generally seen as entitled to their job or any due process for ending it. Besides occupying a special place in American society as a necessary rite of passage, a university is charging students tens of thousands of dollars per year to attend. To expel a student without adequate due process, wasting their previous investment in their diploma, is unconscionable.
In many of these cases where students were expelled, the only evidence was the allegation itself. Is that the world you want to live in, where a young person's life can be ruined by a single malicious accusation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Of course I may have missed something. Yes, you missed telemetry (which is impossible to disable) and unskippable updates. Nadella's Microsoft is more hostile to their users than ever.
My how you have forgotten the 90s.