"Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label," Joe Sandoval, division manager of purchasing and contract services, said in a memo sent to County vendors.

"We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment components that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature," Sandoval said in the memo, which was distributed last week and made available to Reuters.

The memo did not include any suggestions for alternative labels.

Dennis Tafoya, director of the affirmative action office, said in a separate memo that an "exhaustive search" had been undertaken to find all such labels and replace them with more "appropriate" ones. A form was sent to all departments to identify equipment carrying the labels "master" and "slave" or any other offensive terms.


http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/m...reut/index.html

This has already been posted.

http://www.iceteks.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1695&hl=

oops, sorry.

No problem. This has been something that's been going around quite allot.

It's so dumb it's funny.

It's kinda funny. The story I posted was from a link off of /., and only a few days later a big story is up on cnn. What's not as funny is that a lot of people are finding out about this and causing a big fuss without actually reading up on it. The County of LA never actually banned the master\slave terms, but rather, simply suggested that the terms should be replaced - again it was only a suggestion, not law. That's why I posted it in the chill pill section here. It's not as much a post to incite outrage, but rather to poke fun at how sometimes politicians can get a little too cautious about word choices.

yep i knew you was just poking fun at them.

that is why i was poking fun at you

no worries. I didn't mean that as an attack on anyone in particular, but the general reaction, as alluded to in the cnn article. From some of the comments in the article, it's pretty obvious that the County of LA has been catching a lot of crap from this that they really shouldn't be, considering that it was no more than a suggestion. There's no real harm in a simple suggestion like that, and as thus they really didn't deserve much more than a few jokes at their expense