My son got bit by the electronics bug over the summer. He then proceeded to implement logic gates in Minecraft, and used them to build binary adders and other circuits. Is that nerdy enough for/. or what?
More to the point, I am pretty impressed with Minecraft - that one can use it to create such things.
From one of TFAs: "Web sites are liable for ads on their sites from advertisers that break federal criminal law."
Um, just how is one supposed to know - guarantee - that an advertiser is not breaking the law? This potentially affects anyone accepting advertising, all the way from Google down to the lowliest blog. It essentially requires the site accepting advertising to be legally expert in every possible realm of business. What is legal for pharmacies to do? How about alcohol sales? How about car rentals? How about chinese medicine? Unlicensed electricians? Farms that sell unpasteurized milk?
You should be stopped for driving while impaired, not for driving after drinking alcohol. The use of a specific limit - 0.8%, or 0.5%, or whatever - is a poor substitution for plain old good judgement. Some people are impaired while *sober* (like my grandmother, who was allowed to keep her driver's license far, far too long), others are fine at 0.1% BAC, or with a phone growing out of their ear.
Really, if you are sensible, what is the problem? Can't have two hands on the wheel? Watch anyone who drives a stick in city traffic - they usually keep one hand on the shifter. Can't talk while driving? How about with the other passenger. Worse: what if you drive a stick *while* talking to your passenger? Oh no! Now, talking on the phone *while* driving a stick - that is a problem, because you haven't got three hands.
The gp is absolutely right. Beware the the culture of zero tolerance, of substituting strict enforcement of rules for common sense and good judgement.
While experience counts for a lot, managers and employers rarely see it that way. They will see your out-of-date skills and hire that 25-year-old who has all the modern languages on his/her resume.
Want to keep your hand in? A couple of suggestions:
- Even as a PM, you may be able to find an excuse for the odd proof-of-concept or prototype.
- Program in your spare time. If you don't have a family, you have the spare time. If you have a family, take the excuse to learn Scratch, or Python, or some other kid-friendly language - teach your kids to program!
- Teach an evening course in programming.
There is nothing mysterious about the newer languages, but you have to *use* them. Work your way up from simple stuff, Google for answers to the inevitable "stupid questions". Learning a new language, and sometimes a new way of thinking takes time. If it makes you happy, you'll find the time - but likely no longer as part of your career choice.
The biggest problem with textbooks is the fact that they are needlessly revised every year. Creating new editions reduces the usefulness of earlier editions, thus cutting into the used textbook market. I explicitly tell my students "use edition x or newer", rather than insisting on the newest edition. This requires microscopically more work on my side, while saving students massive amounts of money, since they can buy used textbooks. In some courses, I no longer use a textbook at all, as all necessary information is available on the Internet - just give the students a set of links with every lecture.
Anyway, don't worry, the whole problem will go away within 5, or at most 10, years. The dead-tree publishers are doomed, having already missed their chance to offer DRM-free ebooks. Self-published ebooks will become far more common. Some sort of brokers will likely develop - probably companies like Amazon - where people can submit their self-published books, and schools and instructors can download evaluation copies. The books will probably be DRM-free, because DRM is an impossible pain to deal with, giving authors who publish without DRM a substantial advantage.
There was another case of Wifi hacking a while back - the victim of the hacking was able to get the charges dismissed largely because they were running an unsecured WiFi. The implication was clear: if they had secured their WiFi, they probably would have been convicted. The authorities probably not have accepted their claim to have been hacked.
We all know they are going to raise the debt limit. Every time this comes up, whichever party is in power votes to raise the limit. Whichever party is not in power delays the vote to the last minute, using the occasion for political grandstanding.
It would frankly be wonderful if enough Congresscritters had the chuzpa to not raise the limit. Force some fiscal responsibility, even if it is probably too late. But, no, this is the Congress that still hasn't passed a budget for 2011 - they just gave up, and there is every sign that there will be no official budget for 2012 either.
The idea that current management is broken is correct. It's broken because it's not focused on managing companies it's focused on managing stock prices.
This. I have been in a position to observe the management decisions of one particular company for the past 25 years (sadly, with little ability to influence said decisions). When the company was young, the top spot was held by someone dedicated to the product. He made long-term investments in product development and customer satisfaction - often with a horizon of 10 years or more. During this time, the company grew steadily.
Several years ago, the company sold, and is now owned by a publicly held company, although it is maintained internally as a subsidiary. The top spot is held by a typical pure-management guy, with little knowledge of the product. Decisions are made on the basis of improving this quarter's numbers, even if doing so cannibalizes sales from the next quarter. All of the long-term investments have been happily taken advantage of - but no new ones have been made. Important assets are being sold off, because (viewed as profit centers), they do not provide enough ROI.
The guy cannot understand why growth has totally stopped - in fact, sales are slowly decreasing, as the competition's products continue to development. It's very instructive to watch - also damned depressing...
The problem, of course, is that testifying before the Senate is a lose-lose situation.
These are public events that are really grandstanding occasions for senators to work on soundbites for their campaigns. Whoever is "testifying" is just a target for those soundbites. Play target well, and they will shoot you down - "look, we politicians are for the common man and against big business". Defend yourself effectively - show the Senators to be wrong or (more likely) totally uninformed - and suffer the dagger through the cloak instead of the public hanging.
What he did was stupid, and almost certainly illegal. Fine.
What bugs me is this: why is this being investigated by a federal agency? Wehre are the local cops? This strikes me as another example of the ever-increasing expansion of federal powers.
Mastercard and Visa are not even independent of one another. Most larger banks (at least here in Europe) issue - and earn money from - both cards. This means that the banks do not actually want to cards to compete with each other. So Mastercard and Visa put on a show of competing, but in reality are quite happy to just divide the market between themselves, and keep any other payment method from getting to big.
The result is that Mastercard and Visa often act in lockstep - just as they have done in the case of Wikileaks. If they were genuinely independent, and competing with each other, one of them would have been more than happy to take the other's transaction fees on 15 million quid.
That is an absolutely amazing response from RIM. Pure PR-crap, written by the clueless, for the clueless. It completely misses the reason for such an anonymous letter, namely, that RIM upper management is apparently in the habit of handing out "career-limiting" results to anyone to dares to express an opinion.
It has been clear since the advent of the iPhone that RIM missed the boat. This company response shows why, and makes it clear that there will be no recovery. RIM may have $3 billion in cash now, but in 10 years they will be just another patent troll.
There is plenty of raw computing power. Take BOINC for example: if you look at the projects, there is very little exciting. Seti@Home has been running for ages, you can do protein folding, you can do some mathematics that it interesting but hardly revolutionary. More computing power leads to marginally better weather forecasts. NP-complete problems will not yield to computing power - you only get a tiny bit farther.
I'll be interested to see if any/.ers can propose genuinely significant problems that would be solvable by a 100fold or even 1000fold increase in processing power.
This is great for writing medical papers, but in truth it is simply irresponsible medicine. If she can't have a child, well, life's a bitch. If this works, she is going to be on massive medication, like any transplant patient. To conceive and carry a child under those circumstances is simply nuts. Even organizations that totally support transplant patients point out the massive risks involved.
If this woman is this desperate for a child, she needs psychological counseling more than she needs a new uterus.
And what would those be? He is bombing a sovereign country, in which there was a civil uprising. Do you know how many countries in the world have uprisings every year? Libya happens to have a slimeball as a leader (just like Iraq, which you do not think legitimate) - do you know how many countries have slimeballs for leaders?
Even if the attack on Libya were somehow legitimate, this bombing is wrong - and outright stupid - in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. Here are three:
The excuse for the bombing is to "protect the civilian population". Let's bombs military targets in the middle of cities, and see if we can avoid blowing up any civilians. Right. The truth is that we are waging a military campaign to topple the government of a sovereign nation. How is this legitimate without a declaration of war?
Anyone who ever studied any sort of military strategy will tell you that bombing by itself is pretty useless. I am ex-Air Force, and even we have this drummed into our heads: air power buys you nothing without boots on the ground. The insurgents in Libya do not count - they are laughably incompetent. Barring a lucky hit that actually kills Qaddafi, this entire campaign will be useless unless we commit ground troops. Odds are good taht the military told the President this, his academic aides disagreed, and he sided with his aides.
Anyway, why Libya? There are lots of other countries (Syria comes to mind) with brutal dictators, where civilians are slaughtered in larger job-lots than Libya. What is the real motivation here?
For once, Congress actually wants to reign this crap in, and the President protests. What does he want? Perhaps Congress should just declare war on entire the rest of the world? That would free his hands nicely...
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
The bureaucrats are building their empires, and no longer care about ICANN's official mission.
Our university (ok, Fachhochschule, for those of you in the know) runs a purely windows-based network. However, many students and a few faculty have Macs, and since most services are web-based this works fine. I am one of the very few Linux folks, and as faculty I need to access Windows shares, printers, VPN, etc. This all basically works - but it's thanks to Linux's compatibility, and lots of effort on my part, not because of any inherent Linux-friendliness in the network. However, it is worth it, because the default installation and Windows config is not a thing of beauty - booting to a usable desktop takes minutes; with Linux it's maybe 15 seconds.
The school also runs lots of virtual servers. These are handed over to individual departments for whatever applications those departments need internally (databases, SVN, wikis, or whatever), so that the department can manage their own software. These virtual servers are also all Windows-based; as far as I am aware, Linux is not an option.
The IT department puts up with me reasonably gracefully, though they clearly think it a bit odd. For example, I just received a replacement laptop, which comes with Windows-7. They kindly restricted the Windows partition to 1/3 of the disk, leaving the rest for me to use as I wanted - which saved me the hassle of resizing a live Windows partition...
"What bothers me, though, is the concept of a ".NET shop"... what happened to using the best tool for the job? "
I know I am just picking on a small item out of a very long and well-considered post. However, this is one place I think you are in error.
If you are a generalist willing to use any technology set, then a specialist will leave you in the dust. If you know a technology set in-depth, know how to get the best out of it, know where the pitfalls are - you will be much more productive than someone with only a generalist's knowledge. This matters, when you are bidding contracts, and actually expecting to make a profit at the end of the day.
If you specialize on one technology set, thereby improving your productivity and effectiveness, you will automatically be less effective with other technologies, because there are just not enough hours in the day to specialize in *everything*. Being a specialist means that you will automatically want to use the technology you know best, whenever possible. This is not in any sense laziness, but just plain common sense (at least, in a commercial environement), because you will take fewer hours and produce a superior product.
That said, I do agree with you that any programmer should have experience with as many different languages as possible. You learn different techniques, and you know what technologies are available for those projects where your primary technology set really is not the right choice. Besides, it's good to stretch the mental muscles by learning a new language once in a while...
The situation in Switzerland is actually pretty hilarious... People want to use less (or no) nuclear power, however:
- Proposals to allow more allow solar panels on roofs, or on the sides of office buildings - rejected.
- Proposals to put power-plants in rivers - rejected.
- Proposals for wind turbines - rejected.
Electricity just comes magically out of the plug, didn't you know?
In practice, one older and poorly placed nuclear plant will probably be shut down. The others will continue in service, because there just isn't any other realistic choice.
"most of the CS grads didn't go on to be computer scientists, but rather programmers"
Two posters have said this, and I don't get it. Teaching you to be a programmer is what most computer science programs are all about. I know people who "program" without having CS-degrees - they do quick-n-dirty Access applications and other crappy stuff. The programmers doing the challenging programming all have computer science degrees.
Every passionate developer I have ever know hates "process". At the same time, they all understand that at least some process is necessary. It all depends on two things: what kind of work you are doing, and what kind of management you have.
- What you are doing: (A) If you have a small team working on an internal application, you need a lot less process. (B) If you are a huge team working on safety critical code, you need a lot more process.
- Your management: do you have managers smart enough to realize that A != B, or do you have PHBs who want to fill in boxes on some checklist?
Essentially the "agile" manifesto: as much process as necessary, as little as possible. That said, speaking as a passionate type, I would never want to work on a huge project within a bureaucratic company, precisely because I want to do technical work, not paperwork. I imagine many other technically passionate people feel the same way...
This is fail in so many ways. Why do we want to allow an extra chip in our phones - as one poster points out, this is (or ought to be) totally unnecessary. What else does that chip do?
Why do I want to get these alerts? Do I trust the government to use them responsibly (answer: "no")? Anyway, why can't they just send an SMS to every phone in a certain area - why does this even need to be a special protocol?
Finally, and I know I am going to get flamed for this, but: what is it with the children? There is simply no sense to having a special announcement system for missing children. Look at the statistics: several hundred thousand children are reported missing each year in the USA. Of these, about 3/4 are totally harmless - kids who got temporarily lost in the shopping center, who were pissed at their parents and "ran away from home" for an hour, etc. Almost all of the rest are "abductions by family members", meaning marital strife. Something like 100 kids per year truly go missing. Just to put that in perpective, twice that many kids die every year from being circumcised, and yet somehow we survive without a special federal program for that.
Slashdot Mirror
My son got bit by the electronics bug over the summer. He then proceeded to implement logic gates in Minecraft, and used them to build binary adders and other circuits. Is that nerdy enough for /. or what?
More to the point, I am pretty impressed with Minecraft - that one can use it to create such things.
Here is a better article: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/234077-Underground-River-Rio-Hamza-Discovered-4km-Beneath-the-Amazon
Flowing at a rate of 1mm/hour, this is more like a gigantic seepage of ground water. I suppose calling it a "river" gets them into the newspapers...
From one of TFAs: "Web sites are liable for ads on their sites from advertisers that break federal criminal law."
Um, just how is one supposed to know - guarantee - that an advertiser is not breaking the law? This potentially affects anyone accepting advertising, all the way from Google down to the lowliest blog. It essentially requires the site accepting advertising to be legally expert in every possible realm of business. What is legal for pharmacies to do? How about alcohol sales? How about car rentals? How about chinese medicine? Unlicensed electricians? Farms that sell unpasteurized milk?
Idiocy - and it's a shame that Google settled.
You should be stopped for driving while impaired, not for driving after drinking alcohol. The use of a specific limit - 0.8%, or 0.5%, or whatever - is a poor substitution for plain old good judgement. Some people are impaired while *sober* (like my grandmother, who was allowed to keep her driver's license far, far too long), others are fine at 0.1% BAC, or with a phone growing out of their ear.
Really, if you are sensible, what is the problem? Can't have two hands on the wheel? Watch anyone who drives a stick in city traffic - they usually keep one hand on the shifter. Can't talk while driving? How about with the other passenger. Worse: what if you drive a stick *while* talking to your passenger? Oh no! Now, talking on the phone *while* driving a stick - that is a problem, because you haven't got three hands.
The gp is absolutely right. Beware the the culture of zero tolerance, of substituting strict enforcement of rules for common sense and good judgement.
While experience counts for a lot, managers and employers rarely see it that way. They will see your out-of-date skills and hire that 25-year-old who has all the modern languages on his/her resume.
Want to keep your hand in? A couple of suggestions:
- Even as a PM, you may be able to find an excuse for the odd proof-of-concept or prototype.
- Program in your spare time. If you don't have a family, you have the spare time. If you have a family, take the excuse to learn Scratch, or Python, or some other kid-friendly language - teach your kids to program!
- Teach an evening course in programming.
There is nothing mysterious about the newer languages, but you have to *use* them. Work your way up from simple stuff, Google for answers to the inevitable "stupid questions". Learning a new language, and sometimes a new way of thinking takes time. If it makes you happy, you'll find the time - but likely no longer as part of your career choice.
The biggest problem with textbooks is the fact that they are needlessly revised every year. Creating new editions reduces the usefulness of earlier editions, thus cutting into the used textbook market. I explicitly tell my students "use edition x or newer", rather than insisting on the newest edition. This requires microscopically more work on my side, while saving students massive amounts of money, since they can buy used textbooks. In some courses, I no longer use a textbook at all, as all necessary information is available on the Internet - just give the students a set of links with every lecture.
Anyway, don't worry, the whole problem will go away within 5, or at most 10, years. The dead-tree publishers are doomed, having already missed their chance to offer DRM-free ebooks. Self-published ebooks will become far more common. Some sort of brokers will likely develop - probably companies like Amazon - where people can submit their self-published books, and schools and instructors can download evaluation copies. The books will probably be DRM-free, because DRM is an impossible pain to deal with, giving authors who publish without DRM a substantial advantage.
There was another case of Wifi hacking a while back - the victim of the hacking was able to get the charges dismissed largely because they were running an unsecured WiFi. The implication was clear: if they had secured their WiFi, they probably would have been convicted. The authorities probably not have accepted their claim to have been hacked.
We all know they are going to raise the debt limit. Every time this comes up, whichever party is in power votes to raise the limit. Whichever party is not in power delays the vote to the last minute, using the occasion for political grandstanding.
It would frankly be wonderful if enough Congresscritters had the chuzpa to not raise the limit. Force some fiscal responsibility, even if it is probably too late. But, no, this is the Congress that still hasn't passed a budget for 2011 - they just gave up, and there is every sign that there will be no official budget for 2012 either.
The idea that current management is broken is correct. It's broken because it's not focused on managing companies it's focused on managing stock prices.
This. I have been in a position to observe the management decisions of one particular company for the past 25 years (sadly, with little ability to influence said decisions). When the company was young, the top spot was held by someone dedicated to the product. He made long-term investments in product development and customer satisfaction - often with a horizon of 10 years or more. During this time, the company grew steadily.
Several years ago, the company sold, and is now owned by a publicly held company, although it is maintained internally as a subsidiary. The top spot is held by a typical pure-management guy, with little knowledge of the product. Decisions are made on the basis of improving this quarter's numbers, even if doing so cannibalizes sales from the next quarter. All of the long-term investments have been happily taken advantage of - but no new ones have been made. Important assets are being sold off, because (viewed as profit centers), they do not provide enough ROI.
The guy cannot understand why growth has totally stopped - in fact, sales are slowly decreasing, as the competition's products continue to development. It's very instructive to watch - also damned depressing...
The problem, of course, is that testifying before the Senate is a lose-lose situation.
These are public events that are really grandstanding occasions for senators to work on soundbites for their campaigns. Whoever is "testifying" is just a target for those soundbites. Play target well, and they will shoot you down - "look, we politicians are for the common man and against big business". Defend yourself effectively - show the Senators to be wrong or (more likely) totally uninformed - and suffer the dagger through the cloak instead of the public hanging.
What he did was stupid, and almost certainly illegal. Fine.
What bugs me is this: why is this being investigated by a federal agency? Wehre are the local cops? This strikes me as another example of the ever-increasing expansion of federal powers.
Mastercard and Visa are not even independent of one another. Most larger banks (at least here in Europe) issue - and earn money from - both cards. This means that the banks do not actually want to cards to compete with each other. So Mastercard and Visa put on a show of competing, but in reality are quite happy to just divide the market between themselves, and keep any other payment method from getting to big.
The result is that Mastercard and Visa often act in lockstep - just as they have done in the case of Wikileaks. If they were genuinely independent, and competing with each other, one of them would have been more than happy to take the other's transaction fees on 15 million quid.
That is an absolutely amazing response from RIM. Pure PR-crap, written by the clueless, for the clueless. It completely misses the reason for such an anonymous letter, namely, that RIM upper management is apparently in the habit of handing out "career-limiting" results to anyone to dares to express an opinion.
It has been clear since the advent of the iPhone that RIM missed the boat. This company response shows why, and makes it clear that there will be no recovery. RIM may have $3 billion in cash now, but in 10 years they will be just another patent troll.
There is plenty of raw computing power. Take BOINC for example: if you look at the projects, there is very little exciting. Seti@Home has been running for ages, you can do protein folding, you can do some mathematics that it interesting but hardly revolutionary. More computing power leads to marginally better weather forecasts. NP-complete problems will not yield to computing power - you only get a tiny bit farther.
I'll be interested to see if any /.ers can propose genuinely significant problems that would be solvable by a 100fold or even 1000fold increase in processing power.
Not a troll, just curious: What keeps white males from getting on Medicaid? Clearly you mean some form of sexism/racism, but what form does it take?
This is great for writing medical papers, but in truth it is simply irresponsible medicine. If she can't have a child, well, life's a bitch. If this works, she is going to be on massive medication, like any transplant patient. To conceive and carry a child under those circumstances is simply nuts. Even organizations that totally support transplant patients point out the massive risks involved.
If this woman is this desperate for a child, she needs psychological counseling more than she needs a new uterus.
Obama uses it for legitimate purposes...
And what would those be? He is bombing a sovereign country, in which there was a civil uprising. Do you know how many countries in the world have uprisings every year? Libya happens to have a slimeball as a leader (just like Iraq, which you do not think legitimate) - do you know how many countries have slimeballs for leaders?
Even if the attack on Libya were somehow legitimate, this bombing is wrong - and outright stupid - in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. Here are three:
For once, Congress actually wants to reign this crap in, and the President protests. What does he want? Perhaps Congress should just declare war on entire the rest of the world? That would free his hands nicely...
Why? Pournelles Iron Law:
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
The bureaucrats are building their empires, and no longer care about ICANN's official mission.
Our university (ok, Fachhochschule, for those of you in the know) runs a purely windows-based network. However, many students and a few faculty have Macs, and since most services are web-based this works fine. I am one of the very few Linux folks, and as faculty I need to access Windows shares, printers, VPN, etc. This all basically works - but it's thanks to Linux's compatibility, and lots of effort on my part, not because of any inherent Linux-friendliness in the network. However, it is worth it, because the default installation and Windows config is not a thing of beauty - booting to a usable desktop takes minutes; with Linux it's maybe 15 seconds.
The school also runs lots of virtual servers. These are handed over to individual departments for whatever applications those departments need internally (databases, SVN, wikis, or whatever), so that the department can manage their own software. These virtual servers are also all Windows-based; as far as I am aware, Linux is not an option.
The IT department puts up with me reasonably gracefully, though they clearly think it a bit odd. For example, I just received a replacement laptop, which comes with Windows-7. They kindly restricted the Windows partition to 1/3 of the disk, leaving the rest for me to use as I wanted - which saved me the hassle of resizing a live Windows partition...
"What bothers me, though, is the concept of a ".NET shop" ... what happened to using the best tool for the job? "
I know I am just picking on a small item out of a very long and well-considered post. However, this is one place I think you are in error.
If you are a generalist willing to use any technology set, then a specialist will leave you in the dust. If you know a technology set in-depth, know how to get the best out of it, know where the pitfalls are - you will be much more productive than someone with only a generalist's knowledge. This matters, when you are bidding contracts, and actually expecting to make a profit at the end of the day.
If you specialize on one technology set, thereby improving your productivity and effectiveness, you will automatically be less effective with other technologies, because there are just not enough hours in the day to specialize in *everything*. Being a specialist means that you will automatically want to use the technology you know best, whenever possible. This is not in any sense laziness, but just plain common sense (at least, in a commercial environement), because you will take fewer hours and produce a superior product.
That said, I do agree with you that any programmer should have experience with as many different languages as possible. You learn different techniques, and you know what technologies are available for those projects where your primary technology set really is not the right choice. Besides, it's good to stretch the mental muscles by learning a new language once in a while...
The situation in Switzerland is actually pretty hilarious... People want to use less (or no) nuclear power, however:
- Proposals to allow more allow solar panels on roofs, or on the sides of office buildings - rejected.
- Proposals to put power-plants in rivers - rejected.
- Proposals for wind turbines - rejected.
Electricity just comes magically out of the plug, didn't you know?
In practice, one older and poorly placed nuclear plant will probably be shut down. The others will continue in service, because there just isn't any other realistic choice.
Ok, I am being an old curmudgeon here, but...can we just take all of these social icons littering the web and sweep them into the trashcan?
"most of the CS grads didn't go on to be computer scientists, but rather programmers"
Two posters have said this, and I don't get it. Teaching you to be a programmer is what most computer science programs are all about. I know people who "program" without having CS-degrees - they do quick-n-dirty Access applications and other crappy stuff. The programmers doing the challenging programming all have computer science degrees.
Every passionate developer I have ever know hates "process". At the same time, they all understand that at least some process is necessary. It all depends on two things: what kind of work you are doing, and what kind of management you have.
- What you are doing: (A) If you have a small team working on an internal application, you need a lot less process. (B) If you are a huge team working on safety critical code, you need a lot more process.
- Your management: do you have managers smart enough to realize that A != B, or do you have PHBs who want to fill in boxes on some checklist?
Essentially the "agile" manifesto: as much process as necessary, as little as possible. That said, speaking as a passionate type, I would never want to work on a huge project within a bureaucratic company, precisely because I want to do technical work, not paperwork. I imagine many other technically passionate people feel the same way...
This is fail in so many ways. Why do we want to allow an extra chip in our phones - as one poster points out, this is (or ought to be) totally unnecessary. What else does that chip do?
Why do I want to get these alerts? Do I trust the government to use them responsibly (answer: "no")? Anyway, why can't they just send an SMS to every phone in a certain area - why does this even need to be a special protocol?
Finally, and I know I am going to get flamed for this, but: what is it with the children? There is simply no sense to having a special announcement system for missing children. Look at the statistics: several hundred thousand children are reported missing each year in the USA. Of these, about 3/4 are totally harmless - kids who got temporarily lost in the shopping center, who were pissed at their parents and "ran away from home" for an hour, etc. Almost all of the rest are "abductions by family members", meaning marital strife. Something like 100 kids per year truly go missing. Just to put that in perpective, twice that many kids die every year from being circumcised, and yet somehow we survive without a special federal program for that.