If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package. It's pretty black-and-white and has never really been an issue in the dozens of contracts I've been involved in.
Glad that works for you, but you do realize that there are an awful lot of contractors who sign contracts stipulating that they'll be available certain hours, work in a certain place, and even dress a certain way? You're certainly within your rights to respond to such a contract with, "If you're going to treat me like an employee, then I want the full package." A lot of other people would rather be considered contractors despite the employee-like restrictions. It's not a black-and-white contractor-with-only-acceptance-criteria versus employee-with-working-restrictions choice for everyone.
No, you misunderstand. You're right that it goes to all contacts indiscriminately. You don't get to pick and choose who. But it's so much better than that. You don't enable it. You don't even have to have any equipment that runs Windows 10. Say you have a guest that you give access to. If they have a Windows 10 machine with this "feature" enabled, the password is shared to all of their contacts. Brilliant!
You know the nice thing about Wikipedia? When you find poorly written or factually incorrect articles you can actually do something about it instead of just whining about it on an unrelated website.
Read the article? There is no article. There are six tweets (numbered and linked individually), a graph with data sets helpfully labeled "1", "2", "3", "4", and "5" but no other description, and a PDF of the test questions. And some comment about students not understanding the concept of "sparse arrays", but since the term is completely defined in the test materials I can only assume the real concern is that students can't be bothered to read the "unimportant" introductory material before trying to answer the actual test questions.
What do you mean, confusing? There's a link to a jpg that has a lot of lines, and some of the lines are clearly higher than other lines so obviously that means something good.
They were then instructed to press certain keys when images of things like fruits and clothes would appear, indicating a "go." But for images of calorie-dense foods (chips and cake, for example) they were instructed not to do anything, indicating a "stop" action.
It's great that I no longer want to eat chips and cake, but now I've got one hell of a craving to eat a cardigan sweater!
I've got to hang with Theaetetus here. I'm all for poly marriages, but existing inheritance, tax, insurance, etc. laws don't handle more than two people well. Gay marriage doesn't run up against any existing law except the one that says "no gay marriage". You don't have to change anything else when you say, "You know all those laws about a man and woman being married? Yeah, they apply to two dudes or two chicks, too." To include polys you have to redefine how inheritance is divided, how taxes are paid, who's eligible for insurance, etc. etc.
There also need to be new laws for situations that just can't occur in a two-person marriage. For example, what happens when one person wants out of a poly group? With a two-person marriage, a divorce necessarily means the end of a marriage. With a poly group one person leaving is not necessarily the end. What about when one person is unwillingly pushed out of a poly group? Or if the group fissures into two or more sub-groups? What happens if a child of someone in the group turns 18, should they be allowed to marry into the group? Does it make a difference if the child is adopted and not the biological offspring of any existing group member? If members can be added and removed, what are the implications of a continuous marriage that can outlive all of its individual members?
The laws could be changed to make poly unions work. The laws should be changed to make poly unions work. It's just that there are a lot of things that need to be examined for that to happen. It's not just a case of going from "two people of opposite sex" to "any two people". It's a serious qualitative change that will require qualitative changes to the law. Personally I'd love to see a serious proposal to change the laws in question and allow poly marriage. I think we could borrow from laws governing corporations to put something solid together. But I'm not a lawyer. I'll let someone else do the work. I'll vote for the result, to be sure, but I'm not going to kid myself that it's just a matter of adding "or more" between the words "two" and "people".
It's a bit of an odd prize, because all they did was suggest an idea. No working prototype or anything like that, just "wouldn't it be good if..."
Courtesy of The Big Bang Theory....
Leonard: Jimmy, I'm kind of curious why you wanted to see me. Jimmy: Okay, here it is. I have this great money-making idea. I just need a gear head to get it to the finish line. Leonard: What's the idea? Jimmy: This is just between us, right? Leonard: Right. Jimmy: Okay. What do you think about a pair of glasses that makes any movie you want into 3D? Raj: That sounds amazing. First movie I'm watching, Annie. Howard: How exactly would these glasses work? Jimmy: How the hell should I know? That's why I need a nerd.
The notification is mostly a courtesy to the sheriff. Once the booms start, people are going to call the sheriff saying, "Things are going boom out here!" If you've notified them they can just say, "Yeah, Bob Smith's out making holes in his yard, he should be done by sunset." Otherwise they have to find the location of the booms and pay a visit to make sure it's just some guy on his own property and not some guy blowing up someone *else's* property for shits and giggles.
I say this having been on the receiving end of such visits more than once. (Sometimes when you notify them they drive out anyway, but that's mostly because they're bored and like to see stuff blowing up as much as anyone else.)
The tech support script is there for one reason -- to let the higher-tier support staff who have actual problem solving skills work on actual problems without wasting their time on people who need just need to be told that the "any" key isn't literally a key. It does this by letting people of lesser ability handle the easy stuff and -- this is key -- letting the upper tier know that the easy stuff has already been checked.
"But I've already checked the easy stuff. It's plugged in, I have tcpdump output, I can prove that it's an actual problem!" Maybe, maybe not. Think of it as an input validation problem. A web server should never implicitly trust what the browser sends, right? It's poor practice to let the browser do all the input validation and blindly accept it. The script is the tech support input validation step. You say you're an advanced user who's tried everything easy, but how does tech support know that? Just like 90% of drivers think they're above average, 90% of geeks think they're above making stupid mistakes. The very fact that you're quibbling over the terminology of "modem" vs. "router" makes be believe that you're someone with an over-inflated sense of their own abilities.
Let them run through the script. It's tedious. It's frustrating. But it does tend to check the stupid "is it plugged in stuff" that even the most tech-savvy can sometimes forget. When they ask you to do stuff, actually do it. Don't just say, "Okay, I'm rebooting now" while you sit and play Cookie Clicker for five minutes pretending to do it because you "know" that's not the problem. You might get surprised and find that your problem isn't as exotic and unique as you thought it was, or that your list of "everything" to try doesn't really include everything.(*)
And if you do get to the end of the script without fixing it, the upper tier support person will have reasonable confidence that you do indeed have a non-trivial problem.
(*) Personal anecdote: My wife's laptop had a flaky USB port. After checking all the easy stuff I got on the phone with tech support. "Turn off the computer, remove the battery, and hold the power button down for 60 seconds." What? That's ridiculous! There's no way that'll fix it! But I did it anyway. Guess what? It started working, and has worked flawlessly since then.
I'd rather not get painted as a victim, because I feel pretty fortunate.
That's called "Stockholm Syndrome". Call me if you need help. If you can't talk because someone else is in your dingy little cubicle just pretend like you're ordering pizza and I'll know.
Seriously, I was in the video game industry for a few years back in the mid 90s. I worked at one place that was great, another that was absolutely freakin' miserable. Strangely both had roughly the same hours and pay; the difference was in the people. The first place was full of people who loved what they were doing and management that more or less supported them at it. The second place had the morale of a slave galley and a management to match.
And the headline "Stress is driving developers away" was old news even then.
"Infosec professionals do not generally blindly click "install" but actually pay attention to what's going on, and aren't as easy to trick to install secondary offers."
First: What the fuck is a "Technologist?" Personally, I reffer to myself as a Pornomancer, but what that means outside of my secret closet in the basement, I'm not sure.
You're right, you should question who is saying this. Lauren has been around forever, editor of the Privacy Digest and frequent contributor to the Risks Digest. He has street cred in the world of privacy activism. Personally I don't always agree with what he has to say (I find him somewhat alarmist) but he's certainly earned my respect over the decades. He's not just some schmuck with a blog and an axe to grind. (FWIW I've never met the man, I just know him from his writings.)
I've been saying this for 14 years now. Want to shove the final knife in America? Send a suicide bomber to blow up a long, crowded security checkpoint at an airport. You'll completely shut down air travel while we try to figure out how to secure the by-definition insecure side of the checkpoint. Better, send guys to multiple airports, and if you have any left send a few to sports stadiums and other places with moronic security bottlenecks. You'll see the US collectively wetting ourselves to shred the Constitution in the name of safety.
That this hasn't happened yet tells me that either the terrorists are really, really dumb or that maybe, just maybe, there really isn't an army of turban-clad boogeymen just waiting to pounce.
I have a sweet high-paying job that might not last forever. Rather than risk losing it at some unknown time in the future and having to take a pay cut with a new job, should I just switch careers now and guarantee that I take a huge pay cut right away? PS., I'm barely scraping by now. I couldn't possibly support my family on less than the almost quarter million a year that I'm making now.
Sounds similar to us. We're not totally open, we're broken up into rooms of about 6-10 engineers each. This is pretty much ideal for the way I work. I can talk with (and overhear) people working on the same projects I am, but I'm not bothered by lots of extraneous stuff. The rest of the office -- phone booths, conference rooms, alternative spaces, flexible hours -- all sound similar. We've always had engineers working remotely, so the concept of working somewhere outside the actual office isn't foreign to anyone. People work from home, or from coffee shops, or from wherever all the time with no advance notice. In the summer I often decide it's just too damn nice a day out so I head home, make a big pitcher of lemonade, and work from my deck overlooking the woods.
I think that's actually the key. They office layout itself isn't terribly important; the important part is that everyone's treated like grown-ups.
I find it a bit strange Guiness Records only examined the footage before granting the record.
Wait, seriously? The Guinness endorsement was the only thing giving this a shred of credibility in my mind. If they really only saw the video then shame on them. They've been suckered.
Wish I knew for sure. This bit from the CBC site is the only thing I've seen which suggests that all the Guinness Book people saw was a video:
"Duru had been working on a prototype for about five years and last August filmed himself flying his new machine over the lake, which is about 130 kilometres north of Montreal, before contacting Guinness.
"Guinness verified the footage and announced the record on its website Friday."
No vertical tabs 10 years after widescreen displays started spreading widely?
Yeah, Tree Style Tabs is the killer feature that's keeping me with Firefox. There are a couple of Chrome extensions that kinda-sorta-not-quite do the same thing, but nothing that just moves the damn tabs to the side so I can have a dozen open and still read them. I'm probably stuck with FF until Chrome has a suitable substitute or FF breaks it entirely.
Consider this: They're paying you to spend a full day at each gas station doing firmware updates. If they care about the time it takes you should be able to get them to spring for a bunch of laptops so you can load all the pumps at once, properly, without resorting to VMs and trickery. Issuing you 16 laptops so you can do three or four stations in a day is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring three or four more technicians as babysitters. Argue your case from that perspective and don't bother with the half-ass solution. If they don't go for it, then find a good book and keep doing it one pump at a time. They've decided that you're worth the expense.
This is pretty much the thing, at least here in Michigan. For the sake of argument I won't even accuse politicians of spending on pet projects -- schools are partly funded by gas taxes. Average fuel economy is going up, which means that average gas tax revenue is going down. We just had a big referendum to try to fix the problem. Trouble is, everything is interconnected. Change the law so more gas tax goes to roads and the schools suffer, so you raise the regular sales tax to restore funding to the schools, but the sales tax just goes into the general fund, so you need rules to assure that schools don't get stolen from by other general-fund needs, and so on. What we got was a huge clusterfuck of interconnected laws that nobody could make head or tail of. What was presented as a vote to fund road repair turned into a major shell game and nobody was sure where the money was actually going to end up. People didn't just vote "No", they voted "Hell, no!"
Anyway, I think the Oregon idea has merit. There is a privacy issue, but they're addressing that: "Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking." It might still track out-of-state miles, though. They could easily add a GPS that records nothing and is only used to trigger when the odometer should be running. The state would get the number of in-state taxable miles and no other information. They could also make a sliding rate based on vehicle weight, and even give a further discount for hybrids and electric vehicles if they wanted to provide environmental incentives. It could work without getting all Big Brothery.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad that works for you, but you do realize that there are an awful lot of contractors who sign contracts stipulating that they'll be available certain hours, work in a certain place, and even dress a certain way? You're certainly within your rights to respond to such a contract with, "If you're going to treat me like an employee, then I want the full package." A lot of other people would rather be considered contractors despite the employee-like restrictions. It's not a black-and-white contractor-with-only-acceptance-criteria versus employee-with-working-restrictions choice for everyone.
To summarize the linked page...
Intended Use Cases:
Really, the only type of programming not listed there is hard real-time. Way to narrow your focus, guys.
Ah, countering Dice clickbait with Medium clickbait. Well played!
No, you misunderstand. You're right that it goes to all contacts indiscriminately. You don't get to pick and choose who. But it's so much better than that. You don't enable it. You don't even have to have any equipment that runs Windows 10. Say you have a guest that you give access to. If they have a Windows 10 machine with this "feature" enabled, the password is shared to all of their contacts. Brilliant!
You know the nice thing about Wikipedia? When you find poorly written or factually incorrect articles you can actually do something about it instead of just whining about it on an unrelated website.
Read the article? There is no article. There are six tweets (numbered and linked individually), a graph with data sets helpfully labeled "1", "2", "3", "4", and "5" but no other description, and a PDF of the test questions. And some comment about students not understanding the concept of "sparse arrays", but since the term is completely defined in the test materials I can only assume the real concern is that students can't be bothered to read the "unimportant" introductory material before trying to answer the actual test questions.
What do you mean, confusing? There's a link to a jpg that has a lot of lines, and some of the lines are clearly higher than other lines so obviously that means something good.
It's great that I no longer want to eat chips and cake, but now I've got one hell of a craving to eat a cardigan sweater!
I've got to hang with Theaetetus here. I'm all for poly marriages, but existing inheritance, tax, insurance, etc. laws don't handle more than two people well. Gay marriage doesn't run up against any existing law except the one that says "no gay marriage". You don't have to change anything else when you say, "You know all those laws about a man and woman being married? Yeah, they apply to two dudes or two chicks, too." To include polys you have to redefine how inheritance is divided, how taxes are paid, who's eligible for insurance, etc. etc.
There also need to be new laws for situations that just can't occur in a two-person marriage. For example, what happens when one person wants out of a poly group? With a two-person marriage, a divorce necessarily means the end of a marriage. With a poly group one person leaving is not necessarily the end. What about when one person is unwillingly pushed out of a poly group? Or if the group fissures into two or more sub-groups? What happens if a child of someone in the group turns 18, should they be allowed to marry into the group? Does it make a difference if the child is adopted and not the biological offspring of any existing group member? If members can be added and removed, what are the implications of a continuous marriage that can outlive all of its individual members?
The laws could be changed to make poly unions work. The laws should be changed to make poly unions work. It's just that there are a lot of things that need to be examined for that to happen. It's not just a case of going from "two people of opposite sex" to "any two people". It's a serious qualitative change that will require qualitative changes to the law. Personally I'd love to see a serious proposal to change the laws in question and allow poly marriage. I think we could borrow from laws governing corporations to put something solid together. But I'm not a lawyer. I'll let someone else do the work. I'll vote for the result, to be sure, but I'm not going to kid myself that it's just a matter of adding "or more" between the words "two" and "people".
Courtesy of The Big Bang Theory....
Leonard: Jimmy, I'm kind of curious why you wanted to see me.
Jimmy: Okay, here it is. I have this great money-making idea. I just need a gear head to get it to the finish line.
Leonard: What's the idea?
Jimmy: This is just between us, right?
Leonard: Right.
Jimmy: Okay. What do you think about a pair of glasses that makes any movie you want into 3D?
Raj: That sounds amazing. First movie I'm watching, Annie.
Howard: How exactly would these glasses work?
Jimmy: How the hell should I know? That's why I need a nerd.
If Hillary can't even keep people in her own private prison, how can we expect her to run the country?
The notification is mostly a courtesy to the sheriff. Once the booms start, people are going to call the sheriff saying, "Things are going boom out here!" If you've notified them they can just say, "Yeah, Bob Smith's out making holes in his yard, he should be done by sunset." Otherwise they have to find the location of the booms and pay a visit to make sure it's just some guy on his own property and not some guy blowing up someone *else's* property for shits and giggles.
I say this having been on the receiving end of such visits more than once. (Sometimes when you notify them they drive out anyway, but that's mostly because they're bored and like to see stuff blowing up as much as anyone else.)
The tech support script is there for one reason -- to let the higher-tier support staff who have actual problem solving skills work on actual problems without wasting their time on people who need just need to be told that the "any" key isn't literally a key. It does this by letting people of lesser ability handle the easy stuff and -- this is key -- letting the upper tier know that the easy stuff has already been checked.
"But I've already checked the easy stuff. It's plugged in, I have tcpdump output, I can prove that it's an actual problem!" Maybe, maybe not. Think of it as an input validation problem. A web server should never implicitly trust what the browser sends, right? It's poor practice to let the browser do all the input validation and blindly accept it. The script is the tech support input validation step. You say you're an advanced user who's tried everything easy, but how does tech support know that? Just like 90% of drivers think they're above average, 90% of geeks think they're above making stupid mistakes. The very fact that you're quibbling over the terminology of "modem" vs. "router" makes be believe that you're someone with an over-inflated sense of their own abilities.
Let them run through the script. It's tedious. It's frustrating. But it does tend to check the stupid "is it plugged in stuff" that even the most tech-savvy can sometimes forget. When they ask you to do stuff, actually do it. Don't just say, "Okay, I'm rebooting now" while you sit and play Cookie Clicker for five minutes pretending to do it because you "know" that's not the problem. You might get surprised and find that your problem isn't as exotic and unique as you thought it was, or that your list of "everything" to try doesn't really include everything.(*)
And if you do get to the end of the script without fixing it, the upper tier support person will have reasonable confidence that you do indeed have a non-trivial problem.
(*) Personal anecdote: My wife's laptop had a flaky USB port. After checking all the easy stuff I got on the phone with tech support. "Turn off the computer, remove the battery, and hold the power button down for 60 seconds." What? That's ridiculous! There's no way that'll fix it! But I did it anyway. Guess what? It started working, and has worked flawlessly since then.
That's called "Stockholm Syndrome". Call me if you need help. If you can't talk because someone else is in your dingy little cubicle just pretend like you're ordering pizza and I'll know.
Seriously, I was in the video game industry for a few years back in the mid 90s. I worked at one place that was great, another that was absolutely freakin' miserable. Strangely both had roughly the same hours and pay; the difference was in the people. The first place was full of people who loved what they were doing and management that more or less supported them at it. The second place had the morale of a slave galley and a management to match.
And the headline "Stress is driving developers away" was old news even then.
FTFY.
You're right, you should question who is saying this. Lauren has been around forever, editor of the Privacy Digest and frequent contributor to the Risks Digest. He has street cred in the world of privacy activism. Personally I don't always agree with what he has to say (I find him somewhat alarmist) but he's certainly earned my respect over the decades. He's not just some schmuck with a blog and an axe to grind. (FWIW I've never met the man, I just know him from his writings.)
Ooh, if they can extend that to automatically classify photos with tags like "FFM", "ladyboy", and "bukkake" I predict a HUGE market.
I've been saying this for 14 years now. Want to shove the final knife in America? Send a suicide bomber to blow up a long, crowded security checkpoint at an airport. You'll completely shut down air travel while we try to figure out how to secure the by-definition insecure side of the checkpoint. Better, send guys to multiple airports, and if you have any left send a few to sports stadiums and other places with moronic security bottlenecks. You'll see the US collectively wetting ourselves to shred the Constitution in the name of safety.
That this hasn't happened yet tells me that either the terrorists are really, really dumb or that maybe, just maybe, there really isn't an army of turban-clad boogeymen just waiting to pounce.
Dear Slashdot,
I have a sweet high-paying job that might not last forever. Rather than risk losing it at some unknown time in the future and having to take a pay cut with a new job, should I just switch careers now and guarantee that I take a huge pay cut right away? PS., I'm barely scraping by now. I couldn't possibly support my family on less than the almost quarter million a year that I'm making now.
I know trendy coffee places are expensive, but no matter where you are $1 billion a year is a serious habit!
Sounds similar to us. We're not totally open, we're broken up into rooms of about 6-10 engineers each. This is pretty much ideal for the way I work. I can talk with (and overhear) people working on the same projects I am, but I'm not bothered by lots of extraneous stuff. The rest of the office -- phone booths, conference rooms, alternative spaces, flexible hours -- all sound similar. We've always had engineers working remotely, so the concept of working somewhere outside the actual office isn't foreign to anyone. People work from home, or from coffee shops, or from wherever all the time with no advance notice. In the summer I often decide it's just too damn nice a day out so I head home, make a big pitcher of lemonade, and work from my deck overlooking the woods.
I think that's actually the key. They office layout itself isn't terribly important; the important part is that everyone's treated like grown-ups.
Wait, seriously? The Guinness endorsement was the only thing giving this a shred of credibility in my mind. If they really only saw the video then shame on them. They've been suckered.
Wish I knew for sure. This bit from the CBC site is the only thing I've seen which suggests that all the Guinness Book people saw was a video:
"Duru had been working on a prototype for about five years and last August filmed himself flying his new machine over the lake, which is about 130 kilometres north of Montreal, before contacting Guinness.
"Guinness verified the footage and announced the record on its website Friday."
Yeah, Tree Style Tabs is the killer feature that's keeping me with Firefox. There are a couple of Chrome extensions that kinda-sorta-not-quite do the same thing, but nothing that just moves the damn tabs to the side so I can have a dozen open and still read them. I'm probably stuck with FF until Chrome has a suitable substitute or FF breaks it entirely.
Consider this: They're paying you to spend a full day at each gas station doing firmware updates. If they care about the time it takes you should be able to get them to spring for a bunch of laptops so you can load all the pumps at once, properly, without resorting to VMs and trickery. Issuing you 16 laptops so you can do three or four stations in a day is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring three or four more technicians as babysitters. Argue your case from that perspective and don't bother with the half-ass solution. If they don't go for it, then find a good book and keep doing it one pump at a time. They've decided that you're worth the expense.
This is pretty much the thing, at least here in Michigan. For the sake of argument I won't even accuse politicians of spending on pet projects -- schools are partly funded by gas taxes. Average fuel economy is going up, which means that average gas tax revenue is going down. We just had a big referendum to try to fix the problem. Trouble is, everything is interconnected. Change the law so more gas tax goes to roads and the schools suffer, so you raise the regular sales tax to restore funding to the schools, but the sales tax just goes into the general fund, so you need rules to assure that schools don't get stolen from by other general-fund needs, and so on. What we got was a huge clusterfuck of interconnected laws that nobody could make head or tail of. What was presented as a vote to fund road repair turned into a major shell game and nobody was sure where the money was actually going to end up. People didn't just vote "No", they voted "Hell, no!"
Anyway, I think the Oregon idea has merit. There is a privacy issue, but they're addressing that: "Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking." It might still track out-of-state miles, though. They could easily add a GPS that records nothing and is only used to trigger when the odometer should be running. The state would get the number of in-state taxable miles and no other information. They could also make a sliding rate based on vehicle weight, and even give a further discount for hybrids and electric vehicles if they wanted to provide environmental incentives. It could work without getting all Big Brothery.