It doesn't help when the signage is wrong. Until recently the small roundabouts in my residential neighborhood were given signage just like a regular intersection. The primary direction had no signage, the secondary direction had a stop sign before entering the roundabout. Lots of people interpreted that to mean that people entering from the primary street had right-of-way over people already in the roundabout.
It only took about 10 years to get the signage changed. Now all four entrances have yield signs, and there are some very large "one way" arrows indicating the traffic flow around the circle. And I still saw one jerkwad yesterday go the wrong way just because he couldn't be arsed to drive 3/4 of the way around the circle.
We'll figure it out eventually, but it'll probably take at least a generation. And hopefully by then autonomous vehicles will make it a non-issue. Though I really don't think people are ever going to go for this "intelligent" constant flow model. It may ultimately be faster and safer, but people are going to freak out when their autonomous vehicle drives straight into an intersection full of steady cross-traffic without even slowing down.
Take it from someone who regularly interviews on campus -- a lot of seniors in CS (and related fields) can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I actually had one kid tell me, "Well, nobody codes without Google these days!" That may be true, but I do expect you to be able to write a basic 'for' loop in your preferred language without having to look it up. It's not a trick question or obscure trivia.
A lot of students are very good. They're the reason we keep recruiting on campus. But the others... Hoo boy. What the hell have they been doing the past four years?
So $80M over the course of about 6 years is $13.3M/year. Out of an annual budget of $18.4B. That's 0.07% of the annual NASA budget. Okay, so somebody made a bad decision. Reprimand them, do what you have to internally to avoid such decisions in the future, and let's move on. It's not enough that anyone outside of NASA needs to get their undies in a bunch over. If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.
Access to a sensor, any sensor, enables information to leak. Microphone, camera, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, thermometer, battery level... These can all be used to glean some amount of information beyond what they're explicitly intended to gather.
Browser manufacturers, KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF! Quit giving websites access to everything. If there seems to be a good reason to give sensor data, average it over time or fuzz it to reduce malicious use. And give the user control over which sensors you report to which sites, with what degree of precision and accuracy. Too complicated? Too much for your users to handle? Then you should err on the side of privacy and just not give access to third parties.
I read the article and complaint. Lots of allegations of wrong-doing, but I don't see a shred of evidence presented anywhere. Maybe the legal complaint is the wrong place for a technical discussion, but I'd like to see some sort of evidence of the app sending data back to the mothership. Anyone know where to find a good technical analysis?
To save a bit of money, the content on open.gov is moving to whitehouse.gov.
Except, it won't be. It will be removed long enough for people to forget that it ever existed. Then there'll be no need to put it on whitehouse.gov. Problem solved.
This isn't just knocking Trump and praising Obama. I thought Obama's initial announcement of the site was disingenuous and it would be "open" exactly as far as the White House wanted us to see in and no more.
The galling part is that Trump's administration doesn't even have the respect to lie convincingly. "We're closing it to save $70K over four years." Yeah, bullshit. That's $50 per day, probably less than the White House spends on toilet paper. That $70K is literally less than the amount of money they wipe their asses with. They're not doing this to "save money".
"Favorite" is such a loaded word, and conditional on mood. I think any of these could be my "favorite":
Forbidden Planet
Great concepts and cinematography. Huge sense of wonder.
A Clockwork Orange
I absolutely adore the slang and Malcolm McDowell's performance. Plus Kubrick.
Star Wars
Came out in my formative years. What can I say?
Aliens
Saw it at a midnight showing. Had to check the backseat of my car before I got in.
The 5th Element
A better Heavy Metal movie than Heavy Metal. Plus Gary Oldman.
The Martian
Science FTW!
(Geez, Slashdot, how can you screw up definition list formatting so badly?)
Wage disparity would end almost overnight if we got rid of this ridiculous notion that wages should be a secret. If you knew what everyone else was being paid you'd immediately know if you were getting the short end of the stick. It would be obvious if there was any systemic bias in wages.
Really, why wouldn't you want your peers to know what you make? The only reasons I can only think of are, "I might be getting paid too little and they'd all think less of me if they knew", or "I might be getting paid too much and they'd take it away from me to make it fair".
Keeping it a secret only benefits unscrupulous employers. The ones who will give you a low starting offer and low raises on the grounds that you'll never really know how much better you could be doing if you went elsewhere.
Yup. "Rocky and roughly the right size" is a long way away from "Earth-like". Let's reserve that term for when we find something that is, you know, like Earth. As an absolute minimum requirement I'd propose that an "Earth-like" planet must have conditions somewhere on the surface that allow an open pool of water to remain a liquid. Ideally I'd reserve the term to be used for a planet on which you could stand naked and take a deep breath without dying, but until we find a planet like that I'll go with "liquid water stays liquid".
This all sounds good on the surface, but I sense a trap waiting to be sprung. I have a feeling that the "best available science" and "reproducible" requirements are specifically designed to eliminate any policies related to climate change. "It's not the best science available because I can find one guy with a science degree who disagrees with it. And you can't prove that global warming is real or is caused by anthropogenic sources, either. Even if you could, you'd need another planet to reproduce such claims! Ha! Suck it, libtards! Drilling starts tomorrow!"
Nintendo should be charging extra. Look at it this way, that's 55 more hours playing Zelda than he'd normally get. 55 extra hours of gameplay, all at no additional cost!
The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect.
Exactly this. We ask candidates to code a simple function. It's not to see if they know some trivia or if they can place all the semicolons correctly, it's to see if they understand basic programming concepts. Once they get the basic code down, then the interview can start. What's the algorithmic complexity? How does it handle edge cases? How does it handle malformed input? Does it scale? How would you test it?
Yeah, we know you're never going to actually code a toy problem like this on the job. But we only have an hour or two to explain the problem, have you code it, and discuss your solution. We don't have time to have you code anything non-trivial.
Later, when we finally got enough budget for me to be on the other side of the table, I was shocked at how many then recent CS grads (early 2Ks) failed at both.
Tell me about it. I've been to on-campus career fairs where by the end of the day I just want to say, "Pick a language. Write Hello, World." Because I've talked to graduating seniors who couldn't do it! Literally, they could not code Hello, World in the language of their choice. WTF, people? What have you been doing for the past four years?
I've been in the industry for just over 25 years. I've worked for start-ups and I've worked for mega-corps. My current gig has by far the best group of programmers I've ever worked with. I attribute this to our interview process, including the coding portion. No apologies for it. When done right it really works.
A Rolex - lasts for generations, holds and even increases in value with time. The next generation will value it.
Not true! My Rolex barely lasted a month! I'd have demanded my $20 back from the vendor except I can't remember what street corner the guy was standing on.
The testing software takes over the computer ("securely" according to the instructional video, FWIW) and doesn't let you switch out to other programs while you are in the test environment. It looks like the TouchBar bypasses that restriction.
Oh, if there's any justice at all in the world all the exam software will do is pop open a window that reads, "You let someone else load software onto the same laptop you use to work on client cases? YOU FAIL!"
If I'm checking messages / emails / whatnots while watching a movie or tv program, the movie or program has failed.
Okay, I accept this premise. Most programs have failed. They are not sufficient to be the sole focus of my attention for an hour or two. But you know, sometimes they're good enough to have on in the background while I'm doing something else that's *also* not sufficient to be the sole focus of my attention. I can listen to an audio program while I work on chores or crafts. I can watch TV and mostly ignore the video. Or I can watch 3D TV and mostly ignore the video. But if I'm going to mostly ignore the video anyway I'd rather mostly ignore 2D video where I can just glance up to see the interesting bits, rather than mostly ignore 3D video where I have to find special glasses, put them on, and rewind to catch an interesting bit that's already gone by.
This will make the *best* video game in about 5000 years when Lara Croft's great-great-...-great-granddaughter breaks in and raids the Ancient Cursed Tomb of Chernobyl.
tl;dr "Gosh. The marketing guys segment their demographics by generation, and they told us each generation needs their own UI. Here's a graph to back that up. No, we don't know what each generation's needs are, but by golly, look at these graphs! Four generations! Also, we've noticed that you wacky users actually have all sorts of different screen sizes. Who knew? So to accommodate everyone we give you two traditional toolbar layouts, one vertical layout, and our very own innovative new 'Notebook Bar'. (Any resemblance to the 'ribbon' used by the Leading Brand of Office Suite is purely a coincidience, we assure you.)"
BTW, what's with the ugly dithered 16-color indexed screenshots? Is that really the best way to introduce people to your fancy new UI?
Really, if you can't accept someone looking at your stuff you should maybe rethink this whole storing-it-on-their-servers thing. Why in the world does anyone think a little thing like a privacy policy would stop them? (Not picking on Evernote specifically, the same goes for any online data service.)
Why is SQL injection still a thing? Hell, why is SQL still a thing? I have nothing against relational databases, but the Structured Query Language itself is an accident waiting to happen. Why the hell aren't people using proper language bindings instead of trying to pass control and data interleaved into a single text stream?
It's not like your employer has to prove to anyone that you didn't perform your duties. Most places in the US it just doesn't matter. They can fire you for absolutely no reason at all, and you can't do diddly-squat about it unless you can demonstrate that it was racially or sexually motivated.
The nice thing about KeePass is that the database format is documented and the encryption can be done with gnupg. There are other clients available, or write your own. I use my own command-line Python script to read/write the DB on my computers and a third-party client on my phone, with Google Drive to keep them in sync.
The API defined in this specification is used to determine the battery status of the hosting device. The information disclosed has minimal impact on privacy or fingerprinting, and therefore is exposed without permission grants. For example, authors cannot directly know if there is a battery or not in the hosting device.
From now on, let's just assume that any information can be mis-used and not send it without explicit permission, okay?
How about the Ambient Light API? And any other sensor-exposing APIs that may be lurking in there? Or, if somebody really thinks there's a good reason to allow sites to read arbitrary sensors, give the user fine-grained control over which sites have access to which sensors. Preferably with the default access being "NONE".
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't help when the signage is wrong. Until recently the small roundabouts in my residential neighborhood were given signage just like a regular intersection. The primary direction had no signage, the secondary direction had a stop sign before entering the roundabout. Lots of people interpreted that to mean that people entering from the primary street had right-of-way over people already in the roundabout.
It only took about 10 years to get the signage changed. Now all four entrances have yield signs, and there are some very large "one way" arrows indicating the traffic flow around the circle. And I still saw one jerkwad yesterday go the wrong way just because he couldn't be arsed to drive 3/4 of the way around the circle.
We'll figure it out eventually, but it'll probably take at least a generation. And hopefully by then autonomous vehicles will make it a non-issue. Though I really don't think people are ever going to go for this "intelligent" constant flow model. It may ultimately be faster and safer, but people are going to freak out when their autonomous vehicle drives straight into an intersection full of steady cross-traffic without even slowing down.
Take it from someone who regularly interviews on campus -- a lot of seniors in CS (and related fields) can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. I actually had one kid tell me, "Well, nobody codes without Google these days!" That may be true, but I do expect you to be able to write a basic 'for' loop in your preferred language without having to look it up. It's not a trick question or obscure trivia.
A lot of students are very good. They're the reason we keep recruiting on campus. But the others... Hoo boy. What the hell have they been doing the past four years?
A couple employers ago I actually had "reading Slashdot" as part of my job description. Posting wasn't specifically covered though.
So $80M over the course of about 6 years is $13.3M/year. Out of an annual budget of $18.4B. That's 0.07% of the annual NASA budget. Okay, so somebody made a bad decision. Reprimand them, do what you have to internally to avoid such decisions in the future, and let's move on. It's not enough that anyone outside of NASA needs to get their undies in a bunch over. If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.
Access to a sensor, any sensor, enables information to leak. Microphone, camera, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, thermometer, battery level... These can all be used to glean some amount of information beyond what they're explicitly intended to gather.
Browser manufacturers, KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF! Quit giving websites access to everything. If there seems to be a good reason to give sensor data, average it over time or fuzz it to reduce malicious use. And give the user control over which sensors you report to which sites, with what degree of precision and accuracy. Too complicated? Too much for your users to handle? Then you should err on the side of privacy and just not give access to third parties.
I read the article and complaint. Lots of allegations of wrong-doing, but I don't see a shred of evidence presented anywhere. Maybe the legal complaint is the wrong place for a technical discussion, but I'd like to see some sort of evidence of the app sending data back to the mothership. Anyone know where to find a good technical analysis?
Except, it won't be. It will be removed long enough for people to forget that it ever existed. Then there'll be no need to put it on whitehouse.gov. Problem solved.
This isn't just knocking Trump and praising Obama. I thought Obama's initial announcement of the site was disingenuous and it would be "open" exactly as far as the White House wanted us to see in and no more.
The galling part is that Trump's administration doesn't even have the respect to lie convincingly. "We're closing it to save $70K over four years." Yeah, bullshit. That's $50 per day, probably less than the White House spends on toilet paper. That $70K is literally less than the amount of money they wipe their asses with. They're not doing this to "save money".
"Favorite" is such a loaded word, and conditional on mood. I think any of these could be my "favorite":
Forbidden Planet Great concepts and cinematography. Huge sense of wonder. A Clockwork Orange I absolutely adore the slang and Malcolm McDowell's performance. Plus Kubrick. Star Wars Came out in my formative years. What can I say? Aliens Saw it at a midnight showing. Had to check the backseat of my car before I got in. The 5th Element A better Heavy Metal movie than Heavy Metal. Plus Gary Oldman. The Martian Science FTW!(Geez, Slashdot, how can you screw up definition list formatting so badly?)
Wage disparity would end almost overnight if we got rid of this ridiculous notion that wages should be a secret. If you knew what everyone else was being paid you'd immediately know if you were getting the short end of the stick. It would be obvious if there was any systemic bias in wages.
Really, why wouldn't you want your peers to know what you make? The only reasons I can only think of are, "I might be getting paid too little and they'd all think less of me if they knew", or "I might be getting paid too much and they'd take it away from me to make it fair".
Keeping it a secret only benefits unscrupulous employers. The ones who will give you a low starting offer and low raises on the grounds that you'll never really know how much better you could be doing if you went elsewhere.
Adam Ruins Everything - Why You Should Tell Coworkers Your Salary
Yup. "Rocky and roughly the right size" is a long way away from "Earth-like". Let's reserve that term for when we find something that is, you know, like Earth. As an absolute minimum requirement I'd propose that an "Earth-like" planet must have conditions somewhere on the surface that allow an open pool of water to remain a liquid. Ideally I'd reserve the term to be used for a planet on which you could stand naked and take a deep breath without dying, but until we find a planet like that I'll go with "liquid water stays liquid".
This all sounds good on the surface, but I sense a trap waiting to be sprung. I have a feeling that the "best available science" and "reproducible" requirements are specifically designed to eliminate any policies related to climate change. "It's not the best science available because I can find one guy with a science degree who disagrees with it. And you can't prove that global warming is real or is caused by anthropogenic sources, either. Even if you could, you'd need another planet to reproduce such claims! Ha! Suck it, libtards! Drilling starts tomorrow!"
Nintendo should be charging extra. Look at it this way, that's 55 more hours playing Zelda than he'd normally get. 55 extra hours of gameplay, all at no additional cost!
Exactly this. We ask candidates to code a simple function. It's not to see if they know some trivia or if they can place all the semicolons correctly, it's to see if they understand basic programming concepts. Once they get the basic code down, then the interview can start. What's the algorithmic complexity? How does it handle edge cases? How does it handle malformed input? Does it scale? How would you test it?
Yeah, we know you're never going to actually code a toy problem like this on the job. But we only have an hour or two to explain the problem, have you code it, and discuss your solution. We don't have time to have you code anything non-trivial.
Tell me about it. I've been to on-campus career fairs where by the end of the day I just want to say, "Pick a language. Write Hello, World." Because I've talked to graduating seniors who couldn't do it! Literally, they could not code Hello, World in the language of their choice. WTF, people? What have you been doing for the past four years?
I've been in the industry for just over 25 years. I've worked for start-ups and I've worked for mega-corps. My current gig has by far the best group of programmers I've ever worked with. I attribute this to our interview process, including the coding portion. No apologies for it. When done right it really works.
Not true! My Rolex barely lasted a month! I'd have demanded my $20 back from the vendor except I can't remember what street corner the guy was standing on.
Oh, if there's any justice at all in the world all the exam software will do is pop open a window that reads, "You let someone else load software onto the same laptop you use to work on client cases? YOU FAIL!"
Okay, I accept this premise. Most programs have failed. They are not sufficient to be the sole focus of my attention for an hour or two. But you know, sometimes they're good enough to have on in the background while I'm doing something else that's *also* not sufficient to be the sole focus of my attention. I can listen to an audio program while I work on chores or crafts. I can watch TV and mostly ignore the video. Or I can watch 3D TV and mostly ignore the video. But if I'm going to mostly ignore the video anyway I'd rather mostly ignore 2D video where I can just glance up to see the interesting bits, rather than mostly ignore 3D video where I have to find special glasses, put them on, and rewind to catch an interesting bit that's already gone by.
This will make the *best* video game in about 5000 years when Lara Croft's great-great-...-great-granddaughter breaks in and raids the Ancient Cursed Tomb of Chernobyl.
tl;dr "Gosh. The marketing guys segment their demographics by generation, and they told us each generation needs their own UI. Here's a graph to back that up. No, we don't know what each generation's needs are, but by golly, look at these graphs! Four generations! Also, we've noticed that you wacky users actually have all sorts of different screen sizes. Who knew? So to accommodate everyone we give you two traditional toolbar layouts, one vertical layout, and our very own innovative new 'Notebook Bar'. (Any resemblance to the 'ribbon' used by the Leading Brand of Office Suite is purely a coincidience, we assure you.)"
BTW, what's with the ugly dithered 16-color indexed screenshots? Is that really the best way to introduce people to your fancy new UI?
Really, if you can't accept someone looking at your stuff you should maybe rethink this whole storing-it-on-their-servers thing. Why in the world does anyone think a little thing like a privacy policy would stop them? (Not picking on Evernote specifically, the same goes for any online data service.)
Why is SQL injection still a thing? Hell, why is SQL still a thing? I have nothing against relational databases, but the Structured Query Language itself is an accident waiting to happen. Why the hell aren't people using proper language bindings instead of trying to pass control and data interleaved into a single text stream?
I once tried to use a regex to parse XML and got caught in an infinite recursion of problems.
It's not like your employer has to prove to anyone that you didn't perform your duties. Most places in the US it just doesn't matter. They can fire you for absolutely no reason at all, and you can't do diddly-squat about it unless you can demonstrate that it was racially or sexually motivated.
The nice thing about KeePass is that the database format is documented and the encryption can be done with gnupg. There are other clients available, or write your own. I use my own command-line Python script to read/write the DB on my computers and a third-party client on my phone, with Google Drive to keep them in sync.
From the actual spec (emphasis mine):
From now on, let's just assume that any information can be mis-used and not send it without explicit permission, okay?
How about the Ambient Light API? And any other sensor-exposing APIs that may be lurking in there? Or, if somebody really thinks there's a good reason to allow sites to read arbitrary sensors, give the user fine-grained control over which sites have access to which sensors. Preferably with the default access being "NONE".