Rare earth metal, despite it's name, is actually much more common then the name leads you to believe. The problem is extracting it, however, since deposits might be spread thin or in difficult to reach places (too deep). China has the advantage of cheap labor in dealing with these issues simply by throwing more people at it.
Is mining really that labor intensive? Especially for something that involves digging up mass quantities of earth and refining out the trace metals?
I thought something like rare earth mining would just employ huge earth moving equipment with comparatively few people to run it.
How much of a mine's costs go to labor?
I would think that China's bigger advantage is in less strict environmental standards.
Um, no. We are not in Afganistan for the minerals. Sending valuable peolpe and equipment into a mine in a country where explosives-enthusiastic people want you dead is just insane.
Seriously, if you get a bonus check at your job, for $10k and you go to invest it are you going to be remotely tempted to chip in on a "New Long Term Afgani Business Venture?"
Because if that appeals I can connect you to a very well known Nigean Prince with even better offers.
That depends on what backroom deals I get from the US Government - if they say "Hey, we want you to build a mine in Afghanistan, we can't pay you to do it, but here's a $100M contract to purchase output from this mine. Don't worry about security, we'll make sure that anything you dig up can be safely delivered. Feel free to open it under the banner of your Kenyan subsidiary."
It's more akin to letting your "little head" do the thinking instead of the head that has a brain... Nope, doctor analogy fails hard here:( sucks to be you.
Where you got "doctors from the same country" from a situation involving foreign corporations building critical infrastructure for their competition I'll never know.
Because just like a single person doesn't have the ability to know anough about medical science to adequately treat any possible ailment, few countries have the resources or political will to fund development of enough industry to support all of their "critical infrastructure" needs.
Do you really expect Australia to develop chip foundaries, component manufacturers, software development, etc to build all of their government's electronics? What about patented chipsets that they may need? Will Cisco pass on their custom ASIC designs so Australia can build their own high capacity routers? Will Qualcomm pass on their patented CDMA chip designs so Australia can build their own government issued cell phones? Should they refuse to buy cell towers from Ericsson because they are "foreign" and spend 10 times more building their own? Should they give up all of the fighter jets in their air force because they are foreign made, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars inventing their own?
Surely they can't trust any foreign country because even though it's friendly now, it doesn't mean that it will be friendly a decade from now.
It does not matter one whit if they're releasing everything including the ASIC code, masks, etc.
Don't let foreign assholes make your critical infrastructure. Period. Don't ship anything out of country. Don't rely on the companies in your country not to be idiots. If it is going into critical infrastructure you'd best have control of it.
Yea, it will put a screeching halt to the wonderful progress we've had and that is unfortunate but China and others seem to want to slit our throats so we should slit their profits.
Isn't that kind of like saying "Don't trust asshole doctors to treat your complicated medical condition. If you can't treat it yourself, just slit your throat now. Yea, it will kill you right now, and that is unfortunate, but at least the doctors won't profit from it".
Your child is still a person. Even if they are 3 or 14... they are still a person. They aren't possessions or an animal of a different species.
For that reason any tech like this makes me nervous. When you say "this is how a control my dog" I see a bit of red.
Right, my child is more important to me than my dog. So if I'm worried about not knowing where my dog is, I'm much more worried about not knowing where my child is.
Unless you're leaving your kid chained up in the backyard with a bowl of water and some chew toys 8 hours a day, I don't see how this is a valid comparison.
Right, it's not a valid comparison...If I left my child chained up in the back yard (or parked in front of the TV with a can of soda and bag of chips 8 hours a day), then it might be more of a valid comparison and I'd be less worried about where the child was. But, my child leaves the house much more than the dog...many children these days are placed in the hands of one or more caretakers (daycare, preschool, schools, relatives, paid childcare workers, etc) - sometimes more than one caretaker takes care of the child in a day... i.e. dad drops the child off at school, grandma picks him up after school, mom picks him up at grandma's house, which makes it harder to keep track of the child. Often the caretaker has more than one child to take care of, so my child is not their number one concern. In only takes a few seconds of inattention for my child to slip out the door of the childcare center, to be left behind after a field trip, etc.
Just like my dog's tracker can alert me when the dog leaves the house, my child's tracker could alert me and my wife if she's not in school between 8:30am and 11:30, and again if she's not at grandma's house from noon to 5pm. If grandma doesn't want to be tracked, I can turn off the alerts when the child is in her care, and only track in case of emergency.
Your child is still a person. Even if they are 3 or 14... they are still a person. They aren't possessions or an animal of a different species.
For that reason any tech like this makes me nervous. When you say "this is how a control my dog" I see a bit of red.
Right, my child is more important to me than my dog. So if I'm worried about not knowing where my dog is, I'm much more worried about not knowing where my child is. I'm not worried about her privacy when it comes to me knowing where she is - aside from my instincts to want to protect her, I'm legally responsible for her safety. I am more worried about who else might be able to track whatever device she's carrying.
When I was a kid, most of the families in our neighborhood had stay-at-home moms, and whenever us kids were someplace we shouldn't be or doing something we shouldn't be, our mom found out about it. Likewise if a strange car was spotted in the neighborhood, it was noticed, especially if the driver stopped to talk with kids. This is rarely the case nowadays.
DKIM my not validate the sender, but it is supposed to validate the mail server as you say. If you break a DKIM key you can send a mail from anywhere making it appear to be legitimately from a particular mail server even though it wasn't. If your mail servers allow unauthenticated email to be sent from them that is another problem that ought to be fixed. If you allow people to pretend to send email from your server than you are aiding spammers and spear fishers quite a bit.
But it's a misuse of DKIM to assume that a DKIM signed message validates the sender since it does no such thing. It makes it more likely that the sender is who he said it is since it validates the sending server, but it really does no validation of the sender himself. It's possible, even likely, that the mail server validated the sender, but that's outside of the scope of DKIM. Even the DKIM signature includes the entire message envelope, there's no guarantee that the message content wasn't altered.
DKIM is a spam reduction solution, and shouldn't be relied about to provide anything more. If you want to validate that the sender actually sent the message that you received, you need to use something like PGP which gives you more assurance that the message that the sender created on his computer is the message that you received.
I don't know if I'd put a tracker on my child. Maybe. but I do have a Tagg tracker on my dog.
I get a text alert anytime she leaves the "home zone" (which ranges to about 1/2 block from my house). The dog hasn't escaped from the yard since I started using it, but it's good peace of mind just in case she does - I can track her down easily and even if I'm at work, I'll know immediately if she gets out.
There are definitely privacy concerns, for example, anyone that looks at our Tagg activity will know when we're on vacation and where we are, and can pretty easily guess what time we go to work and what time we come home.
The Tagg device itself works very well - it's about the size of an adult's watch and is small enough to snap on the dog's collar. The battery lasts for about 2 weeks because the home docking station emits an RF signal that tells the device when it's in the home zone, so it doesn't waste battery power trying to get a GPS lock or talk to the cell phone network while the dog is at home. Even when the dog leaves the home zone, it doesn't use the GPS unless you explicitly request that the device be tracked through the website or smartphone app. When you request tracking, within a few minutes the device reports its GPS location every few minutes. If the device becomes detached from the dog's collar, it will notify you and report its location. It uses Verizon's cell phone network, so only works within cell phone range.
This was not a misuse of DKIM, or perhaps it was his own misuse in that he thinks DKIM validates the sender of an email. All it does is validate that the email originated from Google's mail servers, but it doesn't neccessarily mean that the address in the From: header wasn't spoofed before it was signed.
In any case, he found that Google (and others) are using an easily cracked 512 bit key, which they silently fixed with a 1024 bit key after he reported it to them by spoofing an email to appear as though it originated at Google.
There was no misuse, 512 bit keys are allowable under the DKIM spec, though they aren't recommended for long-lived keys.
Process it as a credit instead. Sure the merchant has to pay a higher transaction fee, but the card holder has all the power. The card issuing bank must honor any chargeback requests from the card holder and it is on the merchant to prove that the transaction is legit.
Using the debit card as a credit card doesn't give you any more protection under the law, it's still a debit card. Your bank/card issuer may choose to give you better protection than what's required under the law, but they don't have to.
And in the meantime, you've bounced 5 checks because you thought you had $1500 in the bank, but found that thieves drained $1200 of that over a few days.
Umm.. my credit union gives me the same protection for my debit as my credit for loss. but ONLY for usage as a credit card. I pretty much don't do debit transactions anymore with it anyways, I just get my spending money in cash at the start of the month from the bank teller..
What will your credit union do if someone steals your debit card number and empties your checking account, then you bounce a check to your landlord who charges you a $25 bounced check fee, and a $75 late fee, and requires you to pay via cashier's check for 6 months.
Will your credit union reimburse you for all of those expenses?
The thing is, if someone grabs your debit info and pin from a keypad, someone really messed up. I spent a few minutes googling for proof of what I know, but I can't find anything right now. Essentially, when a debit transaction is processed, it should be a public/private key transaction between the system and the keypad. If the keypad system doesn't do things it shouldn't like log keystrokes or card strip information, then it is technically impossible for anyone in between to steal your information. Think of it like logging into slashdot over https. If there is javascript on the page recording what you do, the security mechanism doesn't matter.
It's the whole credit card/debit system that's messed up - once someone hacks the PIN pad, they have full control over it and can collect whatever data they want (and can even pass the keystrokes to the "real" software to let the transaction complete as normal. No matter what security is in place, once the hacker controls the PIN pad, they can capture anything.
There is a simple answer, move the encryption to the credit card itself by using a smart card, but the banking industry in the USA hasn't caught up to the rest of the world in that regard. Even this isn't foolproof, but it's a lot safer than the current system.
But the bigger problem with banking is that it's ludicrously easy to use a fake check to draw against your bank account, and the "secret" numbers needed to do so are printed right on your checks so everyone you give a check to has the ability to "clone" fake checks for your account.
A local grocery store chain had a similar problem a few months back and that's when I decided to never use my ATM/Debit card for purchases -- once the thieves have your card number and PIN, they can suck money right out of your bank account.
For that matter, never use a debit card linked to your bank account - ask your bank for an ATM-only card and send back the debit card that looks like a credit card. If you want a credit card, use a credit card, at least if that number is stolen, thieves can't wipe out your bank account balance and cause you to start bouncing checks. Debit cards don't have the same protection as credit cards under the law, they have the same $50 liability cap if you report the loss of theft of the card within 2 business days, but if you don't report the loss or theft of your card within 2 business days, you could be liable for up to $500 of loss. And if you don't report it within 60 days after your bank statement is mailed, there is no cap on liability.
Many banks and debit card issuers offer better liability guarantees, but they aren't required to by law. And even if the bank refunds their own NSF fees for bounced checks, there's no guarantee that they'll refund bounced-check fees charged by all of the merchants you unknowingly sent bad checks to.
If you are going for a position where legacy code is a reality - I wouldn't hire you if you asked a question that depicted yourself to be either rather irritated by or incapable of dealing with legacy code. Positive attitude in interview, whine all you want when you get the job.
It really depends on whether the employer considers the code to be "bad", anyway. My guess is many would not fess up to the code being poor.
But by all means, you should ask all of those questions and go ahead and let it be known to your future employer that you don't want to touch any crusty old legacy code - it gives him more knowledge about you and makes it easier to make the correct hiring decision. It might hurt you, it could even help you, but no matter what, it will help you to land in the kind of job you want.
Work for a startup. Any place that has been around for any significant length of time is likely to have legacy code.
I've found that in many cases, the code written at a startup is even worse that legacy code - it was written to get the product out the door as quickly as possible, with the belief that it will be rearchitected and rewritten "in the next release".
I would never hire someone who questioned turnover rates and asked why the position was vacant. It is, quite frankly, none of the interviewee's business and conveys a kind of prima donna attitude.
As a hiring manager, I like when a candidate picks up on things like that and asks about the high turnover rate - it shows that he is looking at more than just the technical side of the job and is interested in the entire work environment. I want to make sure he's a good fit and feels comfortable working in the environment, otherwise if he's there for a couple months, runs into the same frustrations as the other programmers that left, he'll just be contributing to the turnover.
I have nothing to hide and no reason to hide it -- it's not like he won't find out about it if he accepts the job. If the high turnover came from a recent management change and change in direction of the company, I want him to know about it from the outset. If the high turnover came because half the development team got together and formed their own, competing company, I also want him to know about it.
Why do people relate intelligence with age? People do not get smarter the older they get, quite often the opposite as IQ tends to decrease with age. There are 3 year olds that are smarter then adults, and vice-versa. There are genius 3 year olds and stupid 3 year olds.
Because most people don't equate clinical IQ with "smart".
I know many highly intelligent people that lack a lot of every day common sense that "dumb" people have.
A 3 year old may have a higher IQ than a typical 40 year old, but no one would trust that 3 year old to live on his own.
Easy to use doesn't necessarily mean usable for the purpose.
My 10 year old cell phone was extremely easy to use - dial the number, press send, and voila, I just made a phone call. A 3 year old could do it.
My smartphone is much harder - unlock the phone, go to the home screen, find the dialer app, start it up, open the dial-pad, dial the number, and voila, I just made a phone call (unless it got dropped).
But my smart phone is still much more usable and useful than my old phone ever was despite being much harder to use.
Let's see how the uber-smart 3 year old handles multitasking on typical office apps - run a report from the ERP system, copy the last 2 years of performance metrics to a spreadsheet, run projections from the numbers, then move the key results to a powerpoint slide. All while carrying on an email conversation with your boss about why you don't have the presentation ready yet.
Unless the typical Win8 user uses their computer the same way as a 3 year old, I'm not sure why it's relevant how well a 3 year old can use it.
Because it's just so hard to add a widget to your homescreen that will turn your bluetooth on and off with just one touch.
And as an added bonus, increased battery life. Is that so hard to understand?
I like to keep my phone in my pocket, it's much less convient to switch audio devices (or just leave my desk to go to a meeting) if I have to take the phone out of my pocket or backpack, wake it up, unlock it, find the bluetooth icon on the main home screen, turn on blue tooth, relock it/turn off the screen, then put it back in my pocket..... if I have to go through all of that, I'd just plug in a cable. Isn't ease of use kind of the point of bluetooth? It automatically connects to paired devices when they are in range so I don't have to do anything.
I didn't fact check all of the companies on your list, but First Solar is not "near bankruptcy" - it's still trading on the NASDAQ with a stock price of $23, or a market cap of around $2B. In its last quarterly report, they claimed to have almost $700M of cash on hand, with $900M in revenues and 25% gross profit.
Even if much of the government money went to innovative companies that are struggling to get their product to market (i.e. Solyndra), that's pretty much where government money should be going -- if a company has a solid business plan and is on the track to profitability, the private sector will take care of them. But if a company with a promising product can't get enough private VC funding to get their product to market, then government funding can help them to compete against government subsidized foreign competitors. The alternative to government investment seems to be to let the Chinese dominate the alternative energy market.
To be honest, most of my managers have been very nervous about my suggestions to even use tools which I'm knowledgable in because they don't understand the concepts. Ad the bigger the company the more likely they are to want a vendor solution rather than use internal resources.
As a manager, sometimes I see the tool to automate and script changes to be a risk of taking down the network faster than anyone can do anything about it.
Like the time a senior network admin accidentally took down our network by setting the IP address of all of our network switches to the same set of IP address. He tested the script and it worked perfectly on one network closet - then he proceeded to apply the remaining set of IP addresses the the remaining hundred network switches in our organization.
He knew as soon as the first alarm went off what had happened, but by then it was too late to stop it. Fortunately, he had the good sense to not write the config to memory, so recovery just walking to each network closet to power cycle the switches -- much faster than if we had to walk around with a console cable to back out the changes on each switch
That said, he still uses the same tool to push out changes, but he tests his scripts on 2 IDF's before pushing out changes and has the junior network admin double check his work.
But I can see why a manager would be cautious about a new and untested automation tool.
You're talking like hosting your own servers on premises or being in the cloud are your only choices. You could also rent space in a high quality data center and replicate you data out to another high quality datacenter where you also rent space in a different geographic location. Then, when your primary data center goes down, you switch over to the other one. Or run off both at the same time if your architecture allows you do do that. That basically covers you in most instances. If both your rented datacenters go out at the same time, and they are in different locations, there's probably much bigger things to worry about. Or you didn't pick very good datacenters in the first place.
Isn't that the same as putting your servers into multiple Amazon regions? You're still putting your destiny in your hands of the datacenter.
Multi AZ IS "completely geographically separate zones" and yes, you can specifically define which ones.
Amazon is very clear that US East 1a,b,c,d are all the same physical data center. However, West is not. It's in Oregon (as opposed to VA for East)
I've seen no evidence that true Multi AZ instances (as described by Amazon) are down. If you've got some though, I would be interested to see it because I would be pretty concerned.
Availability Zones are not geographically separate - regions are:
Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries
Slashdot Mirror
Rare earth metal, despite it's name, is actually much more common then the name leads you to believe. The problem is extracting it, however, since deposits might be spread thin or in difficult to reach places (too deep). China has the advantage of cheap labor in dealing with these issues simply by throwing more people at it.
Is mining really that labor intensive? Especially for something that involves digging up mass quantities of earth and refining out the trace metals?
I thought something like rare earth mining would just employ huge earth moving equipment with comparatively few people to run it.
How much of a mine's costs go to labor?
I would think that China's bigger advantage is in less strict environmental standards.
Um, no. We are not in Afganistan for the minerals. Sending valuable peolpe and equipment into a mine in a country where explosives-enthusiastic people want you dead is just insane.
Seriously, if you get a bonus check at your job, for $10k and you go to invest it are you going to be remotely tempted to chip in on a "New Long Term Afgani Business Venture?"
Because if that appeals I can connect you to a very well known Nigean Prince with even better offers.
That depends on what backroom deals I get from the US Government - if they say "Hey, we want you to build a mine in Afghanistan, we can't pay you to do it, but here's a $100M contract to purchase output from this mine. Don't worry about security, we'll make sure that anything you dig up can be safely delivered. Feel free to open it under the banner of your Kenyan subsidiary."
It's more akin to letting your "little head" do the thinking instead of the head that has a brain... :( sucks to be you.
Nope, doctor analogy fails hard here
Where you got "doctors from the same country" from a situation involving foreign corporations building critical infrastructure for their competition I'll never know.
Because just like a single person doesn't have the ability to know anough about medical science to adequately treat any possible ailment, few countries have the resources or political will to fund development of enough industry to support all of their "critical infrastructure" needs.
Do you really expect Australia to develop chip foundaries, component manufacturers, software development, etc to build all of their government's electronics? What about patented chipsets that they may need? Will Cisco pass on their custom ASIC designs so Australia can build their own high capacity routers? Will Qualcomm pass on their patented CDMA chip designs so Australia can build their own government issued cell phones? Should they refuse to buy cell towers from Ericsson because they are "foreign" and spend 10 times more building their own? Should they give up all of the fighter jets in their air force because they are foreign made, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars inventing their own?
Surely they can't trust any foreign country because even though it's friendly now, it doesn't mean that it will be friendly a decade from now.
Pokes are a stupid concept to begin with. Does anybody use a phone to make calls anymore?
Only if I'm calling my mom. For just about everyone else, about the closest I come to a phone call is a text message.
It does not matter one whit if they're releasing everything including the ASIC code, masks, etc.
Don't let foreign assholes make your critical infrastructure. Period. Don't ship anything out of country. Don't rely on the companies in your country not to be idiots. If it is going into critical infrastructure you'd best have control of it.
Yea, it will put a screeching halt to the wonderful progress we've had and that is unfortunate but China and others seem to want to slit our throats so we should slit their profits.
Isn't that kind of like saying "Don't trust asshole doctors to treat your complicated medical condition. If you can't treat it yourself, just slit your throat now. Yea, it will kill you right now, and that is unfortunate, but at least the doctors won't profit from it".
Your child is still a person. Even if they are 3 or 14... they are still a person. They aren't possessions or an animal of a different species.
For that reason any tech like this makes me nervous. When you say "this is how a control my dog" I see a bit of red.
Right, my child is more important to me than my dog. So if I'm worried about not knowing where my dog is, I'm much more worried about not knowing where my child is.
Unless you're leaving your kid chained up in the backyard with a bowl of water and some chew toys 8 hours a day, I don't see how this is a valid comparison.
Right, it's not a valid comparison...If I left my child chained up in the back yard (or parked in front of the TV with a can of soda and bag of chips 8 hours a day), then it might be more of a valid comparison and I'd be less worried about where the child was. But, my child leaves the house much more than the dog...many children these days are placed in the hands of one or more caretakers (daycare, preschool, schools, relatives, paid childcare workers, etc) - sometimes more than one caretaker takes care of the child in a day... i.e. dad drops the child off at school, grandma picks him up after school, mom picks him up at grandma's house, which makes it harder to keep track of the child. Often the caretaker has more than one child to take care of, so my child is not their number one concern. In only takes a few seconds of inattention for my child to slip out the door of the childcare center, to be left behind after a field trip, etc.
Just like my dog's tracker can alert me when the dog leaves the house, my child's tracker could alert me and my wife if she's not in school between 8:30am and 11:30, and again if she's not at grandma's house from noon to 5pm. If grandma doesn't want to be tracked, I can turn off the alerts when the child is in her care, and only track in case of emergency.
Your child is still a person. Even if they are 3 or 14... they are still a person. They aren't possessions or an animal of a different species.
For that reason any tech like this makes me nervous. When you say "this is how a control my dog" I see a bit of red.
Right, my child is more important to me than my dog. So if I'm worried about not knowing where my dog is, I'm much more worried about not knowing where my child is. I'm not worried about her privacy when it comes to me knowing where she is - aside from my instincts to want to protect her, I'm legally responsible for her safety. I am more worried about who else might be able to track whatever device she's carrying.
When I was a kid, most of the families in our neighborhood had stay-at-home moms, and whenever us kids were someplace we shouldn't be or doing something we shouldn't be, our mom found out about it. Likewise if a strange car was spotted in the neighborhood, it was noticed, especially if the driver stopped to talk with kids. This is rarely the case nowadays.
DKIM my not validate the sender, but it is supposed to validate the mail server as you say. If you break a DKIM key you can send a mail from anywhere making it appear to be legitimately from a particular mail server even though it wasn't. If your mail servers allow unauthenticated email to be sent from them that is another problem that ought to be fixed. If you allow people to pretend to send email from your server than you are aiding spammers and spear fishers quite a bit.
But it's a misuse of DKIM to assume that a DKIM signed message validates the sender since it does no such thing. It makes it more likely that the sender is who he said it is since it validates the sending server, but it really does no validation of the sender himself. It's possible, even likely, that the mail server validated the sender, but that's outside of the scope of DKIM. Even the DKIM signature includes the entire message envelope, there's no guarantee that the message content wasn't altered.
DKIM is a spam reduction solution, and shouldn't be relied about to provide anything more. If you want to validate that the sender actually sent the message that you received, you need to use something like PGP which gives you more assurance that the message that the sender created on his computer is the message that you received.
I don't know if I'd put a tracker on my child. Maybe. but I do have a Tagg tracker on my dog.
I get a text alert anytime she leaves the "home zone" (which ranges to about 1/2 block from my house). The dog hasn't escaped from the yard since I started using it, but it's good peace of mind just in case she does - I can track her down easily and even if I'm at work, I'll know immediately if she gets out.
There are definitely privacy concerns, for example, anyone that looks at our Tagg activity will know when we're on vacation and where we are, and can pretty easily guess what time we go to work and what time we come home.
The Tagg device itself works very well - it's about the size of an adult's watch and is small enough to snap on the dog's collar. The battery lasts for about 2 weeks because the home docking station emits an RF signal that tells the device when it's in the home zone, so it doesn't waste battery power trying to get a GPS lock or talk to the cell phone network while the dog is at home. Even when the dog leaves the home zone, it doesn't use the GPS unless you explicitly request that the device be tracked through the website or smartphone app. When you request tracking, within a few minutes the device reports its GPS location every few minutes. If the device becomes detached from the dog's collar, it will notify you and report its location. It uses Verizon's cell phone network, so only works within cell phone range.
This was not a misuse of DKIM, or perhaps it was his own misuse in that he thinks DKIM validates the sender of an email. All it does is validate that the email originated from Google's mail servers, but it doesn't neccessarily mean that the address in the From: header wasn't spoofed before it was signed.
In any case, he found that Google (and others) are using an easily cracked 512 bit key, which they silently fixed with a 1024 bit key after he reported it to them by spoofing an email to appear as though it originated at Google.
There was no misuse, 512 bit keys are allowable under the DKIM spec, though they aren't recommended for long-lived keys.
Process it as a credit instead. Sure the merchant has to pay a higher transaction fee, but the card holder has all the power. The card issuing bank must honor any chargeback requests from the card holder and it is on the merchant to prove that the transaction is legit.
Using the debit card as a credit card doesn't give you any more protection under the law, it's still a debit card. Your bank/card issuer may choose to give you better protection than what's required under the law, but they don't have to.
And in the meantime, you've bounced 5 checks because you thought you had $1500 in the bank, but found that thieves drained $1200 of that over a few days.
Umm.. my credit union gives me the same protection for my debit as my credit for loss. but ONLY for usage as a credit card. I pretty much don't do debit transactions anymore with it anyways, I just get my spending money in cash at the start of the month from the bank teller..
What will your credit union do if someone steals your debit card number and empties your checking account, then you bounce a check to your landlord who charges you a $25 bounced check fee, and a $75 late fee, and requires you to pay via cashier's check for 6 months.
Will your credit union reimburse you for all of those expenses?
The thing is, if someone grabs your debit info and pin from a keypad, someone really messed up. I spent a few minutes googling for proof of what I know, but I can't find anything right now. Essentially, when a debit transaction is processed, it should be a public/private key transaction between the system and the keypad. If the keypad system doesn't do things it shouldn't like log keystrokes or card strip information, then it is technically impossible for anyone in between to steal your information. Think of it like logging into slashdot over https. If there is javascript on the page recording what you do, the security mechanism doesn't matter.
It's the whole credit card/debit system that's messed up - once someone hacks the PIN pad, they have full control over it and can collect whatever data they want (and can even pass the keystrokes to the "real" software to let the transaction complete as normal. No matter what security is in place, once the hacker controls the PIN pad, they can capture anything.
There is a simple answer, move the encryption to the credit card itself by using a smart card, but the banking industry in the USA hasn't caught up to the rest of the world in that regard. Even this isn't foolproof, but it's a lot safer than the current system.
But the bigger problem with banking is that it's ludicrously easy to use a fake check to draw against your bank account, and the "secret" numbers needed to do so are printed right on your checks so everyone you give a check to has the ability to "clone" fake checks for your account.
A local grocery store chain had a similar problem a few months back and that's when I decided to never use my ATM/Debit card for purchases -- once the thieves have your card number and PIN, they can suck money right out of your bank account.
For that matter, never use a debit card linked to your bank account - ask your bank for an ATM-only card and send back the debit card that looks like a credit card. If you want a credit card, use a credit card, at least if that number is stolen, thieves can't wipe out your bank account balance and cause you to start bouncing checks. Debit cards don't have the same protection as credit cards under the law, they have the same $50 liability cap if you report the loss of theft of the card within 2 business days, but if you don't report the loss or theft of your card within 2 business days, you could be liable for up to $500 of loss. And if you don't report it within 60 days after your bank statement is mailed, there is no cap on liability.
Many banks and debit card issuers offer better liability guarantees, but they aren't required to by law. And even if the bank refunds their own NSF fees for bounced checks, there's no guarantee that they'll refund bounced-check fees charged by all of the merchants you unknowingly sent bad checks to.
If you are going for a position where legacy code is a reality - I wouldn't hire you if you asked a question that depicted yourself to be either rather irritated by or incapable of dealing with legacy code. Positive attitude in interview, whine all you want when you get the job.
It really depends on whether the employer considers the code to be "bad", anyway. My guess is many would not fess up to the code being poor.
But by all means, you should ask all of those questions and go ahead and let it be known to your future employer that you don't want to touch any crusty old legacy code - it gives him more knowledge about you and makes it easier to make the correct hiring decision. It might hurt you, it could even help you, but no matter what, it will help you to land in the kind of job you want.
Work for a startup. Any place that has been around for any significant length of time is likely to have legacy code.
I've found that in many cases, the code written at a startup is even worse that legacy code - it was written to get the product out the door as quickly as possible, with the belief that it will be rearchitected and rewritten "in the next release".
I would never hire someone who questioned turnover rates and asked why the position was vacant. It is, quite frankly, none of the interviewee's business and conveys a kind of prima donna attitude.
As a hiring manager, I like when a candidate picks up on things like that and asks about the high turnover rate - it shows that he is looking at more than just the technical side of the job and is interested in the entire work environment. I want to make sure he's a good fit and feels comfortable working in the environment, otherwise if he's there for a couple months, runs into the same frustrations as the other programmers that left, he'll just be contributing to the turnover.
I have nothing to hide and no reason to hide it -- it's not like he won't find out about it if he accepts the job. If the high turnover came from a recent management change and change in direction of the company, I want him to know about it from the outset. If the high turnover came because half the development team got together and formed their own, competing company, I also want him to know about it.
Why do people relate intelligence with age? People do not get smarter the older they get, quite often the opposite as IQ tends to decrease with age. There are 3 year olds that are smarter then adults, and vice-versa. There are genius 3 year olds and stupid 3 year olds.
Because most people don't equate clinical IQ with "smart".
I know many highly intelligent people that lack a lot of every day common sense that "dumb" people have.
A 3 year old may have a higher IQ than a typical 40 year old, but no one would trust that 3 year old to live on his own.
Easy to use doesn't necessarily mean usable for the purpose.
My 10 year old cell phone was extremely easy to use - dial the number, press send, and voila, I just made a phone call. A 3 year old could do it.
My smartphone is much harder - unlock the phone, go to the home screen, find the dialer app, start it up, open the dial-pad, dial the number, and voila, I just made a phone call (unless it got dropped).
But my smart phone is still much more usable and useful than my old phone ever was despite being much harder to use.
Let's see how the uber-smart 3 year old handles multitasking on typical office apps - run a report from the ERP system, copy the last 2 years of performance metrics to a spreadsheet, run projections from the numbers, then move the key results to a powerpoint slide. All while carrying on an email conversation with your boss about why you don't have the presentation ready yet.
Unless the typical Win8 user uses their computer the same way as a 3 year old, I'm not sure why it's relevant how well a 3 year old can use it.
Got something capable of reading NFC tags? Get an NFC tag and program it to turn bluetooth off and on like a switch without having to manually do it?
Are you sure that's safer? http://www.zdnet.com/exploit-beamed-via-nfc-to-hack-samsung-galaxy-s3-android-4-0-4-7000004510/
Phone/Tablet can't read NFC tags - why would you even consider purchasing them?
Because I have no NFC tags to read?
Because it's just so hard to add a widget to your homescreen that will turn your bluetooth on and off with just one touch.
And as an added bonus, increased battery life. Is that so hard to understand?
I like to keep my phone in my pocket, it's much less convient to switch audio devices (or just leave my desk to go to a meeting) if I have to take the phone out of my pocket or backpack, wake it up, unlock it, find the bluetooth icon on the main home screen, turn on blue tooth, relock it/turn off the screen, then put it back in my pocket..... if I have to go through all of that, I'd just plug in a cable. Isn't ease of use kind of the point of bluetooth? It automatically connects to paired devices when they are in range so I don't have to do anything.
I didn't fact check all of the companies on your list, but First Solar is not "near bankruptcy" - it's still trading on the NASDAQ with a stock price of $23, or a market cap of around $2B. In its last quarterly report, they claimed to have almost $700M of cash on hand, with $900M in revenues and 25% gross profit.
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/FSLR/2133318876x0x587754/43642762-a08b-47d3-bc57-62ee73d6b300/Q2_2012_Web_Schedule_final.pdf
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/06/romneys-solar-flareout/
Even if much of the government money went to innovative companies that are struggling to get their product to market (i.e. Solyndra), that's pretty much where government money should be going -- if a company has a solid business plan and is on the track to profitability, the private sector will take care of them. But if a company with a promising product can't get enough private VC funding to get their product to market, then government funding can help them to compete against government subsidized foreign competitors. The alternative to government investment seems to be to let the Chinese dominate the alternative energy market.
To be honest, most of my managers have been very nervous about my suggestions to even use tools which I'm knowledgable in because they don't understand the concepts. Ad the bigger the company the more likely they are to want a vendor solution rather than use internal resources.
As a manager, sometimes I see the tool to automate and script changes to be a risk of taking down the network faster than anyone can do anything about it.
Like the time a senior network admin accidentally took down our network by setting the IP address of all of our network switches to the same set of IP address. He tested the script and it worked perfectly on one network closet - then he proceeded to apply the remaining set of IP addresses the the remaining hundred network switches in our organization.
He knew as soon as the first alarm went off what had happened, but by then it was too late to stop it. Fortunately, he had the good sense to not write the config to memory, so recovery just walking to each network closet to power cycle the switches -- much faster than if we had to walk around with a console cable to back out the changes on each switch
That said, he still uses the same tool to push out changes, but he tests his scripts on 2 IDF's before pushing out changes and has the junior network admin double check his work.
But I can see why a manager would be cautious about a new and untested automation tool.
You're talking like hosting your own servers on premises or being in the cloud are your only choices. You could also rent space in a high quality data center and replicate you data out to another high quality datacenter where you also rent space in a different geographic location. Then, when your primary data center goes down, you switch over to the other one. Or run off both at the same time if your architecture allows you do do that. That basically covers you in most instances. If both your rented datacenters go out at the same time, and they are in different locations, there's probably much bigger things to worry about. Or you didn't pick very good datacenters in the first place.
Isn't that the same as putting your servers into multiple Amazon regions? You're still putting your destiny in your hands of the datacenter.
Multi AZ IS "completely geographically separate zones" and yes, you can specifically define which ones.
Amazon is very clear that US East 1a,b,c,d are all the same physical data center. However, West is not. It's in Oregon (as opposed to VA for East)
I've seen no evidence that true Multi AZ instances (as described by Amazon) are down. If you've got some though, I would be interested to see it because I would be pretty concerned.
Availability Zones are not geographically separate - regions are:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#features
Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries