My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous. However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).
Educational use is one of the fundamental uses of the Fair Use doctrine, as long as there is no commercial gain derived directly from the application of Fair Use. Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
So... this use is valid on the grounds that it is criticism (in both of the main definitions of the word), comment, and teaching, if the person applying the Fair Use doctrine is not claiming any direct commercial benefit from the use of said copyrighted information. Unless, of course, the original authors can show that the original work is of a specific nature that would itself invalidate Fair Use; the re-user had included all or the vast majority of the original piece directly in his response; or the re-use substantially affected the commercial value of the original work (probably requires a before/after study of revenue generated from the work to be presented in justification for the copyright claim, not something that can be submitted with a DCMA request).
In this case, both sides will probably feel justified in labeling the other's position as "propaganda", with their own as "education", although it shows the AIDS-deniers' viewpoint and world view as being very narrow, because "any view other than something that completely aligns with mine is incorrect, and worse propaganda, so must be expunged from view so that my Universal Truth can be seen in all its glory"...
If you are having problems getting past this one (idiotic) App reviewer, then unless you have already gone through a successful app review process with another reviewer whom you can use for a second opinion or have an escalation point to request an appeal, then you have only two choices that I can see - give up on the idea, or rewrite the app without using jQuery (either by self-coding all of those elements, or taking the bits of jQuery that you need and packaging those separately.
Lets say you sell something you warrant to work for three years. Some four years later, there's some kind of security flaw - why should the company not need some extra funds to develop a fix? To my mind this change is something that will lead to better support for older products, because you can keep on paying and demanding fixes for your payments...
Let's say that I buy a brand new HP product, and then inside of 1 month I notice a bug in the firmware. It doesn't stop the system working, because that server is not hosting anything on its secondary RAID array other than a set of backup disks that I can put on a different controller (i.e. it causes a problem, but I have an easy and 100% effective workaround). However, I report the bug to HP. On that server, I download all available firmware updates and apply them as they are released. 3 years later, that system is out of warranty but I now need to start using that secondary disk array, and HP has now released a firmware patch to fix the bug that I reported when first using the system. In this case, the "different controller" happened to be a RAID card that had been purchased for a different project which was on-off-on-off- and then finally back on, so we had to purchase another RAID card, which was a smaller expense than swapping out the entire HP server for one with different firmware (the other option we had).
At the time we had this issue, we could just download the patch from HP for our now out-of-warranty system. Under this new policy, we could not have done so.
If companies fix their firmware issues in a timely fashion, my problem does not arise. As it is, I can see a huge demand on Torrent sites for HP firmware updates coming up, or contract network professionals trying to build up firmware libraries through companies that do maintain their HP service agreements.
As you have said that the person who worked on the project before is well liked and respected within the company, while you are the new guy with no good will or social capital built up in the organisation, the last thing you should be doing is forming any kind of criticism of the code or the person who wrote it. However, if the project is truly "Broken", then the person who worked on it before will not be the untouchable God type. He may be the asshole programmer from Hell who purposefully wrote code that could not be maintained by anyone else, in which case you are his patsy and you are probably on a losing bet, because he is just waiting in the wings to swoop in, pull an all-nighter bashing away at the keyboard to rescue the company from the incompetence of the new guy, all for a measly 50% pay rise... I have seen it happen to a few contractors and it is not pretty.
The "obvious" solution, of course, is to quit and find another gig. However, the next place (or the one after that) will probably have a similar scenario, so the best approach would be to start learning to tackle the problem on this project.
That means that step 1 is to look at where YOU went wrong. By that, I mean that either your initial code analysis was incomplete (you did not check out the code before taking the assignment, or maybe you had no opportunity to check it out), or you started coding before understanding the existing structure (or lack of). Yes, you are under pressure to add value, contribute, justify your existence, and so on... but that will be doubly true next month. If you cannot make the argument in the first week/month that you need to review the existing code before making changes and adding features, then you are not going to be able to make that argument at any point. It takes a particular kind of coder to write updates to existing code without first understanding what the existing stuff does, and that type is rare, especially when dealing with an un-maintainable bird's nest of code.
If the code is already documented, verify that the documentation is accurate. If it is not already documented, then document it. The code may need to be re-factored before you can make any meaningful contribution, but right at the beginning of the project is the only possible window you will have for that kind of analysis.
If your response at this point is "I do not have time to document the code", then my advice would be to leave with your sanity and most of your reputation intact. You have already seen that coding hot, without any insight into what you are working with, causes unexpected and unexplained problems.
Maybe not... but spending by Munis is also not responsible for the vast majority of US public debt. As of 2012 (the latest year-end I can find data for without logging into Bloomberg and compiling the data): US local government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 7-8%. US state government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 19-20%. US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%.
So, by far the biggest contributor to US public debt is the US Federal Government, and by far the biggest single-ticket item of its expenditure is military spending ($700 Billion per year in direct contract awards), with massive spending on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most thorough study that I can find public reference to is by Brown University, which puts the cost of troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and logistical support in Pakistan, plus domestic spending on debt interest to service that cost, at something over $6 Trillion so far, and that is only since 2003. The study itself does not seem to be publicly available on the interwebs - Crawford, Neta and Catherine Lutz. "Economic and Budgetary Costs of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to the United States: A Summary". Costs of War. Brown University. But you can check out the Wikipedia article to get the basics: Financial cost of the Iraq War
Seeing as the current US Federal Debt burden is somewhere between $17 and $17.5 Trillion, the "non-War" debt burden is still a not-inconsiderable $11 Trillion, but the annual Military Gravy Train in the US dwarfs the rest of the debt components.
When the US and Italian police have problems with Mafia dons (all the evidence points to them, but it is very difficult to pin anything on them), the IRS has much more success in getting them on tax evasion. Give the IRS something to do, and maybe enlist the NSA's help with tapping dark matter's communication channels so that the IRS can figure out where the dark matter is hiding!
And if they tell you you're going to be safe, more than once, you're going to die.
Even worse, never, ever, agree to wear a red shirt and beam down to a planet with them. You probably have a better chance of survival by playing Russian Roulette with an automatic pistol...
Ok, so here's what doesn't make sense. If they're saying 25% of the smog came from china, then only 1.3% of the total smog is from goods produced for export to the US. On the other hand, if they're really saying that what they're saying, and 25% of total smog is from US goods, that means 470% of the smog in total is form China.
5. I'm really tired and I missed something. But I don't think I'm that tired.
The article is a bit whiffy when it comes to the figures, but the bit you are missing is that it is not just the smog from goods produced for export to the US that is making its way over to the US. If it was, that would be an interesting irony... I do not think it helps that the article seems to be at the same time trying to discuss the amount of pollution generated by Chinese manufacturing of goods for export to the US, while also discussing the amount of smog "exported" from China to the US. Those things are very easily confused. So some of the smog generated by China that makes its way over to the US was generated by manufacturing processes for goods not destined for export to the US.:)
I was wondering how much Linus knows about Conjugated Linoleic Acids.
Quite a bit, it seems. After all, he has been able to analyse the CLAs produced by several other sources and determined that they are broken. So he must know as much or more about them than the FSF and Apache biochemists who produced the Acids for those organisations... although why the FSF and Apache Foundation would need or want such materials is beyond me...
First, you would be surprised how inter-connected a lot of these HR departments and technical team are - people moving from one company to another, or simply talking to each other about "asshat" candidates is very common. I find that is more of a problem in smaller countries and specialized industries, such as the banking sector in Stockholm or Oslo... less of a problem in London or New York. However, the rule is, as always, keep it professional in the interview. If you get the feeling that the role or the people or the company are not for you, explain to the interviewer calmly and rationally that you are not getting a good feeling about the situation, thank them for their time and wish them luck in filling the position. Then make your way out of the office and be thankful that you have only wasted an hour or two of your time. Certainly, that is not as satisfying as making a snarky comment, but you will find that all the pre-prepared snarky comments you walked in with are not appropriate for the situation, and all of the appropriate snarky comments you can come up with on the spot are insufficiently snarky to correctly encapsulate your sarcasm.
Plus, if you think the interview questions are stupid, wait until you meet the users. Asking stupid questions in the interview is a good way of weeding out the people who will be incapable of suppressing the urge to strangle the third user who asks a mortifyingly stupid question.
Bah, they'll just wrap the content in JavaScript. Wanna use NoScript? Fine, then you don't get to access the content.
If you take the view that the purpose of the website is to promote the company, and the purpose of the Ad is to, err, advertise (either the company, one of their services, or an affiliate), then the Adblock arms race will probably be ultimately won by that company's competitors:
1. Company puts up an ad-laden web site to try and sell/promote their goods/services, and convert viewers into customers. 2. Viewers of the web site use Adblock to cut out the ads. 3. Company uses tech to make ads indistinguishable from content (using scripts, for example). 4. Viewers of the web site start using NoScript or similar tools. 5. Company's web site is no longer viewable to potential customers, so the site viewers are not not converted into customers. 6. Company loses potential customers to competitors. 7. (Competitors) Profit!!!!
ok, it does not always work out that way, but the fundamental truth is that a company exists to make money for the shareholders of said company. They do that by adding value to goods and services that they provide to customers. Nobody is forced to buy from a specific company (exclusive supply contracts or biased tender processes aside), so it is entirely voluntary for a customer to put their money with a particular company. While a customer may need or think they need a particular item, in a market where there are several potential sources or variants of that item, an individual company needs the customer more than the customer needs that particular company (because the customer can go elsewhere for that item).
Remember business people... "The customer is always right."
An armed society is a polite society. When you know someone is probably able to kill you (justified or not), you tend to be much more polite to them. Take away people's ability to restrain rude fucks, and the rude fucks run riot through the life you're trying to live.
An armed society (with concealed carry) is a society in which the individuals fear other individuals because they might be carrying a gun. "This person might be carrying a gun so they can kill me, so I need to fear them." Fear leads to one of two impulses - fight or flight. Flight, and the guy runs out of the theater. Fight, and the guy pulls his own gun because he feels threatened, and you have another Trayvon Martin incident, but with a few more witnesses and the possibility of a stray shot wounding or killing innocent bystanders.
Politeness comes from mutual respect, not from fear. Respect has nothing to do with guns, but with tolerance and empathy. Both needed to show a bit more tolerance and empathy for the wishes of the other, but neither did so one is now dead and the other will almost certainly spend the rest of their life in prison at the taxpayer's expense. Doesn't exactly sound like a win-win for the "Right to bear arms" lobby.
Thanks you for calling, Linda. Please sign me up for the no-filtering-whatsoever service, please. My own filters that I have setup and maintain are more accurate, more unbiased, and less aligned toward corporate group think than the crap you are trying to push on me. As for child pornography and hard core porn, I have already discussed such things with my children and prepared them for what is out there. I trust that they are mentally strong enough and intelligent enough to be able to make basic decisions about "wrong" and "right" more than some faceless and unaccountable political dweeb that I have never met.
Seeing as how the BBC article clearly mentions that the "Passengers" (aka Researchers) on the ship have been rescued, but that the crew members of the ship are staying on board and could be stuck for several weeks, I hope the attention span of the people keeping an eye on the ship is a bit better than that of the/. editors, who had apparently forgotten that the crew exists before they reached the bottom of the article...
The two scenarios where I see this being a benefit for the surveillance and intelligence-gathering community is that: (a) Other alphabet soup agencies in the US and abroad will get an even better idea of what the NSA are gathering, and they will then push even harder for similar capabilities within their domestic spheres to give them more trading options with NSA and others, "because if the NSA needs this information, then so do we" and (b) The scrambling by pro-surveillance lobbyists and lawmakers to say that this is legal, followed by the judicial branch issuing judgements on this "grey area" of the law in conflicting and contradictory rulings, to the point where the lawmakers again need to step in with a new law that "clarifies" the current situation.
Although the fact that I can even call this a "grey area" is frankly laughable. While I am sure the collective efforts of the judiciary ruling on cases which impinge on Constitutional issues of the last 100 years have not been a co-ordinated campaign to weaken and obviate the Consitution, the end result is that the Constitution is no longer a shield for the people protecting them from Federal Government and limiting the reach of those in power. It now has so many holes in it that it is barely a safety net" between the two groups - it stops most of the baseballs thrown at it, but bullets will easily find the holes. Note: The previous comment is not intended to be a suggestion that the people of the United States of America should round up the politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and judges and shoot them.
Having said that, as bad as the USofA has become, it is still possible to criticize the US Government in this way without being dragged away to re-education classes or prison camps. Mostly... so far.
They call themselves the 'intelligence' community, but even that is a lie.
No, no... the NSA is always on the lookout for intelligence. One of their analysts at one point had some intelligent material in their possession. But given the choice of spit or swallow, it was swallowed, flushed and lost.
...that kind of scale could work. For a bounty of $150,000 to be "less than two-tenths of 1% of those companies' annual revenue" (I am assuming that is each company's annual revenue calculation, not a global pool), that suggests the model is aimed at companies with >$75M annual revenue. Newsflash for the paper authors... there are not many software development companies in that ballpark. Granted, the smaller the company, (probably) the smaller the market for their software so the smaller the need for such a bug bounty. But if companies are going to be "compelled" to buy bug reports, that is going to require federal legislation which is not good at such fine-tuned work, especially after 150 groups of lobbyists have crafted their specific amendments to it, at which point companies will shift development efforts offshore, causing the federal legislation to be retargeted at company head-office location or companies whose software is used within the country, and a legal dance to get around the legislation begins, assuming software dev houses do not simply say their software cannot legally be used within USA.
a) Those 'other shareholders' bought the shares voluntarily. The taxpayer didn't.
Very true, but "the taxpayer" did not choose to invest in GM in the first place, the US Government did. Equally, "the taxpayer" did not choose to sell their shares in GM, at a lower price than those shares were bought for (thus generating the losses), the US Government did. The US Government had a very compelling reason for buying those shares and shoring up the GM corporate entity and its supply chain. However, there was no contractual obligation for them to sell the shares when they did - as far as I can tell, that decision to sell was made for purely political/PR decisions. Admittedly, those reasons are also compelling - if the US Government introduces and legislation that will have some kind of positive impact for car manufacturers, then there is a conflict-of-interest issue to be addressed, so it is in the Government's interest to avoid holding the shares for an extended period. However, the Government decided to sell when it did, and the Government is (or should be) responsible for the losses incurred through that decision. After all, if the transaction had yielded a massive profit, the Government would not have been willing to hand that profit over, either back to GM for further investment or to some other organisation that could use it. That profit would go to the treasury to be used. The company whose shares are being bought and sold has no control over that process, as the shares are freely tradeable on the open market. So without any leverage of control, the company cannot assume the liability for losses. Want to complain about it? Welcome to capitalism. Complaints can be addressed to our Complaints Manager, Helen Waite. Her office is in the basement. Form a queue outside the door, and when someone asks what you are doing, tell them that you were told to go to Helen Waite.
The biggest security hole in any operating system is the same in every operating system - the source of ID-10-T and PEBKAC errors (Idiot, and Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) - the OS can be totally secure and hardened, but if it allows users to do stupid stuff then it is still going to be vulnerable. Unless, of course, the system is totally locked down so that it resembles the IT version of a strait jacket, in which case users will spend as much time cursing the fact that the computer stops them working, and trying to get around your restrictions to see their lolcat pictures as they do actually working.
If the physical object itself was a legal form of currency, then I could get behind what the Government are doing... but as the Government has only just started to recognise Bitcoin as a commodity with value, I fail to see the rationale behind this unless either the Government people behind the idea are crazy for power or they actually think that the physical "coin" this guy makes is what carries the value.
As it stands, I would say that the physical object here is closer to being an ornament, perhaps a small piggy bank - for example, he charges $50 for these items, and people send him $100, so he returns an item with a $50 note inside it. He has sold them a container, not a representation of money. Because in the case of the Bitcoins, the representation of money is the cryptographic key which is inside the item he has made, and the value of the item he has made is that of the materials used in its construction plus his time and effort.
Remember: religions are like penises. It's ok to have one, and it's even ok to be proud of it. But don't take it out and wave it around in public, and certainly do not try and shove it down anyone's throat (especially children).
Having a huge religion is probably not enough to get you a part in a porn movie, though.
Bah, I hate it when/. blocks characters it knows nothing about... Pnyn should come out to be something like Pinyin, but with a bar over the i's:( Hopefully the community do not slaughter me for that mistake *prays*...
The iDot... Apple's new (patent and copyright pending) way to end sentences and provide a break between the integer and fractional parts of a number. According to Apple, it looks better than the old "decimal point" that it replaces, it has more caché, has been designed with usability in mind, and it runs the latest version of iOS. It is also fully compatible with your web browser and email system, and all such systems will be automatically upgraded to work with the new symbol. A small licensing fee will be levied by Apple for the use of this incredible and ground-breaking new technology, and their lawyers will be in contact with each and every one of you in due course, to arrange your payment of this licensing fee, along with the pre-defined hourly rate for the lawyers' time spent on the case. Failure to pay the licence fee and other associated fees will cause a general reduction in your attractiveness to the opposite sex, and infestation of Locusts to descend on your house, you will be afflicted with Cooties, and you will henceforth be referred to by anyone who hears about the failure to pay the license fee for such a useful and necessary implement as "that iDot".
Oh and if you believe the Urban Dictionary, ying-yang is the erroneous spelling of the phrase "yin-yang", which is the simplified form of "ynyáng", the Pnyn (phonetic method of representing Chinese characters in western script) spelling of the Chinese characters which define Yin and Yang. So, it looks like the OP is not the "iDot" in this case...
I think about bitcoin more as "commodity" or "liquid trade asset" than currency. And yes, we going to have all types of market. The traditional exchanges (trading, clearing, settlement processes, etc) and Over-the-counter trading as well. I don't know why government and legislators are get freaking out about the pseudo-anonymity that bitcoin got. Bitcoin has a global and immutable ledger that would be a very good start for trading transparency and economics flow analysis.
Btw how "darkpools" really works ?
Anonymity (for a Government that fears either its own people or someone else's) is, in my opinion, a direct threat to that government, because they seek leverage/power over those individuals or institutions that they fear, as a means of control. But that is my very Orwellian 1984-type negative opinion of people who seek power through political office speaking... I am sure that nobody in the US political machine is actually like that...
As for dark pools, they work on a double-blind system, for fungible assets (a fungible asset is one that is directly and equally swapable for any other identical asset - a $10 bill can be swapped for any other $10 bill in the system without gaining or losing any value, with the only real difference being that one is slightly dirtier, more crumpled and more bacteria-ridden than the other - a bank will still give you $10 for it if you take it in). In simple terms, a dark pool allows me to say that I want to sell 100 of a particular item at a particular price, usually shares in a company, but fundamentally it could be anything fungible. You might post that you want to buy 150 of that particular item, again at a particular price. Neither of us sees that the other has posted something relevant to our request, but the dark pool system will see both requests and pair them up if the prices we are both looking for match. Once the trade has been completed and ownership is transferred, then the trade can be examined to see who the two parties in the transaction were (if you want truly anonymous trading, then most of the major trading exchanges for fungible assets - NASDAQ, LSE, NYSE, and so on - have anonymous exchange trading platforms which keep the identities of the parties involved in the transactions secret even after the trade has completed, although this information can be obtained by law enforcement agencies with a court order, or probably by the NSA without one...).
Slashdot Mirror
My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.
However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).
Educational use is one of the fundamental uses of the Fair Use doctrine, as long as there is no commercial gain derived directly from the application of Fair Use.
Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
So... this use is valid on the grounds that it is criticism (in both of the main definitions of the word), comment, and teaching, if the person applying the Fair Use doctrine is not claiming any direct commercial benefit from the use of said copyrighted information. Unless, of course, the original authors can show that the original work is of a specific nature that would itself invalidate Fair Use; the re-user had included all or the vast majority of the original piece directly in his response; or the re-use substantially affected the commercial value of the original work (probably requires a before/after study of revenue generated from the work to be presented in justification for the copyright claim, not something that can be submitted with a DCMA request).
In this case, both sides will probably feel justified in labeling the other's position as "propaganda", with their own as "education", although it shows the AIDS-deniers' viewpoint and world view as being very narrow, because "any view other than something that completely aligns with mine is incorrect, and worse propaganda, so must be expunged from view so that my Universal Truth can be seen in all its glory"...
If you are having problems getting past this one (idiotic) App reviewer, then unless you have already gone through a successful app review process with another reviewer whom you can use for a second opinion or have an escalation point to request an appeal, then you have only two choices that I can see - give up on the idea, or rewrite the app without using jQuery (either by self-coding all of those elements, or taking the bits of jQuery that you need and packaging those separately.
Lets say you sell something you warrant to work for three years. Some four years later, there's some kind of security flaw - why should the company not need some extra funds to develop a fix? To my mind this change is something that will lead to better support for older products, because you can keep on paying and demanding fixes for your payments...
Let's say that I buy a brand new HP product, and then inside of 1 month I notice a bug in the firmware. It doesn't stop the system working, because that server is not hosting anything on its secondary RAID array other than a set of backup disks that I can put on a different controller (i.e. it causes a problem, but I have an easy and 100% effective workaround). However, I report the bug to HP. On that server, I download all available firmware updates and apply them as they are released.
3 years later, that system is out of warranty but I now need to start using that secondary disk array, and HP has now released a firmware patch to fix the bug that I reported when first using the system.
In this case, the "different controller" happened to be a RAID card that had been purchased for a different project which was on-off-on-off- and then finally back on, so we had to purchase another RAID card, which was a smaller expense than swapping out the entire HP server for one with different firmware (the other option we had).
At the time we had this issue, we could just download the patch from HP for our now out-of-warranty system. Under this new policy, we could not have done so.
If companies fix their firmware issues in a timely fashion, my problem does not arise. As it is, I can see a huge demand on Torrent sites for HP firmware updates coming up, or contract network professionals trying to build up firmware libraries through companies that do maintain their HP service agreements.
As you have said that the person who worked on the project before is well liked and respected within the company, while you are the new guy with no good will or social capital built up in the organisation, the last thing you should be doing is forming any kind of criticism of the code or the person who wrote it.
However, if the project is truly "Broken", then the person who worked on it before will not be the untouchable God type. He may be the asshole programmer from Hell who purposefully wrote code that could not be maintained by anyone else, in which case you are his patsy and you are probably on a losing bet, because he is just waiting in the wings to swoop in, pull an all-nighter bashing away at the keyboard to rescue the company from the incompetence of the new guy, all for a measly 50% pay rise... I have seen it happen to a few contractors and it is not pretty.
The "obvious" solution, of course, is to quit and find another gig. However, the next place (or the one after that) will probably have a similar scenario, so the best approach would be to start learning to tackle the problem on this project.
That means that step 1 is to look at where YOU went wrong. By that, I mean that either your initial code analysis was incomplete (you did not check out the code before taking the assignment, or maybe you had no opportunity to check it out), or you started coding before understanding the existing structure (or lack of). Yes, you are under pressure to add value, contribute, justify your existence, and so on... but that will be doubly true next month. If you cannot make the argument in the first week/month that you need to review the existing code before making changes and adding features, then you are not going to be able to make that argument at any point. It takes a particular kind of coder to write updates to existing code without first understanding what the existing stuff does, and that type is rare, especially when dealing with an un-maintainable bird's nest of code.
If the code is already documented, verify that the documentation is accurate. If it is not already documented, then document it. The code may need to be re-factored before you can make any meaningful contribution, but right at the beginning of the project is the only possible window you will have for that kind of analysis.
If your response at this point is "I do not have time to document the code", then my advice would be to leave with your sanity and most of your reputation intact. You have already seen that coding hot, without any insight into what you are working with, causes unexpected and unexplained problems.
munis didn't fund wars... nice try though
Maybe not... but spending by Munis is also not responsible for the vast majority of US public debt. As of 2012 (the latest year-end I can find data for without logging into Bloomberg and compiling the data):
US local government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 7-8%.
US state government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 19-20%.
US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%.
So, by far the biggest contributor to US public debt is the US Federal Government, and by far the biggest single-ticket item of its expenditure is military spending ($700 Billion per year in direct contract awards), with massive spending on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most thorough study that I can find public reference to is by Brown University, which puts the cost of troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and logistical support in Pakistan, plus domestic spending on debt interest to service that cost, at something over $6 Trillion so far, and that is only since 2003.
The study itself does not seem to be publicly available on the interwebs - Crawford, Neta and Catherine Lutz. "Economic and Budgetary Costs of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to the United States: A Summary". Costs of War. Brown University.
But you can check out the Wikipedia article to get the basics: Financial cost of the Iraq War
Seeing as the current US Federal Debt burden is somewhere between $17 and $17.5 Trillion, the "non-War" debt burden is still a not-inconsiderable $11 Trillion, but the annual Military Gravy Train in the US dwarfs the rest of the debt components.
When the US and Italian police have problems with Mafia dons (all the evidence points to them, but it is very difficult to pin anything on them), the IRS has much more success in getting them on tax evasion.
Give the IRS something to do, and maybe enlist the NSA's help with tapping dark matter's communication channels so that the IRS can figure out where the dark matter is hiding!
And if they tell you you're going to be safe, more than once, you're going to die.
Even worse, never, ever, agree to wear a red shirt and beam down to a planet with them. You probably have a better chance of survival by playing Russian Roulette with an automatic pistol...
Ok, so here's what doesn't make sense. If they're saying 25% of the smog came from china, then only 1.3% of the total smog is from goods produced for export to the US. On the other hand, if they're really saying that what they're saying, and 25% of total smog is from US goods, that means 470% of the smog in total is form China.
5. I'm really tired and I missed something. But I don't think I'm that tired.
The article is a bit whiffy when it comes to the figures, but the bit you are missing is that it is not just the smog from goods produced for export to the US that is making its way over to the US. If it was, that would be an interesting irony... I do not think it helps that the article seems to be at the same time trying to discuss the amount of pollution generated by Chinese manufacturing of goods for export to the US, while also discussing the amount of smog "exported" from China to the US. Those things are very easily confused. :)
So some of the smog generated by China that makes its way over to the US was generated by manufacturing processes for goods not destined for export to the US.
I was wondering how much Linus knows about Conjugated Linoleic Acids.
Quite a bit, it seems. After all, he has been able to analyse the CLAs produced by several other sources and determined that they are broken. So he must know as much or more about them than the FSF and Apache biochemists who produced the Acids for those organisations... although why the FSF and Apache Foundation would need or want such materials is beyond me...
First, you would be surprised how inter-connected a lot of these HR departments and technical team are - people moving from one company to another, or simply talking to each other about "asshat" candidates is very common.
I find that is more of a problem in smaller countries and specialized industries, such as the banking sector in Stockholm or Oslo... less of a problem in London or New York.
However, the rule is, as always, keep it professional in the interview. If you get the feeling that the role or the people or the company are not for you, explain to the interviewer calmly and rationally that you are not getting a good feeling about the situation, thank them for their time and wish them luck in filling the position. Then make your way out of the office and be thankful that you have only wasted an hour or two of your time. Certainly, that is not as satisfying as making a snarky comment, but you will find that all the pre-prepared snarky comments you walked in with are not appropriate for the situation, and all of the appropriate snarky comments you can come up with on the spot are insufficiently snarky to correctly encapsulate your sarcasm.
Plus, if you think the interview questions are stupid, wait until you meet the users. Asking stupid questions in the interview is a good way of weeding out the people who will be incapable of suppressing the urge to strangle the third user who asks a mortifyingly stupid question.
Bah, they'll just wrap the content in JavaScript. Wanna use NoScript? Fine, then you don't get to access the content.
If you take the view that the purpose of the website is to promote the company, and the purpose of the Ad is to, err, advertise (either the company, one of their services, or an affiliate), then the Adblock arms race will probably be ultimately won by that company's competitors:
1. Company puts up an ad-laden web site to try and sell/promote their goods/services, and convert viewers into customers.
2. Viewers of the web site use Adblock to cut out the ads.
3. Company uses tech to make ads indistinguishable from content (using scripts, for example).
4. Viewers of the web site start using NoScript or similar tools.
5. Company's web site is no longer viewable to potential customers, so the site viewers are not not converted into customers.
6. Company loses potential customers to competitors.
7. (Competitors) Profit!!!!
ok, it does not always work out that way, but the fundamental truth is that a company exists to make money for the shareholders of said company. They do that by adding value to goods and services that they provide to customers. Nobody is forced to buy from a specific company (exclusive supply contracts or biased tender processes aside), so it is entirely voluntary for a customer to put their money with a particular company.
While a customer may need or think they need a particular item, in a market where there are several potential sources or variants of that item, an individual company needs the customer more than the customer needs that particular company (because the customer can go elsewhere for that item).
Remember business people... "The customer is always right."
An armed society is a polite society. When you know someone is probably able to kill you (justified or not), you tend to be much more polite to them. Take away people's ability to restrain rude fucks, and the rude fucks run riot through the life you're trying to live.
An armed society (with concealed carry) is a society in which the individuals fear other individuals because they might be carrying a gun. "This person might be carrying a gun so they can kill me, so I need to fear them."
Fear leads to one of two impulses - fight or flight. Flight, and the guy runs out of the theater. Fight, and the guy pulls his own gun because he feels threatened, and you have another Trayvon Martin incident, but with a few more witnesses and the possibility of a stray shot wounding or killing innocent bystanders.
Politeness comes from mutual respect, not from fear. Respect has nothing to do with guns, but with tolerance and empathy. Both needed to show a bit more tolerance and empathy for the wishes of the other, but neither did so one is now dead and the other will almost certainly spend the rest of their life in prison at the taxpayer's expense. Doesn't exactly sound like a win-win for the "Right to bear arms" lobby.
Thanks you for calling, Linda. Please sign me up for the no-filtering-whatsoever service, please. My own filters that I have setup and maintain are more accurate, more unbiased, and less aligned toward corporate group think than the crap you are trying to push on me. As for child pornography and hard core porn, I have already discussed such things with my children and prepared them for what is out there. I trust that they are mentally strong enough and intelligent enough to be able to make basic decisions about "wrong" and "right" more than some faceless and unaccountable political dweeb that I have never met.
Seeing as how the BBC article clearly mentions that the "Passengers" (aka Researchers) on the ship have been rescued, but that the crew members of the ship are staying on board and could be stuck for several weeks, I hope the attention span of the people keeping an eye on the ship is a bit better than that of the /. editors, who had apparently forgotten that the crew exists before they reached the bottom of the article...
The two scenarios where I see this being a benefit for the surveillance and intelligence-gathering community is that:
(a) Other alphabet soup agencies in the US and abroad will get an even better idea of what the NSA are gathering, and they will then push even harder for similar capabilities within their domestic spheres to give them more trading options with NSA and others, "because if the NSA needs this information, then so do we" and
(b) The scrambling by pro-surveillance lobbyists and lawmakers to say that this is legal, followed by the judicial branch issuing judgements on this "grey area" of the law in conflicting and contradictory rulings, to the point where the lawmakers again need to step in with a new law that "clarifies" the current situation.
Although the fact that I can even call this a "grey area" is frankly laughable. While I am sure the collective efforts of the judiciary ruling on cases which impinge on Constitutional issues of the last 100 years have not been a co-ordinated campaign to weaken and obviate the Consitution, the end result is that the Constitution is no longer a shield for the people protecting them from Federal Government and limiting the reach of those in power. It now has so many holes in it that it is barely a safety net" between the two groups - it stops most of the baseballs thrown at it, but bullets will easily find the holes.
Note: The previous comment is not intended to be a suggestion that the people of the United States of America should round up the politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and judges and shoot them.
Having said that, as bad as the USofA has become, it is still possible to criticize the US Government in this way without being dragged away to re-education classes or prison camps. Mostly... so far.
They call themselves the 'intelligence' community, but even that is a lie.
No, no... the NSA is always on the lookout for intelligence. One of their analysts at one point had some intelligent material in their possession. But given the choice of spit or swallow, it was swallowed, flushed and lost.
...that kind of scale could work.
For a bounty of $150,000 to be "less than two-tenths of 1% of those companies' annual revenue" (I am assuming that is each company's annual revenue calculation, not a global pool), that suggests the model is aimed at companies with >$75M annual revenue.
Newsflash for the paper authors... there are not many software development companies in that ballpark. Granted, the smaller the company, (probably) the smaller the market for their software so the smaller the need for such a bug bounty.
But if companies are going to be "compelled" to buy bug reports, that is going to require federal legislation which is not good at such fine-tuned work, especially after 150 groups of lobbyists have crafted their specific amendments to it, at which point companies will shift development efforts offshore, causing the federal legislation to be retargeted at company head-office location or companies whose software is used within the country, and a legal dance to get around the legislation begins, assuming software dev houses do not simply say their software cannot legally be used within USA.
a) Those 'other shareholders' bought the shares voluntarily. The taxpayer didn't.
Very true, but "the taxpayer" did not choose to invest in GM in the first place, the US Government did. Equally, "the taxpayer" did not choose to sell their shares in GM, at a lower price than those shares were bought for (thus generating the losses), the US Government did.
The US Government had a very compelling reason for buying those shares and shoring up the GM corporate entity and its supply chain. However, there was no contractual obligation for them to sell the shares when they did - as far as I can tell, that decision to sell was made for purely political/PR decisions. Admittedly, those reasons are also compelling - if the US Government introduces and legislation that will have some kind of positive impact for car manufacturers, then there is a conflict-of-interest issue to be addressed, so it is in the Government's interest to avoid holding the shares for an extended period.
However, the Government decided to sell when it did, and the Government is (or should be) responsible for the losses incurred through that decision. After all, if the transaction had yielded a massive profit, the Government would not have been willing to hand that profit over, either back to GM for further investment or to some other organisation that could use it. That profit would go to the treasury to be used.
The company whose shares are being bought and sold has no control over that process, as the shares are freely tradeable on the open market. So without any leverage of control, the company cannot assume the liability for losses. Want to complain about it? Welcome to capitalism. Complaints can be addressed to our Complaints Manager, Helen Waite. Her office is in the basement. Form a queue outside the door, and when someone asks what you are doing, tell them that you were told to go to Helen Waite.
The biggest security hole in any operating system is the same in every operating system - the source of ID-10-T and PEBKAC errors (Idiot, and Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) - the OS can be totally secure and hardened, but if it allows users to do stupid stuff then it is still going to be vulnerable.
Unless, of course, the system is totally locked down so that it resembles the IT version of a strait jacket, in which case users will spend as much time cursing the fact that the computer stops them working, and trying to get around your restrictions to see their lolcat pictures as they do actually working.
If the physical object itself was a legal form of currency, then I could get behind what the Government are doing... but as the Government has only just started to recognise Bitcoin as a commodity with value, I fail to see the rationale behind this unless either the Government people behind the idea are crazy for power or they actually think that the physical "coin" this guy makes is what carries the value.
As it stands, I would say that the physical object here is closer to being an ornament, perhaps a small piggy bank - for example, he charges $50 for these items, and people send him $100, so he returns an item with a $50 note inside it. He has sold them a container, not a representation of money. Because in the case of the Bitcoins, the representation of money is the cryptographic key which is inside the item he has made, and the value of the item he has made is that of the materials used in its construction plus his time and effort.
Remember: religions are like penises. It's ok to have one, and it's even ok to be proud of it. But don't take it out and wave it around in public, and certainly do not try and shove it down anyone's throat (especially children).
Having a huge religion is probably not enough to get you a part in a porn movie, though.
Bah, I hate it when /. blocks characters it knows nothing about... Pnyn should come out to be something like Pinyin, but with a bar over the i's :(
Hopefully the community do not slaughter me for that mistake *prays*...
The iDot... Apple's new (patent and copyright pending) way to end sentences and provide a break between the integer and fractional parts of a number. According to Apple, it looks better than the old "decimal point" that it replaces, it has more caché, has been designed with usability in mind, and it runs the latest version of iOS.
It is also fully compatible with your web browser and email system, and all such systems will be automatically upgraded to work with the new symbol.
A small licensing fee will be levied by Apple for the use of this incredible and ground-breaking new technology, and their lawyers will be in contact with each and every one of you in due course, to arrange your payment of this licensing fee, along with the pre-defined hourly rate for the lawyers' time spent on the case.
Failure to pay the licence fee and other associated fees will cause a general reduction in your attractiveness to the opposite sex, and infestation of Locusts to descend on your house, you will be afflicted with Cooties, and you will henceforth be referred to by anyone who hears about the failure to pay the license fee for such a useful and necessary implement as "that iDot".
Oh and if you believe the Urban Dictionary, ying-yang is the erroneous spelling of the phrase "yin-yang", which is the simplified form of "ynyáng", the Pnyn (phonetic method of representing Chinese characters in western script) spelling of the Chinese characters which define Yin and Yang. So, it looks like the OP is not the "iDot" in this case...
I think about bitcoin more as "commodity" or "liquid trade asset" than currency. And yes, we going to have all types of market. The traditional exchanges (trading, clearing, settlement processes, etc) and Over-the-counter trading as well. I don't know why government and legislators are get freaking out about the pseudo-anonymity that bitcoin got. Bitcoin has a global and immutable ledger that would be a very good start for trading transparency and economics flow analysis.
Btw how "darkpools" really works ?
Anonymity (for a Government that fears either its own people or someone else's) is, in my opinion, a direct threat to that government, because they seek leverage/power over those individuals or institutions that they fear, as a means of control. But that is my very Orwellian 1984-type negative opinion of people who seek power through political office speaking... I am sure that nobody in the US political machine is actually like that...
As for dark pools, they work on a double-blind system, for fungible assets (a fungible asset is one that is directly and equally swapable for any other identical asset - a $10 bill can be swapped for any other $10 bill in the system without gaining or losing any value, with the only real difference being that one is slightly dirtier, more crumpled and more bacteria-ridden than the other - a bank will still give you $10 for it if you take it in).
In simple terms, a dark pool allows me to say that I want to sell 100 of a particular item at a particular price, usually shares in a company, but fundamentally it could be anything fungible. You might post that you want to buy 150 of that particular item, again at a particular price. Neither of us sees that the other has posted something relevant to our request, but the dark pool system will see both requests and pair them up if the prices we are both looking for match. Once the trade has been completed and ownership is transferred, then the trade can be examined to see who the two parties in the transaction were (if you want truly anonymous trading, then most of the major trading exchanges for fungible assets - NASDAQ, LSE, NYSE, and so on - have anonymous exchange trading platforms which keep the identities of the parties involved in the transactions secret even after the trade has completed, although this information can be obtained by law enforcement agencies with a court order, or probably by the NSA without one...).