HP should be so lucky that these people left instead of, say, unionizing. Of course, they could be compelled to return, in which case unionizing might be their only recourse. Texas is a pretty messed up state for worker rights, and you can literally sign away your right to work in that state as part of an employment agreement, and it would be legally enforced there.
My own Texas employment experience, which was thankfully brief (under two weeks)- A 'very large travel company' from TX acquired a startup I worked for in CA, and tried to get me to sign agreements that literally sold away all previous, current, and future intellectual property rights to the new company in perpetuity. They also wanted me to give them the right to know everything about my past, my political affiliations past and present, and to have their approval to become politically involved in anything in the future. They also wanted me to agree not to work in my industry again if I left employment, even if they fired me. Apparently, this is all legal in TX, where courts have already decided that ANY agreement between employer and employee is legal and binding, and that there is no concept of duress or pressure to sign. None of that is legal in CA. I walked out because I refused to sign, they refused to negotiate, and then they made noises about suing me for having been employed without signing their agreement. Ultimately, they screwed up my ISO shares six ways from Sunday as a way of getting back at me.
My experience was an eye opener to how many states operate, and it made me very thankful to be in a state where employees can't be forced to sign away their rights in exchange for employment.
Lol. I think if I make it to seventy, I've pretty much earned the right to use or not use them as I see fit. I can only imagine how terse my perl code will look by then. Kudos to this guy for being so kind and taking the time to give us a very valid perspective on the issue. And for walking coatimundis.;) (btw,/. sometimes eats paragraph separators).
Dunno why this was modded down. The *ONLY* ISP or hosting service operator in US history to challenge a national security letter was Nick Merrill. Ever.
A single national security letter can dragnet in thousands of user accounts. Simply receiving one means that you are already bound to secrecy by the letter itself with the very real threat of 10 years in jail. Nick had to fight in a secret court hearing just to have the right to have an attorney represent him, and then again to publicly state that he received a letter. He still cannot discuss any of what was requested, or he goes to prison for a very long time.
They are not limited to one letter per user per item- they are not required to be specific at all. That means every major service out there has been handing out your info to the feds. Usually, this is just usernames and other log data. If your full name is included, it makes it that much easier to keep tabs on you. And, yes, people are being investigated and rounded up based on this kind of data.
My apologies, you are correct in regard to the licensing versions. I went through and downloaded all of the available packages, opened them, and found that was the case.
My initial search was for the string "license" through Enlightenment's wiki's search tool, which brought up pretty much every GPL license version imaginable- however I did not vette my own results correctly, because items not part of their project were displaying results for GPLv3, etc.
That still leaves open the question of whether having portions under the LGPL and portions under BSD has limited adoption by vendors or other projects.
I've noted that while Enlightenment is BSD licensed, but some of the foundational libraries are licensed under *various* versions of the GPL. What gives? This would be confusing to most people who are looking to repackage E for use on various devices. Is there going to be a resolution for the licensing mess, or will development continue with multiple licenses that have to be negotiated by vendors and others interested in using this with their products? The issue isn't free beer vs free speech, the issue is how does one decide which license takes greatest precedence. Is the project going to go forward as GPLv3, v2, v1, or 2 clause BSD, or what?
Actually, people have. A company I worked for, upon the recommendation of a new manager, tried to convert their monitoring systems over to something windows based. The guy behind the change couldn't make it happen for even twice the cost of the hardware using a *nix based environment. He was politely asked to leave after that. I think it is more about ability to deliver rather than buying Windows. The difference with Windows is that Microsoft will hold your hand (and budget) while providing a neatly delineated solution for failed implementations. If you try that under Linux, be prepared to actually explain all of those things yourself as a manager.
There are similar stories of this happening elsewhere (getting canned for failed Windows implementations, later replaced by *nix systems), but I do understand the sentiment of having something that is easy to explain in dollars and cents, especially when the business side of the house fails to understand that from the day they replaced file clerks with file servers they went from a company that does X, to being an IT company that does X.
You know, what's funny is that I actually did delete my FB account over issues just like this.
I warned people for six months that I would be leaving. Of the 152 friends that I had, just a handful responded to my repeated posts asking people to email me their current contact data. It wasn't until about a month out, when someone realized that I was actually leaving FB. Then there was a shitstorm of comments about why I shouldn't. So, I pointed out the privacy policy issues, the general privacy issues, and the fact that I'd been mentioning this for nearly six months until someone noticed. The best one was "OMG, how will I stay in contact with you??!!11?" (irony, people forgetting that they have to have an email account in order to set up FB...).
Since I left, I haven't really been missing much. My wife will sometimes show me some pithy comment someone posted on her feed, but so far there aren't any withdrawals, tremors, or cravings.
From the article, it appears that their niche market may be in working with the US Army to turn it into a drone carrier, a la StarCraft Protoss Carriers. Now all we need is shield tech, and a floating railgun platform... and the Zerg will be doomed.
It's a shame the comment was modded down. AC's statement is inline with CISPA and the Patriot Act as they are applied in the United States. Nick Merrill, founder of the Calyx Institute, was the ONLY person running an ISP to turn down one of those orders to snoop on his customers and fight it in court. Ever. The only other people who have fought National Security letters in court were librarians. Considering that orders for disclosure under National Security letters are in the tens of thousands, and each letter can apply to hundreds or thousands of records, I would say that the AC has good reasons for their concern over where this project is based out of. This is also why OpenBSD won't let US citizens work on key project internals either.
I like Phil Zimmerman's work, but basing his product out of the US as a US citizen means that his system can and will be used for MitM attacks against his users. His website is clearly marketing this tool for DoD use, as a GSA contract could pretty much secure his or anyone else's future. I don't blame him for doing that, as there is a sizable market for this within the US and for US business travellers abroad- for private business use. For anyone with ANY political involvement within or related to the US or US policy, my thought is ymmv.
I'll believe that when I see their products running under Free or Open BSD. Unless "any" is really a very narrow definition of specific Linux Distros, MS Windows, and OS X.
Definitely Jenkins for code pushes. Not only can you decide how to push the code (even build and deploy through RPM), you can also use the Jenkins interface to manage testing and QA as well. Build can be distributed through virtual machines, and automation can be tied into something like chef or puppet. That includes cleaning and restarting virtual host images during testing, automating deployment milestones, etc.
Also, the other benefit of using Jenkins is that you can manage future contributors through the Jenkins management interface, limiting their access privileges while preserving a lot of flexibility. This means you can start out someone with a few privileges, say for QA validation only, and then add more as they show they are trustworthy.
Yes! Minecraft is an excellent way of getting kids to *want* to play with the internals more!
Both my kid and my best friend's kids are nuts about Minecraft. My kid has installed her own CLI operating system, installed Java, and got Minecraft running under X. She is getting into mods now, and will probably start editing her own skins in a few months when she gets bored "of the mod telling me what to do". My friend's kids are a year and three years older, and are running their own servers, modding mods, and the older one is studying java programming of his own volition. Both of those kids are capable of opening up and fixing anything on their computers, restoring backups, etc.
Couldn't give enough praise to Minecraft for getting kids more seriously interested in electronics, computing, and design.
This comment is spot on. I work in a heterogeneous shop, and our best results have been in training a Unix admin to take on additional Windows roles. It isn't just about being good at Windows, there are plenty of Windows professionals who can fulfill that role as a consultant or FTE. The problem is finding one who can integrate Windows environments to work well with your existing Unix infrastructure, much of which probably doesn't need to be duplicated under a separate Windows domain. To do that well, you need someone with a deep Unix background as well as the Windows training.
He apparently did know that. Almost all of his posts were public. Definitely the ones that people are citing were. He was deliberately baiting people to come and get him. He even posted an address, etc.
Does that make him crazy? Dunno. I've seen people say much worse in world readable posts, and nobody did a thing about it.
Does that make him a martyr of some kind? Dunno. Maybe he thought that would happen. Instead, look at all the people talking about how the trained killer was crazy.
Does it mean that FB is being watched for this kind of chaff? Dunno. I know that Palantir is a project that works with the US Govt to find this sort of stuff. There are all kinds of resources out there that make it pretty clear that DHS and others are looking for this sort of thing. Then again, a close friend or family member might have reported him as a potential violent loon, and not just because of his postings.
As the Director, you get to decide the dress policy for you staff, aside from whatever HR may demand. At least, that is how it is in most workplaces. So, expect your staff to take a cue from you and dress slightly down from whatever you may present. If that ends up being the case, some monogrammed polo shirts might not be bad to keep around (you know, Horde logo, Tardis, etc). For interviews, I would consider wearing the minimum of whatever YOU would expect someone would come to an interview in. Based on what little you wrote, I would guess a polo or bowling/tropical shirt?
Aside from that, I would doubt that dressing up matters much at your workplace if you were promoted to Director and like dressing in t-shirts and jeans.
Even in "non-contested" districts, people have lost their seats. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. In most of these districts that are non-contested, this happens because many of the local businesses put their money into that candidate's coffers, hoping some pork will come back. I didn't say that there is this magic way of making this happen. I implied that making that happen would take a lot of hours and dedicated work.
Nobody "needs" to go fire their Congresscritter. Even if they suck. Plenty of people spend every day wishing some messiah will spring fully formed out of the aether to kick ass and benevolently take over. In reality, incumbents won't leave office until they die, or lose to another candidate. Surprisingly, from my own experience so far, it takes effort to build and maintain a political base for even non-controversial issues. However, once one gets past the initial learning curve that political movements look more like the early days of Linux and BSD, rather than modern Mac OSX, it gets easier to step in and build the necessary frameworks to give new candidates the head starts that they need to run with a shot at winning.
What you do is you write to them, and you tell them that you voted for them. Once.
Then you tell them that what they did was immoral, abhorrent, and you consider what they did a violation of their oath of office, and of the trust you put into them as your representative.
Telling them isn't enough. They have to be convinced that it could be fatal to their career.
You enumerate for them just how much you are going to work to see someone else that you do believe in is put into office. Tell the legislator the money that you gave their campaign will now be donated five fold to your new champion. Tell this person that you will be providing X hours a month of volunteer time working for another candidate. Then tell them that you will find no less than 5 friends who listen to you and trust your opinion, and they will do the same, and bring their friends along as well.
Then, email the letter to their Congressional office, with a cc to their campaign manager.
Then, go make good on your promise. Because, ultimately, if you want something to change, you will need to unfuck it yourself. Chances are, if it is a contested district, you might get a phone call back. If not, at least you know you are doing something to fix the problem created by voting for someone who would sell you out. This isn't about fighting and beating the current candidate- it is about the journey it will take *you* to become involved enough to become a good gatekeeper for the governmental process in your district.
Especially since Ron Paul wants to defund NIST. I don't see how "Internet Freedom" and defunding NIST go hand in hand, unless his Internet Freedom initiative is to protect the same kind of large donors that would seek to make extra money from NIST going down. For those who don't know, NIST's time servers are what all keep us on the same sheet of music- kind of important to running the kind of Internet we have now.
I live in California, and basically have a kid and a wife that doesn't (actually can't) work. Because I've had enough income (and always had the last IT crash on my mind), I've pretty much paid everything in cash up front and have effectively no credit. Home buying with a mortgage is currently beyond my reach, even though I make a pretty good living. Not having health insurance isn't an option, because of the wife and kid, and it can be pricey because of the wife. BTW, if *your* stay at home wife isn't on board with consulting, its demands (she needs to be very self-sufficient and industrious), and the risks, you will need to stop now, and just find a way of enduring (going into management) until retirement age hits. Or get her on board. Or divorce. Because if you go through with consulting, and she isn't on board, it will end in divorce.
I've run my own business. Unless you have a product, don't do it. Service based IT consulting is a dicey business at best, and until I understood my market and how C-level people are motivated and think, I failed repeatedly until I learned the market well enough to succeed. Then I got out, because I realized that I didn't have my own assets and self-support aligned correctly. I'll be going back into it in a year or two at most. IF you do decide to go into consulting professionally, make sure you own a property you can live on that does not have a mortgage, car or credit payments, and NEVER EVER EVER borrow/mortgage or open a line of credit against that property- EVER.
Medical for the self-employed is also difficult to do, especially as I'm growing older. Ultimately, I will have to find a service plan that mixes some of the business back end (payroll for self, taking care of tax withholdings, etc) with the medical. There are companies that do this, but availability of their services varies state by state. Some will even help me prioritize expense spending for business related expenses like laptops, etc. Again, doing this without a product (to base selling services off of) or lots of business contacts that can say "yes" is a recipe for failure until those are developed.
With this in mind, here is my plan, and you may want to make use of it.
1. Buy at auction, refurbished, or used. The goal is to keep myself out of debt, and to ensure your costs are as low as possible for when consulting does come around again. My last car, next car, and my next property should come from auction/refurb/used, out of money I have put together in advance. Aggressive saving is the key to being successful at consulting, and saving to buy at auction is excellent practice. Multiple accounts for specific purchases, etc- do whatever it takes to save. Building credit is another term for "I am willing to be a slave to my debt load", and that should only be done with an equal amount of savings set aside to immediately pay any balance if hard financial times should hit, and only should be done if it builds something that adds positive cash flow (cars are not positive cash flow, and neither are properties these days).
2. Fix everything I buy at auction myself. I have to be self-sufficient, aside from those things that absolutely are a bad idea for me to do on my own. I can do my own light construction, plumbing, and residential electrical, because it isn't hard to learn and there is plenty of information out there on how to do it. Same goes for my vehicles. Double-plus good if the stay at home wife is even halfway motivated to become that self-sufficient (because, really, that is her fucking job if I bring home the only pay check). Drilling my own well or major brake work? I'll be paying for that, because of the cost of the equipment and the risk. A well, septic and off-grid power are really good for a primary residence, as they eliminate monthly expenses. Properly managed, they cost MUCH less than buying that service from a city or county. If I own my own property, this also means growing and canning our own food as a family. Again, self-sufficiency is t
Agreed. I also think that having filtering software creates a false sense of security wherein anything is going to be "ok" to do or view on the Web. Keeping the kids on their judgmental toes, asking themselves "is this ok for me to watch", means that they will do a better job of policing their own behavior rather than trusting in some filter list to determine whatever they are viewing is ok.
I recently had an issue like this come up with my daughter, because my wife puts the kid on PBSkids.org and kind of lets her do her own thing. Mom never thought that there might be content on a mainstream kids site that might be problematic, or need explaining to an 8 year old. One day, I am watching my kid watching videos, and there is a whole section priming kids to accept illegal search and seizure as ok. I then started watching other videos with my daughter, and found that there was a whole slough of behaviors that this "kids" website was preloading our kid with- accepting illegal search, stealing because the end justifies the means, and some really awful judgmental behaviors. I had been wondering where it was coming from, and it had been coming from something that was listed as "trustworthy". Now PBSkids.org is limited to viewing when parents are nearby and capable of lending an ear to the conversation- and generally, she doesn't want to view it as much now that she has to think about what she is watching. Then again, this has opened up my daughter's viewing habits to wander the internet more often, because it is now an exercise in judgment for her to be on the Internet, instead of just accepting whatever she clicks as being ok. I think why I had such a problem with this situation is that we are not raising her in a walled garden otherwise- she rides public transit (there is a lot there that needs explaining), listens to radio, goes to shows and experiences other things based upon her comfort level, not on some rigid set of unrealistic rules. Basically, giving her a pass on critical thinking while on the Internet was a mistake, and one that I corrected quickly.
There are no trustworthy sites on the internet. That is the whole point of raising the kid without a walled garden, because it will be more of a disservice to them later on if they run into a situation that requires critical thinking rather than blind adherence to accepting status quo.
A VP I know once did this at a company I've worked at. He focused on making sure his staff were happy doing good work. He couldn't offer great wages, so he made the workplace a great place to get work done in. Time off, personal projects, and work schedules were never an issue- the only requirement was a good end result. I even took a small pay cut to come and work for him. The team was incredibly happy, productive in not just beating timelines, but also in coming up with new lines of business and in internal innovation to run projects more efficiently.
The problem is that senior managers like this are rarer than the IT talent they try to recruit. Once he took his department from being the lowest overall performer to being the highest per capita earner in the company (took only three years), he was forced out by other veeps looking to cash in on what he had made. What they had not realized was that his gains in developing his division were at the expense of him taking bonuses. The compensation structure for senior managers was such that after making the "local contribution" of profits back to the company, the veeps could take their cut. They mistakenly thought he had found the golden goose and was pulling golden eggs out of its ass on demand. When they took over, their chief hatchet man found he would have to cut 1/4 of the staff just to get his bonus unless he continued for another two years not receiving a bonus. Sadly, he took the place from being a great place to work to being mediocre, and shed staff appropriately.
And the rarity of senior management who can see further than their bonus is what the article was mostly about. A lot of tech staff I know talk about how rare it is to find creative, intelligent talent in their fields, but the reality is that it is even rarer to find it in business leadership. I'm thinking that if "we" want to fix this problem, then "we" need to start more of our own companies, and run them the right way.
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HP should be so lucky that these people left instead of, say, unionizing. Of course, they could be compelled to return, in which case unionizing might be their only recourse. Texas is a pretty messed up state for worker rights, and you can literally sign away your right to work in that state as part of an employment agreement, and it would be legally enforced there.
My own Texas employment experience, which was thankfully brief (under two weeks)- A 'very large travel company' from TX acquired a startup I worked for in CA, and tried to get me to sign agreements that literally sold away all previous, current, and future intellectual property rights to the new company in perpetuity. They also wanted me to give them the right to know everything about my past, my political affiliations past and present, and to have their approval to become politically involved in anything in the future. They also wanted me to agree not to work in my industry again if I left employment, even if they fired me. Apparently, this is all legal in TX, where courts have already decided that ANY agreement between employer and employee is legal and binding, and that there is no concept of duress or pressure to sign. None of that is legal in CA. I walked out because I refused to sign, they refused to negotiate, and then they made noises about suing me for having been employed without signing their agreement. Ultimately, they screwed up my ISO shares six ways from Sunday as a way of getting back at me.
My experience was an eye opener to how many states operate, and it made me very thankful to be in a state where employees can't be forced to sign away their rights in exchange for employment.
And recruiters wonder why it is so hard to hire experienced staff from CA to work in other states.
Lol. I think if I make it to seventy, I've pretty much earned the right to use or not use them as I see fit. I can only imagine how terse my perl code will look by then. Kudos to this guy for being so kind and taking the time to give us a very valid perspective on the issue. And for walking coatimundis. ;) (btw, /. sometimes eats paragraph separators).
Dunno why this was modded down. The *ONLY* ISP or hosting service operator in US history to challenge a national security letter was Nick Merrill. Ever.
A single national security letter can dragnet in thousands of user accounts. Simply receiving one means that you are already bound to secrecy by the letter itself with the very real threat of 10 years in jail. Nick had to fight in a secret court hearing just to have the right to have an attorney represent him, and then again to publicly state that he received a letter. He still cannot discuss any of what was requested, or he goes to prison for a very long time.
They are not limited to one letter per user per item- they are not required to be specific at all. That means every major service out there has been handing out your info to the feds. Usually, this is just usernames and other log data. If your full name is included, it makes it that much easier to keep tabs on you. And, yes, people are being investigated and rounded up based on this kind of data.
Look up the Calyx Institute or Nick Merrill on YouTube. Fascinating stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkvGK60MSOk
Actually, it is only *mostly* BSD licensed. Mostly. There are components that are LGPL 2.1 (or 1.2?) licensed as well, which made me go WTF.
Spam, spam, spam spam! Spam, spam, spam spam! Spammity spam, money and spam!
My apologies, you are correct in regard to the licensing versions. I went through and downloaded all of the available packages, opened them, and found that was the case.
My initial search was for the string "license" through Enlightenment's wiki's search tool, which brought up pretty much every GPL license version imaginable- however I did not vette my own results correctly, because items not part of their project were displaying results for GPLv3, etc.
That still leaves open the question of whether having portions under the LGPL and portions under BSD has limited adoption by vendors or other projects.
I've noted that while Enlightenment is BSD licensed, but some of the foundational libraries are licensed under *various* versions of the GPL. What gives? This would be confusing to most people who are looking to repackage E for use on various devices. Is there going to be a resolution for the licensing mess, or will development continue with multiple licenses that have to be negotiated by vendors and others interested in using this with their products? The issue isn't free beer vs free speech, the issue is how does one decide which license takes greatest precedence. Is the project going to go forward as GPLv3, v2, v1, or 2 clause BSD, or what?
Actually, people have. A company I worked for, upon the recommendation of a new manager, tried to convert their monitoring systems over to something windows based. The guy behind the change couldn't make it happen for even twice the cost of the hardware using a *nix based environment. He was politely asked to leave after that. I think it is more about ability to deliver rather than buying Windows. The difference with Windows is that Microsoft will hold your hand (and budget) while providing a neatly delineated solution for failed implementations. If you try that under Linux, be prepared to actually explain all of those things yourself as a manager.
There are similar stories of this happening elsewhere (getting canned for failed Windows implementations, later replaced by *nix systems), but I do understand the sentiment of having something that is easy to explain in dollars and cents, especially when the business side of the house fails to understand that from the day they replaced file clerks with file servers they went from a company that does X, to being an IT company that does X.
You know, what's funny is that I actually did delete my FB account over issues just like this.
I warned people for six months that I would be leaving. Of the 152 friends that I had, just a handful responded to my repeated posts asking people to email me their current contact data. It wasn't until about a month out, when someone realized that I was actually leaving FB. Then there was a shitstorm of comments about why I shouldn't. So, I pointed out the privacy policy issues, the general privacy issues, and the fact that I'd been mentioning this for nearly six months until someone noticed. The best one was "OMG, how will I stay in contact with you??!!11?" (irony, people forgetting that they have to have an email account in order to set up FB...).
Since I left, I haven't really been missing much. My wife will sometimes show me some pithy comment someone posted on her feed, but so far there aren't any withdrawals, tremors, or cravings.
*CARRIER HAS ARRIVED*
From the article, it appears that their niche market may be in working with the US Army to turn it into a drone carrier, a la StarCraft Protoss Carriers. Now all we need is shield tech, and a floating railgun platform... and the Zerg will be doomed.
It's a shame the comment was modded down. AC's statement is inline with CISPA and the Patriot Act as they are applied in the United States. Nick Merrill, founder of the Calyx Institute, was the ONLY person running an ISP to turn down one of those orders to snoop on his customers and fight it in court. Ever. The only other people who have fought National Security letters in court were librarians. Considering that orders for disclosure under National Security letters are in the tens of thousands, and each letter can apply to hundreds or thousands of records, I would say that the AC has good reasons for their concern over where this project is based out of. This is also why OpenBSD won't let US citizens work on key project internals either.
I like Phil Zimmerman's work, but basing his product out of the US as a US citizen means that his system can and will be used for MitM attacks against his users. His website is clearly marketing this tool for DoD use, as a GSA contract could pretty much secure his or anyone else's future. I don't blame him for doing that, as there is a sizable market for this within the US and for US business travellers abroad- for private business use. For anyone with ANY political involvement within or related to the US or US policy, my thought is ymmv.
I'll believe that when I see their products running under Free or Open BSD. Unless "any" is really a very narrow definition of specific Linux Distros, MS Windows, and OS X.
Definitely Jenkins for code pushes. Not only can you decide how to push the code (even build and deploy through RPM), you can also use the Jenkins interface to manage testing and QA as well. Build can be distributed through virtual machines, and automation can be tied into something like chef or puppet. That includes cleaning and restarting virtual host images during testing, automating deployment milestones, etc.
Also, the other benefit of using Jenkins is that you can manage future contributors through the Jenkins management interface, limiting their access privileges while preserving a lot of flexibility. This means you can start out someone with a few privileges, say for QA validation only, and then add more as they show they are trustworthy.
Yes! Minecraft is an excellent way of getting kids to *want* to play with the internals more!
Both my kid and my best friend's kids are nuts about Minecraft. My kid has installed her own CLI operating system, installed Java, and got Minecraft running under X. She is getting into mods now, and will probably start editing her own skins in a few months when she gets bored "of the mod telling me what to do". My friend's kids are a year and three years older, and are running their own servers, modding mods, and the older one is studying java programming of his own volition. Both of those kids are capable of opening up and fixing anything on their computers, restoring backups, etc.
Couldn't give enough praise to Minecraft for getting kids more seriously interested in electronics, computing, and design.
This comment is spot on. I work in a heterogeneous shop, and our best results have been in training a Unix admin to take on additional Windows roles. It isn't just about being good at Windows, there are plenty of Windows professionals who can fulfill that role as a consultant or FTE. The problem is finding one who can integrate Windows environments to work well with your existing Unix infrastructure, much of which probably doesn't need to be duplicated under a separate Windows domain. To do that well, you need someone with a deep Unix background as well as the Windows training.
He apparently did know that. Almost all of his posts were public. Definitely the ones that people are citing were. He was deliberately baiting people to come and get him. He even posted an address, etc.
Does that make him crazy? Dunno. I've seen people say much worse in world readable posts, and nobody did a thing about it.
Does that make him a martyr of some kind? Dunno. Maybe he thought that would happen. Instead, look at all the people talking about how the trained killer was crazy.
Does it mean that FB is being watched for this kind of chaff? Dunno. I know that Palantir is a project that works with the US Govt to find this sort of stuff. There are all kinds of resources out there that make it pretty clear that DHS and others are looking for this sort of thing. Then again, a close friend or family member might have reported him as a potential violent loon, and not just because of his postings.
As the Director, you get to decide the dress policy for you staff, aside from whatever HR may demand. At least, that is how it is in most workplaces. So, expect your staff to take a cue from you and dress slightly down from whatever you may present. If that ends up being the case, some monogrammed polo shirts might not be bad to keep around (you know, Horde logo, Tardis, etc). For interviews, I would consider wearing the minimum of whatever YOU would expect someone would come to an interview in. Based on what little you wrote, I would guess a polo or bowling/tropical shirt?
Aside from that, I would doubt that dressing up matters much at your workplace if you were promoted to Director and like dressing in t-shirts and jeans.
Even in "non-contested" districts, people have lost their seats. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. In most of these districts that are non-contested, this happens because many of the local businesses put their money into that candidate's coffers, hoping some pork will come back. I didn't say that there is this magic way of making this happen. I implied that making that happen would take a lot of hours and dedicated work.
Nobody "needs" to go fire their Congresscritter. Even if they suck. Plenty of people spend every day wishing some messiah will spring fully formed out of the aether to kick ass and benevolently take over. In reality, incumbents won't leave office until they die, or lose to another candidate. Surprisingly, from my own experience so far, it takes effort to build and maintain a political base for even non-controversial issues. However, once one gets past the initial learning curve that political movements look more like the early days of Linux and BSD, rather than modern Mac OSX, it gets easier to step in and build the necessary frameworks to give new candidates the head starts that they need to run with a shot at winning.
If apathy is your solution, then please, by all means, continue waiting for Godot. I will continue working.
What you do is you write to them, and you tell them that you voted for them. Once.
Then you tell them that what they did was immoral, abhorrent, and you consider what they did a violation of their oath of office, and of the trust you put into them as your representative.
Telling them isn't enough. They have to be convinced that it could be fatal to their career.
You enumerate for them just how much you are going to work to see someone else that you do believe in is put into office. Tell the legislator the money that you gave their campaign will now be donated five fold to your new champion. Tell this person that you will be providing X hours a month of volunteer time working for another candidate. Then tell them that you will find no less than 5 friends who listen to you and trust your opinion, and they will do the same, and bring their friends along as well.
Then, email the letter to their Congressional office, with a cc to their campaign manager.
Then, go make good on your promise. Because, ultimately, if you want something to change, you will need to unfuck it yourself. Chances are, if it is a contested district, you might get a phone call back. If not, at least you know you are doing something to fix the problem created by voting for someone who would sell you out. This isn't about fighting and beating the current candidate- it is about the journey it will take *you* to become involved enough to become a good gatekeeper for the governmental process in your district.
Especially since Ron Paul wants to defund NIST. I don't see how "Internet Freedom" and defunding NIST go hand in hand, unless his Internet Freedom initiative is to protect the same kind of large donors that would seek to make extra money from NIST going down. For those who don't know, NIST's time servers are what all keep us on the same sheet of music- kind of important to running the kind of Internet we have now.
I live in California, and basically have a kid and a wife that doesn't (actually can't) work. Because I've had enough income (and always had the last IT crash on my mind), I've pretty much paid everything in cash up front and have effectively no credit. Home buying with a mortgage is currently beyond my reach, even though I make a pretty good living. Not having health insurance isn't an option, because of the wife and kid, and it can be pricey because of the wife. BTW, if *your* stay at home wife isn't on board with consulting, its demands (she needs to be very self-sufficient and industrious), and the risks, you will need to stop now, and just find a way of enduring (going into management) until retirement age hits. Or get her on board. Or divorce. Because if you go through with consulting, and she isn't on board, it will end in divorce.
I've run my own business. Unless you have a product, don't do it. Service based IT consulting is a dicey business at best, and until I understood my market and how C-level people are motivated and think, I failed repeatedly until I learned the market well enough to succeed. Then I got out, because I realized that I didn't have my own assets and self-support aligned correctly. I'll be going back into it in a year or two at most. IF you do decide to go into consulting professionally, make sure you own a property you can live on that does not have a mortgage, car or credit payments, and NEVER EVER EVER borrow/mortgage or open a line of credit against that property- EVER.
Medical for the self-employed is also difficult to do, especially as I'm growing older. Ultimately, I will have to find a service plan that mixes some of the business back end (payroll for self, taking care of tax withholdings, etc) with the medical. There are companies that do this, but availability of their services varies state by state. Some will even help me prioritize expense spending for business related expenses like laptops, etc. Again, doing this without a product (to base selling services off of) or lots of business contacts that can say "yes" is a recipe for failure until those are developed.
With this in mind, here is my plan, and you may want to make use of it.
1. Buy at auction, refurbished, or used. The goal is to keep myself out of debt, and to ensure your costs are as low as possible for when consulting does come around again. My last car, next car, and my next property should come from auction/refurb/used, out of money I have put together in advance. Aggressive saving is the key to being successful at consulting, and saving to buy at auction is excellent practice. Multiple accounts for specific purchases, etc- do whatever it takes to save. Building credit is another term for "I am willing to be a slave to my debt load", and that should only be done with an equal amount of savings set aside to immediately pay any balance if hard financial times should hit, and only should be done if it builds something that adds positive cash flow (cars are not positive cash flow, and neither are properties these days).
2. Fix everything I buy at auction myself. I have to be self-sufficient, aside from those things that absolutely are a bad idea for me to do on my own. I can do my own light construction, plumbing, and residential electrical, because it isn't hard to learn and there is plenty of information out there on how to do it. Same goes for my vehicles. Double-plus good if the stay at home wife is even halfway motivated to become that self-sufficient (because, really, that is her fucking job if I bring home the only pay check). Drilling my own well or major brake work? I'll be paying for that, because of the cost of the equipment and the risk. A well, septic and off-grid power are really good for a primary residence, as they eliminate monthly expenses. Properly managed, they cost MUCH less than buying that service from a city or county. If I own my own property, this also means growing and canning our own food as a family. Again, self-sufficiency is t
Agreed. I also think that having filtering software creates a false sense of security wherein anything is going to be "ok" to do or view on the Web. Keeping the kids on their judgmental toes, asking themselves "is this ok for me to watch", means that they will do a better job of policing their own behavior rather than trusting in some filter list to determine whatever they are viewing is ok.
I recently had an issue like this come up with my daughter, because my wife puts the kid on PBSkids.org and kind of lets her do her own thing. Mom never thought that there might be content on a mainstream kids site that might be problematic, or need explaining to an 8 year old. One day, I am watching my kid watching videos, and there is a whole section priming kids to accept illegal search and seizure as ok. I then started watching other videos with my daughter, and found that there was a whole slough of behaviors that this "kids" website was preloading our kid with- accepting illegal search, stealing because the end justifies the means, and some really awful judgmental behaviors. I had been wondering where it was coming from, and it had been coming from something that was listed as "trustworthy". Now PBSkids.org is limited to viewing when parents are nearby and capable of lending an ear to the conversation- and generally, she doesn't want to view it as much now that she has to think about what she is watching. Then again, this has opened up my daughter's viewing habits to wander the internet more often, because it is now an exercise in judgment for her to be on the Internet, instead of just accepting whatever she clicks as being ok. I think why I had such a problem with this situation is that we are not raising her in a walled garden otherwise- she rides public transit (there is a lot there that needs explaining), listens to radio, goes to shows and experiences other things based upon her comfort level, not on some rigid set of unrealistic rules. Basically, giving her a pass on critical thinking while on the Internet was a mistake, and one that I corrected quickly.
There are no trustworthy sites on the internet. That is the whole point of raising the kid without a walled garden, because it will be more of a disservice to them later on if they run into a situation that requires critical thinking rather than blind adherence to accepting status quo.
A VP I know once did this at a company I've worked at. He focused on making sure his staff were happy doing good work. He couldn't offer great wages, so he made the workplace a great place to get work done in. Time off, personal projects, and work schedules were never an issue- the only requirement was a good end result. I even took a small pay cut to come and work for him. The team was incredibly happy, productive in not just beating timelines, but also in coming up with new lines of business and in internal innovation to run projects more efficiently.
The problem is that senior managers like this are rarer than the IT talent they try to recruit. Once he took his department from being the lowest overall performer to being the highest per capita earner in the company (took only three years), he was forced out by other veeps looking to cash in on what he had made. What they had not realized was that his gains in developing his division were at the expense of him taking bonuses. The compensation structure for senior managers was such that after making the "local contribution" of profits back to the company, the veeps could take their cut. They mistakenly thought he had found the golden goose and was pulling golden eggs out of its ass on demand. When they took over, their chief hatchet man found he would have to cut 1/4 of the staff just to get his bonus unless he continued for another two years not receiving a bonus. Sadly, he took the place from being a great place to work to being mediocre, and shed staff appropriately.
And the rarity of senior management who can see further than their bonus is what the article was mostly about. A lot of tech staff I know talk about how rare it is to find creative, intelligent talent in their fields, but the reality is that it is even rarer to find it in business leadership. I'm thinking that if "we" want to fix this problem, then "we" need to start more of our own companies, and run them the right way.