Automation is most definitely a thing. It's a thing I and many other engineers do every single day. My entire career is built around automating processes that either were manual processes or would have to be implemented as a manual process if not for the software I architect and write. That doesn't mean that every piece of automation I work on is unique enough to justify a patent. If he designed and built specific machines to support his business those should be patentable. Any software he or his company wrote to support their process is patentable. But, his entire business is based around the automation of an existing business process that any number of companies did before he built his automation. That right there creates prior art that the business process existed before he built his business. Just go do some simple searches and you'll find any number of legal scholars talk about the fact that patents are not supposed to be granted for existing business processes that are simply made electronic. I'm not in any way belittling what he did. I'm just pointing out that "doing it on a computer" is not patentable in the US legal system. So yes the patent should be invalidated and if due diligence had been done when it was applied for probably never should have been issued. And, as far as I'm concerned that's ok. That's why we have the law the post office used to invalidate the patent because poorly vetted or bad patents get issued and there needs to be a way to take them down and keep the market moving.
If the post office decided this was a good idea after hearing about his company they probably had someone do some basic research and saw on his website that he listed a patent. So the business people went in thinking it was a valid patent and that it would have to be licensed. They came back and talked to some engineers, and those engineers pointed out that 90% of what the patent covered is stuff they already do. You get some back and forth then between the engineers and the patent lawyers who dig through and find prior work (internal or external) or question the underlying premise of the patent and the post office will stop their conversations on licensing and sue to invalidate. In my understanding that's a very valid way to proceed. Unfortunately the patent office seems to issue lots of patents which should not be issued. Largely because it seems they don't have the technical knowledge to understand what is a re-application of existing technology/process and what is truly a unique invention. And, most "do it on a computer" or "do it on the internet" patents seem bogus. To the person filing for it they may honestly believe they have a new invention, but any engineer with a few years of industry experience would look at the "invention" in the patent and say it's a re-application of existing technologies to do exactly what those technologies were invented for.
I'm not saying that his idea isn't valuable. He obviously had a great idea and was able to build a business around it. But, the idea itself doesn't sound patentable to me. His specific implementation may be patentable, or aspects of what he has built could be. But, should the concept of scanning a barcode and marking an entry in a contacts database as invalid be itself patentable? I would argue not because the action itself is a standard business process that has been done before albeit manually. Plus the post office already had mail sorting hardware/software that would use OCR to decode the address on envelopes, apply barcodes to the envelopes, and then route said envelopes through massive sorting systems. So all they are doing on top of that is building a list of invalid addresses in a database when the envelopes route back through the sorting machine. So they already had most of the pieces he put together into his patent. Only the output was different.
Basically it sounds like he just took an existing process/job and did it on a computer. Prior to this a person would've gone into the contact spreadsheet or database and marked the entries as invalid. All he did was take that existing job and put a computer readable barcode on stuff and had the computer do it faster. Very useful for the companies as it saves payroll, but it does not sound like something that should've been patentable to me.
Caller ID issues have just been growing for years. This is not a "this administration" or "that administration" issue. It's a fundamental flaw in the way the caller ID protocol was bootstrapped onto the existing landline networks. Landline networks were harder to spoof because phone numbers were hard tied to geographical regions and if you spoofed stuff on a landline chances were the landline would get cut off or if you were a provider you would lose access to the network.
Then along comes number portability which gave consumers the right to move their landline phone number to a cell carrier or take it from one carrier to another. And, at the same time the growth of VOIP and suddenly there was no way to say provider X actually does have that number on their network. Because the numbers can bounce all over the place now in terms of ownership and whether they are landline, VOIP, or cellular.
Then VOIP hardware became cheap and easy to implement. Et voila! The perfect storm. This has been building to this point for at least two decades. Now anyone can pass a law saying they have to stop it, but the telecom companies have to come up with a solution of how to stop it that all of them can implement before that will do any good. It sounds like there are some good proposals out there, but for them to work a lot of hardware will have to be replaced/installed and it will take a while.
Taking aim at one administration or another in this case is just not helpful and doing so in such a childish way is not helpful. If you want people to agree that something needs to get fixed on something that should arguably not be political then don't turn it into a political mudslinging contest.
When you sign up for the enterprise program you agree to certain terms. Facebook violated those terms by making an app for general distribution outside the App Store to non-employees. The enterprise program is supposed to be used for making applications for your own employees/devices.
So Facebook completely ignored the terms of the license they agreed to when purchasing the enterprise program. Even when you develop using the enterprise program you still have to register the certificate of your application through Apple's servers and the end user has to accept the developer's certificate on their iOS device.
Just from a contract perspective Apple has every right to remove Facebook's app. Technically Facebook could even lose access to the entire enterprise.
In all likelihood the people installing this Facebook VPN had no idea what they were handing over to Facebook. Or that Facebook is not a brand you should really trust. So I'm ok with Apple acting as the cops in this case. They've done a good job so far in keeping my parents, sister, nieces/nephews, in-laws, etc... from doing really stupid things with their phones which contains almost every facet of their life including banking information.
The only way to enforce the kind of control you are advocating is to move to a Chinese style internet. Lock down all external connections to only approved channels. And, then hunt through the internal network looking for anyone not following the rules and punish them. Everyone would have to register their online identities and open source software projects that currently make the world go round would have to be locked down.
Up/down voting can be used by bullies. And, really what is the social value of up/down voting? Why should your response to anything I saw be binary? Let's say I post a simple statement saying I like the color red. Is that something that should have a binary response? Or let's extend and say trinary because you can always not respond. Is there really value in you giving me a thumbs up or thumbs down on the liking of red. if I truly like the color red and everyone else I know gives me thumbs down is that a valid reaction? That's a good way to bully someone into conforming with the color choices that everyone else puts out there. Pretty soon if I'm the only one who liked the color red I may find it's an opinion I dare not voice because the need to conform will push other individuals into jumping on me anytime I say anything about the color red.
You can see that basic tendency happen here in slashdot when someone says "I like Macs", "I like Windows", "I like Linux", "I like iPhones", "I like Android", etc... the nastiness that comes out as responses is terrible. Instead of asking "what about that *thing* do you like?" People just jump on and say how terrible it is. Or fanboys will jump in and push up an opinion they agree with. All while the rest of us are sitting here wondering what these nut jobs are all getting worked up about.
Twitter, Facebook, and all the other platforms are the same way. A small percentage of people are hitting the like buttons or jumping on the people who have opinions that diverge while the vast majority of people are standing by wonder what the nut jobs are up to. If I met you in real life and you expressed an opinion I didn't like I have to judge my surroundings to see if this is a good place to have a conversation on the subject, decide whether I really want to spend the time to express anything on the topic, and then I have to actually engage in a conversation with you. I don't get to just say "you're dumb" and walk away without looking like a complete child and everyone rightly judging me as having no social skills. But, on the internet that is the default behavior. I can sit on the toilet and hit a thumbs down/frowny face/or write "you're dumb" and then just move along to the next thing in my feed. And, when I do that I'm no better than the school bully who picks a fight for no better reason than he thinks that by putting someone else down he'll feel better about himself.
I seriously feel like I'm constantly living through the adage of "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Most of these people who don't want the military fail to remember what happened the last time we decided we didn't need a big military and we shouldn't get entangled in other people's fights. That fight came home to us here via an attack at Pearl Harbor which we were ill prepared to defend against because we stopped preparing to fight effectively.
My father is a US Marine, retired. One thing he told me that was instilled into him by the corps that has always stuck in my mind is "never start a fight, but if you find yourself in one be damned sure you finish it." I want the men and women who serve our country and our allies to be able to come home and the end of the day and hug their spouses and children. And, if that means that we give them the tools to do their job then I will be happy to help them get those tools.
I would be incredibly happy if we never again had to send men and women off to fight a war. And, I really would like to see the day when no one goes off to war. But, as long as there are bad people in this world who try to hurt people, dictators, despots, petty warlords, etc... then we need a military that can protect us and sometimes goes abroad to stop the bad people over there before they can come here and hurt people.
As for why we keep getting embroiled in wars much of it stems from a post WWII mentality developed by the US and the UK. If you've never read Churchill's writings I encourage you to. He may be a bit full of himself, but he laid out a lot of WWII and the immediate aftermath quite well and you will learn a lot of at least what he thought during the war years. But, he calls out that the US and UK looked at the war and never wanted something like it to happen again. They saw a rising threat in the old Soviet Union especially after the Soviets didn't retreat from the European countries they "liberated" during the war. And, those leaders decided the best defense was a strong offense.
So we keep seeking out conflicts while they hopefully remain "smaller" and before they can grow into something the likes of WWII. We keep trying to contain threats and neutralize them before they can become another Pearl Harbor or a Poland. Yes, that means we fight. Yes, that means some people die. But, better fewer people while a conflict can remain relatively small than after it has grown beyond hopes of containment and impacts too many people.
"We learn karate so that we don't have to use karate." Those are some of the first words my sensei in college ever said to my class in college. I think it's a very apt statement. We learn to fight, so that hopefully we never have to fight. Because if the other guy knows that we can and will fight back he might just not want to fight us at all. I know very few men and women in the military who want to get shot at or die. I know quite a few who want to go home to their spouses and their children and be proud of what they do and not be haunted by nightmares or suffer PTSD. Let's make sure they have the tools to do their jobs so that they can come home, and that they don't have to fight, or at least if they have to that they can limit who gets hurt.
Well said! A bit of a long read, but you summarize the feedback loop scenario perfectly. When you look at what is actually needed to gain an education vs. what is currently built into colleges it's a glaring divide. Most of what you actually need for an education can be listed as: a teacher, books, a classroom, and a computer. None of which should add up to 40k/year.
On the potential sex crime front. You need to consider two things, the potential misconduct happened a long time ago. That makes gathering evidence hard and when it comes to criminal courts an accusation is not enough to charge anyone. You need solid evidence. No prosecutor is going to file charges without believing they have at least some chance of winning in court. At least no sane prosecutor.
There may also be a statute of limitations at play. I have no idea what that length of time may be. But, many crimes cannot be prosecuted after enough time has gone by.
Just because you haven't seen charges yet doesn't mean that you won't at some point. It could take time to build a case.
Also, different crimes are tried in different courts and have potentially different prosecutors. Financial crimes that involve banks I think almost always go directly to federal courts. Sexual misconduct/molestation would likely be a county or state court unless inter-state travel or use of a national park or federal lands were involved in which case it would elevate to a federal crime.
Take what I say with a grain of salt. I learned most of my legalese from the internet...
We're all going to screw up at some point. If you are honest and forthright about your mistakes it tends to go over a lot better than when you try to hide them and it comes out later. I'm not saying you have to shout to everyone everything you've done wrong. But, if you hit the wrong button and cause lost productivity or take down a system you can aide in getting things put to rights a lot more by being honest than by trying to cover your tracks. And, you'll gain trust when you're honest about such things.
I've seen people who try to hide their mistakes, they tend to not last long around here once their behavior becomes known.
Also, if you don't understand something just say so and ask for clarification/help. The worst thing you can do on a project is say "yes" and walk away scared and not sure you know how to do it. Ultimately someone will be depending on your work, and when you don't deliver it can impact not just you but your coworkers. If you don't understand how to fill out a document, file a request, write a piece of code, etc... say so! Ask for guidance or an example. I assume when I delegate work that you know what to do, and I also assume that if you don't know you'll ask me for help.
Never threaten to leave to get something. All you do is sow distrust, and once you've lost trust you're in a bad situation. The best thing to do is be clear and politic in your discussion with your manager and explain to them why you are upset and what you believe should be done to rectify the situation. Let them infer that you might leave if they don't remedy the situation. If they are smart and value you, they will do what they can to rectify the matter. If they are not smart, or do not value you then nothing will change and you know where you stand. Which is to say that you can stay and show that they can run roughshod over you, or you can leave and explain politely as you leave why you left. The people who threaten may make short term gains, but ultimately they will find themselves painted into a corner. You can only threaten to leave so many times before they will simply say "fine, leave." Because in the meantime they will have positioned themselves to be able to get along fine without you despite what you think.
That may happen too, but my dad experienced first hand bullying from at least some of the women in the nursing department. Not sure the exact reason for it, but it was primarily from the older nurses in "Charge" positions. He was the only full time male nurse in the hospital, the others were either CNA's or floaters who worked part-time. But, there were at least two older nurses who constantly bullied my dad around and made his life hell. My mom, who was also a nurse at the same hospital, actually came home in tears sometimes from what the bullies were putting my dad through. Dad being a marine (won't say former, once a marine always a marine) hid it most of the time.
Reports should only exist to solve problems. And, when the problems go away so should the reports.
Why are reports typically created? Usually in my experience it's because you need to get a handle on the performance of something. Or you have identified a problem that you need so solve.
If you want to get a handle on the performance of something then you should run the report as long as it takes to get a handle on it. If it's not a problem, then stop the reporting.
If you have identified a problem, then by all means create a report to measure the problem and set a criteria for what you would consider to be "bad" and "good". Once you get the problem in hand and move your measure from bad to good and can keep it at good the problem will likely be gone. At which point your report is really doing no good anymore. If you're concerned about the problem coming up again set up some sort of threshold alert to warn you and stash that report away in your archives.
If a report outlives the problem it was intended to help solve institutional momentum will keep that report going forever. No one will remember why metric X was generated or why it was considered "bad" back in 2007 when that value got too high. The underlying technology or processes may have changed completely in the meantime and metric X may be meaningless, but someone who is ill informed will keep looking at it and trying to drive meaningless work off of it. The healthiest thing a company can do is to define a lifetime for their reports and re-evaluate whether those reports should continue at the end of the lifetime. If you do determine it should keep continuing define a new lifetime and re-evaluate it at the end of that lifetime again.
I personally account for:
- One person cell phone
- One work issued cell phone
- One medical device that has a cellular connection to a service provider
- One security system that has a mobile module in it
- Two kindles, one 2nd generation, and one DX both of which connect via cellular
You can keep your "smart firearms" to yourself. People who argue that "smart" firearms will keep them out of the hands of criminals obviously have never dismantled a firearm before. The main elements that make a firearm are the barrel, the chamber, and the firing pin. You load a shell into the chamber, the firing pin strikes the shell igniting the primer and powder, and the bullet is expelled from the shell into the barrel and outward.
Safeties on firearms typically disable the ability to pull the trigger or to allow the mechanism to engage the firing pin. All a "smart firearm" can do is to build some complex mechanism that acts as one of these safeties. If I were to open up a firearm for maintenance I could easily remove the "smart" portion of the firearm and replace it with some normal "dumb" components. Which thanks to 3D printing and relatively cheap machining equipment could be produced at home. Criminals will still steal weapons, they will pay someone some money to disable the smart portion, and they will continue on their way.
Here are some other problems I see with a "smart firearm."
- Batteries, ok, now I need to change the batteries in my firearms before I can use them
- Fingerprint scanners are useless in states that have cold weather, ever hear of gloves?
- Fingerprint scanners are also useless in most cases if your hands are too dry from things like woodworking, or a number of other hands on trades
- RF Bracelets? Umm... ever hear of RF jammers? If I'm a criminal and I want to rob people all I have to do is get an RF jammer that works on the approved frequencies and I suddenly render all firearms (except my own hacked one) useless. (If you want to point out that such jammers would be illegal I'll point you back to the fact that criminals don't follow the law.) And, I guarantee you the police will demand they can jam the frequency so the tech will be out there and it won't stay in police hands.
You nailed it spot on. There were always a few students back in college who "got it." But, the vast majority of the students I helped in the lab struggled with the concepts. I even knew a fair number of students who had tinkered with computers for years before showing up in my labs and they were still clueless once we hit anything that took abstract thinking, which was pretty much the first class. I know I was one of those annoying people who seemed to get it right away, but part of that was simply because I was a TA and the constant reiteration of concepts as I was helping students constantly pounded home the concepts for me. However even that background didn't prepare me for working in the real world, I had to learn and even re-learn a lot of concepts once I started working professionally. Which might surprise some of my lab partners from college.
There's nothing in her experience that I would call as truly being unique to her. She's just voicing self doubt and complaining about how hard it was to find her way into a specific field. Everyone feels self doubt at some point. But, she attributes that self doubt and inability to find opportunities to her gender.
Very few people I know in IT started out saying I want to be X and then found a college program to study that, and then immediately found a job doing that. Most people's careers are simply defined by the opportunities they are lucky enough to find when they are looking for a position. If you graduated with a CS degree but could only find DBA positions, you probably became a DBA. If all you could find was support, you're probably still working in support. If you found a position that involved coding, there's a good possibility that you're still doing coding. The folks that I know who work in security usually stumbled into the field because they were working on something security related for a project and made the right contacts to follow through.
Would you put someone in charge of finance who didn't have a background in finance or accounting?
Would you put someone in charge of a legal department who was not a lawyer?
I'm guessing the answer in both cases would be no. These are specialist areas that require specialized knowledge to ensure that the organizations are working correctly and effectively. Information Technology is also a specialist area and should really be treated in the same mode as a finance or legal department. Leadership within a specialist department should be representative of the core competency of that department. We certainly need people to help manage the money and people, and there are many other roles within a large IT organization that don't need to be technical. But, when it comes to making good decisions about technology you really need people with a technical background.
If you're working for a Fortune 500 company there likely will be some form of internal integrity hotline. I know my own corporation has one. Document your concerns and contact them. I recently had to report a concern raised about one of the major offshore contractors we use to our integrity hotline and it was actually a very good experience from my side. After submitting the issue it took a few days but an investigator from our legal department contacted me and we had a phone conversation, and then I forwarded him some additional details I had held back from the initial correspondence. I did that mostly to protect an individual from the contractor who brought the concerns to my attention.
I would make sure that the correspondence you send to your legal department includes copies of some of the email chains you have with your managers, peers, etc... raising the concerns. Be sure to specify any regulations you suspect are being violated. If the legal team determines there is concern you can bet that change will happen. If they determine otherwise, then you've done your due diligence and reported it within the means your company gives for you to report it.
You don't face criminal charges for not testifying. You are held in contempt of court. Contempt of court does not require the state to press charges against you and an independent trial.
Pretty sure these were features of VB6. I remember hacking out code, using the immediate window to trace values, setting break points, stepping through the code, modifying in the middle of execution, and then resuming execution. The language itself may have had a lot of issues and performance issues, but the IDE and development environment had some very nice features.
We are definitely enriched by the arts. However there is a surplus of people going into these areas and a deficit of jobs. I see this quite frequently since one of my hobbies is working with community theatre groups. I see a lot of folks who got theatre, music, or other arts related majors in college (quite frequently at private colleges...) and then complain that they can't find a job. Note, I live in the Minneapolis area and we have a very large theatre community here, even with all the professional theatres we have here we cannot support the numbers of people who graduate every year looking to make theatre their career.
I would argue that most of these individuals would've been better off having obtained a major in some other field and done theatre as a minor or second major. Personally I majored in computer science. I have a stable profitable career, and I'm still able to partake in the arts and contribute to the arts.
The same can also be said for elementary education majors here in MN. We probably have per capita one of the highest rates of people with elementary education degrees. To the point where most of them are not working in education. Probably only half of the people I know who went to college for elementary education are actually working in that field. Did they learn something valuable? Sure. Could they have potentially learned something else and had an easier time getting a career in another field? Definitely.
I think the original commenter was simply trying to point out this fact. We do a very poor job of guiding teenagers moving from high school to either the real world or college. And, there are some fields which are simply over-saturated and it'll be hard to get a job in.
I have to say I have severely mixed feelings on working from home. It's definitely nice on occasion, but as I see more and more of my coworkers working remotely and we're forced to use more workers in India it creates an environment where the entire feeling of teamwork is breaking down. Plus as an engineer I feel my single best tool for communicating many technical issues and designs is a marker board. Which cannot be used remotely. Even the engineers I have "locally" tend to be very green and need a lot of guidance, trying to lead them remotely just gives me a headache and things take far longer than they should.
Some of it might be attributable to the "participation award" mentality that has become quite pervasive over the past few decades. I can't recall where I read it, but sometime in the past few months there was an article which was pointing out that the kids currently in college were more likely to believe themselves to be exceptional at whatever they were doing. If they all believe themselves to be exceptional they have very little reason to try and do better. A lifetime of reinforcing that everyone is a winner, and everyone is exceptional can only result in bar being lowered.
There's definitely value in teaching kids that it's good to try, and it's ok to not succeed at some things. But, it may have been taken a bit too far. People need to fall down if only to learn how to stand. And, that's not really happening right now in our schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Automation is most definitely a thing. It's a thing I and many other engineers do every single day. My entire career is built around automating processes that either were manual processes or would have to be implemented as a manual process if not for the software I architect and write. That doesn't mean that every piece of automation I work on is unique enough to justify a patent. If he designed and built specific machines to support his business those should be patentable. Any software he or his company wrote to support their process is patentable. But, his entire business is based around the automation of an existing business process that any number of companies did before he built his automation. That right there creates prior art that the business process existed before he built his business. Just go do some simple searches and you'll find any number of legal scholars talk about the fact that patents are not supposed to be granted for existing business processes that are simply made electronic. I'm not in any way belittling what he did. I'm just pointing out that "doing it on a computer" is not patentable in the US legal system. So yes the patent should be invalidated and if due diligence had been done when it was applied for probably never should have been issued. And, as far as I'm concerned that's ok. That's why we have the law the post office used to invalidate the patent because poorly vetted or bad patents get issued and there needs to be a way to take them down and keep the market moving.
If the post office decided this was a good idea after hearing about his company they probably had someone do some basic research and saw on his website that he listed a patent. So the business people went in thinking it was a valid patent and that it would have to be licensed. They came back and talked to some engineers, and those engineers pointed out that 90% of what the patent covered is stuff they already do. You get some back and forth then between the engineers and the patent lawyers who dig through and find prior work (internal or external) or question the underlying premise of the patent and the post office will stop their conversations on licensing and sue to invalidate. In my understanding that's a very valid way to proceed. Unfortunately the patent office seems to issue lots of patents which should not be issued. Largely because it seems they don't have the technical knowledge to understand what is a re-application of existing technology/process and what is truly a unique invention. And, most "do it on a computer" or "do it on the internet" patents seem bogus. To the person filing for it they may honestly believe they have a new invention, but any engineer with a few years of industry experience would look at the "invention" in the patent and say it's a re-application of existing technologies to do exactly what those technologies were invented for.
I'm not saying that his idea isn't valuable. He obviously had a great idea and was able to build a business around it. But, the idea itself doesn't sound patentable to me. His specific implementation may be patentable, or aspects of what he has built could be. But, should the concept of scanning a barcode and marking an entry in a contacts database as invalid be itself patentable? I would argue not because the action itself is a standard business process that has been done before albeit manually. Plus the post office already had mail sorting hardware/software that would use OCR to decode the address on envelopes, apply barcodes to the envelopes, and then route said envelopes through massive sorting systems. So all they are doing on top of that is building a list of invalid addresses in a database when the envelopes route back through the sorting machine. So they already had most of the pieces he put together into his patent. Only the output was different.
Basically it sounds like he just took an existing process/job and did it on a computer. Prior to this a person would've gone into the contact spreadsheet or database and marked the entries as invalid. All he did was take that existing job and put a computer readable barcode on stuff and had the computer do it faster. Very useful for the companies as it saves payroll, but it does not sound like something that should've been patentable to me.
Caller ID issues have just been growing for years. This is not a "this administration" or "that administration" issue. It's a fundamental flaw in the way the caller ID protocol was bootstrapped onto the existing landline networks. Landline networks were harder to spoof because phone numbers were hard tied to geographical regions and if you spoofed stuff on a landline chances were the landline would get cut off or if you were a provider you would lose access to the network.
Then along comes number portability which gave consumers the right to move their landline phone number to a cell carrier or take it from one carrier to another. And, at the same time the growth of VOIP and suddenly there was no way to say provider X actually does have that number on their network. Because the numbers can bounce all over the place now in terms of ownership and whether they are landline, VOIP, or cellular.
Then VOIP hardware became cheap and easy to implement. Et voila! The perfect storm. This has been building to this point for at least two decades. Now anyone can pass a law saying they have to stop it, but the telecom companies have to come up with a solution of how to stop it that all of them can implement before that will do any good. It sounds like there are some good proposals out there, but for them to work a lot of hardware will have to be replaced/installed and it will take a while.
Taking aim at one administration or another in this case is just not helpful and doing so in such a childish way is not helpful. If you want people to agree that something needs to get fixed on something that should arguably not be political then don't turn it into a political mudslinging contest.
When you sign up for the enterprise program you agree to certain terms. Facebook violated those terms by making an app for general distribution outside the App Store to non-employees. The enterprise program is supposed to be used for making applications for your own employees/devices.
So Facebook completely ignored the terms of the license they agreed to when purchasing the enterprise program. Even when you develop using the enterprise program you still have to register the certificate of your application through Apple's servers and the end user has to accept the developer's certificate on their iOS device.
Just from a contract perspective Apple has every right to remove Facebook's app. Technically Facebook could even lose access to the entire enterprise.
In all likelihood the people installing this Facebook VPN had no idea what they were handing over to Facebook. Or that Facebook is not a brand you should really trust. So I'm ok with Apple acting as the cops in this case. They've done a good job so far in keeping my parents, sister, nieces/nephews, in-laws, etc... from doing really stupid things with their phones which contains almost every facet of their life including banking information.
The only way to enforce the kind of control you are advocating is to move to a Chinese style internet. Lock down all external connections to only approved channels. And, then hunt through the internal network looking for anyone not following the rules and punish them. Everyone would have to register their online identities and open source software projects that currently make the world go round would have to be locked down.
Up/down voting can be used by bullies. And, really what is the social value of up/down voting? Why should your response to anything I saw be binary? Let's say I post a simple statement saying I like the color red. Is that something that should have a binary response? Or let's extend and say trinary because you can always not respond. Is there really value in you giving me a thumbs up or thumbs down on the liking of red. if I truly like the color red and everyone else I know gives me thumbs down is that a valid reaction? That's a good way to bully someone into conforming with the color choices that everyone else puts out there. Pretty soon if I'm the only one who liked the color red I may find it's an opinion I dare not voice because the need to conform will push other individuals into jumping on me anytime I say anything about the color red.
You can see that basic tendency happen here in slashdot when someone says "I like Macs", "I like Windows", "I like Linux", "I like iPhones", "I like Android", etc... the nastiness that comes out as responses is terrible. Instead of asking "what about that *thing* do you like?" People just jump on and say how terrible it is. Or fanboys will jump in and push up an opinion they agree with. All while the rest of us are sitting here wondering what these nut jobs are all getting worked up about.
Twitter, Facebook, and all the other platforms are the same way. A small percentage of people are hitting the like buttons or jumping on the people who have opinions that diverge while the vast majority of people are standing by wonder what the nut jobs are up to. If I met you in real life and you expressed an opinion I didn't like I have to judge my surroundings to see if this is a good place to have a conversation on the subject, decide whether I really want to spend the time to express anything on the topic, and then I have to actually engage in a conversation with you. I don't get to just say "you're dumb" and walk away without looking like a complete child and everyone rightly judging me as having no social skills. But, on the internet that is the default behavior. I can sit on the toilet and hit a thumbs down/frowny face/or write "you're dumb" and then just move along to the next thing in my feed. And, when I do that I'm no better than the school bully who picks a fight for no better reason than he thinks that by putting someone else down he'll feel better about himself.
I seriously feel like I'm constantly living through the adage of "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Most of these people who don't want the military fail to remember what happened the last time we decided we didn't need a big military and we shouldn't get entangled in other people's fights. That fight came home to us here via an attack at Pearl Harbor which we were ill prepared to defend against because we stopped preparing to fight effectively.
My father is a US Marine, retired. One thing he told me that was instilled into him by the corps that has always stuck in my mind is "never start a fight, but if you find yourself in one be damned sure you finish it." I want the men and women who serve our country and our allies to be able to come home and the end of the day and hug their spouses and children. And, if that means that we give them the tools to do their job then I will be happy to help them get those tools.
I would be incredibly happy if we never again had to send men and women off to fight a war. And, I really would like to see the day when no one goes off to war. But, as long as there are bad people in this world who try to hurt people, dictators, despots, petty warlords, etc... then we need a military that can protect us and sometimes goes abroad to stop the bad people over there before they can come here and hurt people.
As for why we keep getting embroiled in wars much of it stems from a post WWII mentality developed by the US and the UK. If you've never read Churchill's writings I encourage you to. He may be a bit full of himself, but he laid out a lot of WWII and the immediate aftermath quite well and you will learn a lot of at least what he thought during the war years. But, he calls out that the US and UK looked at the war and never wanted something like it to happen again. They saw a rising threat in the old Soviet Union especially after the Soviets didn't retreat from the European countries they "liberated" during the war. And, those leaders decided the best defense was a strong offense.
So we keep seeking out conflicts while they hopefully remain "smaller" and before they can grow into something the likes of WWII. We keep trying to contain threats and neutralize them before they can become another Pearl Harbor or a Poland. Yes, that means we fight. Yes, that means some people die. But, better fewer people while a conflict can remain relatively small than after it has grown beyond hopes of containment and impacts too many people.
"We learn karate so that we don't have to use karate." Those are some of the first words my sensei in college ever said to my class in college. I think it's a very apt statement. We learn to fight, so that hopefully we never have to fight. Because if the other guy knows that we can and will fight back he might just not want to fight us at all. I know very few men and women in the military who want to get shot at or die. I know quite a few who want to go home to their spouses and their children and be proud of what they do and not be haunted by nightmares or suffer PTSD. Let's make sure they have the tools to do their jobs so that they can come home, and that they don't have to fight, or at least if they have to that they can limit who gets hurt.
Well said! A bit of a long read, but you summarize the feedback loop scenario perfectly. When you look at what is actually needed to gain an education vs. what is currently built into colleges it's a glaring divide. Most of what you actually need for an education can be listed as: a teacher, books, a classroom, and a computer. None of which should add up to 40k/year.
On the potential sex crime front. You need to consider two things, the potential misconduct happened a long time ago. That makes gathering evidence hard and when it comes to criminal courts an accusation is not enough to charge anyone. You need solid evidence. No prosecutor is going to file charges without believing they have at least some chance of winning in court. At least no sane prosecutor.
There may also be a statute of limitations at play. I have no idea what that length of time may be. But, many crimes cannot be prosecuted after enough time has gone by.
Just because you haven't seen charges yet doesn't mean that you won't at some point. It could take time to build a case.
Also, different crimes are tried in different courts and have potentially different prosecutors. Financial crimes that involve banks I think almost always go directly to federal courts. Sexual misconduct/molestation would likely be a county or state court unless inter-state travel or use of a national park or federal lands were involved in which case it would elevate to a federal crime.
Take what I say with a grain of salt. I learned most of my legalese from the internet...
We're all going to screw up at some point. If you are honest and forthright about your mistakes it tends to go over a lot better than when you try to hide them and it comes out later. I'm not saying you have to shout to everyone everything you've done wrong. But, if you hit the wrong button and cause lost productivity or take down a system you can aide in getting things put to rights a lot more by being honest than by trying to cover your tracks. And, you'll gain trust when you're honest about such things.
I've seen people who try to hide their mistakes, they tend to not last long around here once their behavior becomes known.
Also, if you don't understand something just say so and ask for clarification/help. The worst thing you can do on a project is say "yes" and walk away scared and not sure you know how to do it. Ultimately someone will be depending on your work, and when you don't deliver it can impact not just you but your coworkers. If you don't understand how to fill out a document, file a request, write a piece of code, etc... say so! Ask for guidance or an example. I assume when I delegate work that you know what to do, and I also assume that if you don't know you'll ask me for help.
Never threaten to leave to get something. All you do is sow distrust, and once you've lost trust you're in a bad situation. The best thing to do is be clear and politic in your discussion with your manager and explain to them why you are upset and what you believe should be done to rectify the situation. Let them infer that you might leave if they don't remedy the situation. If they are smart and value you, they will do what they can to rectify the matter. If they are not smart, or do not value you then nothing will change and you know where you stand. Which is to say that you can stay and show that they can run roughshod over you, or you can leave and explain politely as you leave why you left. The people who threaten may make short term gains, but ultimately they will find themselves painted into a corner. You can only threaten to leave so many times before they will simply say "fine, leave." Because in the meantime they will have positioned themselves to be able to get along fine without you despite what you think.
That may happen too, but my dad experienced first hand bullying from at least some of the women in the nursing department. Not sure the exact reason for it, but it was primarily from the older nurses in "Charge" positions. He was the only full time male nurse in the hospital, the others were either CNA's or floaters who worked part-time. But, there were at least two older nurses who constantly bullied my dad around and made his life hell. My mom, who was also a nurse at the same hospital, actually came home in tears sometimes from what the bullies were putting my dad through. Dad being a marine (won't say former, once a marine always a marine) hid it most of the time.
Reports should only exist to solve problems. And, when the problems go away so should the reports.
Why are reports typically created? Usually in my experience it's because you need to get a handle on the performance of something. Or you have identified a problem that you need so solve.
If you want to get a handle on the performance of something then you should run the report as long as it takes to get a handle on it. If it's not a problem, then stop the reporting.
If you have identified a problem, then by all means create a report to measure the problem and set a criteria for what you would consider to be "bad" and "good". Once you get the problem in hand and move your measure from bad to good and can keep it at good the problem will likely be gone. At which point your report is really doing no good anymore. If you're concerned about the problem coming up again set up some sort of threshold alert to warn you and stash that report away in your archives.
If a report outlives the problem it was intended to help solve institutional momentum will keep that report going forever. No one will remember why metric X was generated or why it was considered "bad" back in 2007 when that value got too high. The underlying technology or processes may have changed completely in the meantime and metric X may be meaningless, but someone who is ill informed will keep looking at it and trying to drive meaningless work off of it. The healthiest thing a company can do is to define a lifetime for their reports and re-evaluate whether those reports should continue at the end of the lifetime. If you do determine it should keep continuing define a new lifetime and re-evaluate it at the end of that lifetime again.
I personally account for:
- One person cell phone
- One work issued cell phone
- One medical device that has a cellular connection to a service provider
- One security system that has a mobile module in it
- Two kindles, one 2nd generation, and one DX both of which connect via cellular
So right there I account for six "subscriptions."
You can keep your "smart firearms" to yourself. People who argue that "smart" firearms will keep them out of the hands of criminals obviously have never dismantled a firearm before. The main elements that make a firearm are the barrel, the chamber, and the firing pin. You load a shell into the chamber, the firing pin strikes the shell igniting the primer and powder, and the bullet is expelled from the shell into the barrel and outward.
Safeties on firearms typically disable the ability to pull the trigger or to allow the mechanism to engage the firing pin. All a "smart firearm" can do is to build some complex mechanism that acts as one of these safeties. If I were to open up a firearm for maintenance I could easily remove the "smart" portion of the firearm and replace it with some normal "dumb" components. Which thanks to 3D printing and relatively cheap machining equipment could be produced at home. Criminals will still steal weapons, they will pay someone some money to disable the smart portion, and they will continue on their way.
Here are some other problems I see with a "smart firearm."
- Batteries, ok, now I need to change the batteries in my firearms before I can use them
- Fingerprint scanners are useless in states that have cold weather, ever hear of gloves?
- Fingerprint scanners are also useless in most cases if your hands are too dry from things like woodworking, or a number of other hands on trades
- RF Bracelets? Umm... ever hear of RF jammers? If I'm a criminal and I want to rob people all I have to do is get an RF jammer that works on the approved frequencies and I suddenly render all firearms (except my own hacked one) useless. (If you want to point out that such jammers would be illegal I'll point you back to the fact that criminals don't follow the law.) And, I guarantee you the police will demand they can jam the frequency so the tech will be out there and it won't stay in police hands.
You nailed it spot on. There were always a few students back in college who "got it." But, the vast majority of the students I helped in the lab struggled with the concepts. I even knew a fair number of students who had tinkered with computers for years before showing up in my labs and they were still clueless once we hit anything that took abstract thinking, which was pretty much the first class. I know I was one of those annoying people who seemed to get it right away, but part of that was simply because I was a TA and the constant reiteration of concepts as I was helping students constantly pounded home the concepts for me. However even that background didn't prepare me for working in the real world, I had to learn and even re-learn a lot of concepts once I started working professionally. Which might surprise some of my lab partners from college.
There's nothing in her experience that I would call as truly being unique to her. She's just voicing self doubt and complaining about how hard it was to find her way into a specific field. Everyone feels self doubt at some point. But, she attributes that self doubt and inability to find opportunities to her gender.
Very few people I know in IT started out saying I want to be X and then found a college program to study that, and then immediately found a job doing that. Most people's careers are simply defined by the opportunities they are lucky enough to find when they are looking for a position. If you graduated with a CS degree but could only find DBA positions, you probably became a DBA. If all you could find was support, you're probably still working in support. If you found a position that involved coding, there's a good possibility that you're still doing coding. The folks that I know who work in security usually stumbled into the field because they were working on something security related for a project and made the right contacts to follow through.
Would you put someone in charge of finance who didn't have a background in finance or accounting?
Would you put someone in charge of a legal department who was not a lawyer?
I'm guessing the answer in both cases would be no. These are specialist areas that require specialized knowledge to ensure that the organizations are working correctly and effectively. Information Technology is also a specialist area and should really be treated in the same mode as a finance or legal department. Leadership within a specialist department should be representative of the core competency of that department. We certainly need people to help manage the money and people, and there are many other roles within a large IT organization that don't need to be technical. But, when it comes to making good decisions about technology you really need people with a technical background.
If you're working for a Fortune 500 company there likely will be some form of internal integrity hotline. I know my own corporation has one. Document your concerns and contact them. I recently had to report a concern raised about one of the major offshore contractors we use to our integrity hotline and it was actually a very good experience from my side. After submitting the issue it took a few days but an investigator from our legal department contacted me and we had a phone conversation, and then I forwarded him some additional details I had held back from the initial correspondence. I did that mostly to protect an individual from the contractor who brought the concerns to my attention.
I would make sure that the correspondence you send to your legal department includes copies of some of the email chains you have with your managers, peers, etc... raising the concerns. Be sure to specify any regulations you suspect are being violated. If the legal team determines there is concern you can bet that change will happen. If they determine otherwise, then you've done your due diligence and reported it within the means your company gives for you to report it.
You don't face criminal charges for not testifying. You are held in contempt of court. Contempt of court does not require the state to press charges against you and an independent trial.
Pretty sure these were features of VB6. I remember hacking out code, using the immediate window to trace values, setting break points, stepping through the code, modifying in the middle of execution, and then resuming execution. The language itself may have had a lot of issues and performance issues, but the IDE and development environment had some very nice features.
We are definitely enriched by the arts. However there is a surplus of people going into these areas and a deficit of jobs. I see this quite frequently since one of my hobbies is working with community theatre groups. I see a lot of folks who got theatre, music, or other arts related majors in college (quite frequently at private colleges...) and then complain that they can't find a job. Note, I live in the Minneapolis area and we have a very large theatre community here, even with all the professional theatres we have here we cannot support the numbers of people who graduate every year looking to make theatre their career.
I would argue that most of these individuals would've been better off having obtained a major in some other field and done theatre as a minor or second major. Personally I majored in computer science. I have a stable profitable career, and I'm still able to partake in the arts and contribute to the arts.
The same can also be said for elementary education majors here in MN. We probably have per capita one of the highest rates of people with elementary education degrees. To the point where most of them are not working in education. Probably only half of the people I know who went to college for elementary education are actually working in that field. Did they learn something valuable? Sure. Could they have potentially learned something else and had an easier time getting a career in another field? Definitely.
I think the original commenter was simply trying to point out this fact. We do a very poor job of guiding teenagers moving from high school to either the real world or college. And, there are some fields which are simply over-saturated and it'll be hard to get a job in.
I have to say I have severely mixed feelings on working from home. It's definitely nice on occasion, but as I see more and more of my coworkers working remotely and we're forced to use more workers in India it creates an environment where the entire feeling of teamwork is breaking down. Plus as an engineer I feel my single best tool for communicating many technical issues and designs is a marker board. Which cannot be used remotely. Even the engineers I have "locally" tend to be very green and need a lot of guidance, trying to lead them remotely just gives me a headache and things take far longer than they should.
Some of it might be attributable to the "participation award" mentality that has become quite pervasive over the past few decades. I can't recall where I read it, but sometime in the past few months there was an article which was pointing out that the kids currently in college were more likely to believe themselves to be exceptional at whatever they were doing. If they all believe themselves to be exceptional they have very little reason to try and do better. A lifetime of reinforcing that everyone is a winner, and everyone is exceptional can only result in bar being lowered.
There's definitely value in teaching kids that it's good to try, and it's ok to not succeed at some things. But, it may have been taken a bit too far. People need to fall down if only to learn how to stand. And, that's not really happening right now in our schools.