My income has quadrupled since I started, and I'm not too far from $125K today, with a year of school left to go.
One nice thing about WGU is that many of the classes end in industry certifications such as Cisco CNNA and Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Certifications. I have about eight professional certifications from WGU courses right now. In about two weeks I'll have my Cisco VNNA Security. Listing those certifications on LinkedIn absolutely does get recruiters calling.
Then when I have interviews, it's me, with fresh knowledge about the subject (and a respected certification) vs the guy who padded his resume claiming "networking knowledge" because he set up his Linksys. At my last interview, I was asked how a piece of data travels the network. When it became clear I knew everything end-to-end, when I could talk about the details of how a packet is processed inside the router, and how switches decide where to forward frames, the interview team was very impressed. They offered me a job at nearly twice the salary I had been making. A lot of that networking knowledge I learned at WGU.
Similar for other topics - the other guy *said* he knew Windows servers and Linux. I said I knew Windows servers and Linux *and* had certifications from Microsoft and LPI to back it up.
> The problem is that citizens then become virtual prisoners in their country, because if they leave their basic rights don't have to be respected when they try to cross the border.
Are you talking about when a citizen is coming back home? I did say in my post citizens have a right to come home, in general*, and they don't (shouldn't) have to give up other rights to do so. On the other hand, citizens of Syria don't have a *right* to come to the United States - they are invited subject to conditions.
Do you mean if the US searches Syrian citizens, Syria may retaliate by being rude to US citizens? Too late - Syria hasn't respected human rights for many decades.
* For a few countries known to sponsor or harbor terrorists and such, I have no problem with a policy of "if you choose to go to Syria, be forewarned a) Syrians may chop your head off and b) the US will search you thoroughly when you return." You can decide whether you're willing to risk your life and a search before you travel to a hotbed of violence and terrorism like Syria.
I agree. As far as I know, there is little to be gained from a policy of searching phones.
I can think of some rare circumstances in which it might be the most efficient way to resolve a doubt, perhaps with consent. Consider a young man, maybe 20 years old, is wanting to visit and bring a $50,000 of cash across the border. He says the cash is for his business buying medical lab equipment at auction in one country and bringing it to the other. Given the total circumstances, his story seems suspicious. A quick look at his Facebook and a glance at his text messages may establish whether he appears to actually be in the medical lab equipment business, or if it looks more likely he's intending to run drugs. That's an unusual type of case though, and could probably be handled with a consent search ("sir, this pile of cash looks suspicious, mind if I look at your phone for a minute?)
There are a lot of judgement calls in these kinds of things, and looking at someone's phone *will* tell you a lot about what kind of person you're dealing with, but in general I don't think it should be routinely. Probably in most cases only consensually, when there is reason to check somebody out a bit, you could give them the option of speeding up the process by letting someone look through their phone rather than waiting to hear back from more official inquiries into their background.
> I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I've been there - I lived in a vacant lot under a tarp for a while, then moved into a dilapidated mobile home I shared with a roommate (rent $125/month). A few years later I was evicted from a house when I couldn't pay the rent. That was about 15 years ago.
> the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not.
Several years ago I learned that there are a few specific things that rich people do to get amd stay rich. I was surprised to learn that over 80% of millionaires never made more than $100,000 / year. I've tried to apply some of those principles and while I've not been very good at applying them consistently, I rarely very have to *worry* about money anymore. Now I'm concerned mostly about making less progress than planned toward becoming a millionaire so I can retire comfortably.
Actually I found out there are two distinct groups of "rich people" - roughly those who are financially comfortable and those who have more than $100 million dollars. The mega rich almost always give up everything else in their life to obsessively pursue money. Screw that, I don't want to do that. The people who have a few million get there by much more reasonable steps such as using a written budget with automatic saving as the first item. I can do that.
> My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege.
Ouch! You say she just started college. My college career was interrupted 25 years ago, so I'm just about to graduate now. At WGU (a state school) tuition and fees is $6,000/year. I get student loans of $3,000/year. The other $3,000/year is covered by the tax credit, my employer's tuition reimbursement, and me paying a bit of cash each year from working. I'll graduate with total student loans of $12,000. Well, I would have, but when I got some extra money (outside of my normal paycheck) I paid off $6,000, so I'll graduate with $6,000 in debt. With the degree I chose, that's about 2 1/2 weeks of income. You *could* talk to your daughter about debt and double check if the plan she has is something she's going to be happy about five or ten years from now. She doesn't *have* to have significant debt to get a college education. Of course she can go into major debt if she wants to.
I don't think border patrol should be searching phones, we agree on that. We disagree on the reason why.
> So while I can't run for US president, if I visit
If you visit, sure, no unreasonable search. Just as I treat visitors in my home respectfully, as I'm sure you do in your home.
Consider when a couple of thuggish looking guys, strangers, show up at my door one night. Not only am I not required to invite them in, but because my wife and 2 year old daughter are inside, I have a responsibility to my wife and daughter to NOT bring potentially dangerous people in. It is my duty to take some care regarding who I allow inside.
If you want to, you can throw a nude party in your house, and say "if you want to join the party, you need to be nude". Or you can throw a sober party, and say "if you want to come to my party, don't show up drunk." I can choose whether I want to come in under those conditions or not. You haven't violated my rights by setting ground rules for your party.
When someone standing at the border requesting entry, a country has no obligation to let them in. They in fact have some degree of responsibility to exercise a degree of care about who comes in and what they bring with them. Perhaps the government has no right to search X, for any X, but they DO have the right to say "no you can't come in", or impose any conditions they feel are proper before granting entry.
Once you're in the US (and while your outside the US), your rights as a human being should be fully respected.
On the other hand, it would be wrong for me to block your entry into your *own* house, saying "in order to go home, you have to get nude." That's the case of US citizens. Unlike people who wish to visit, peope have a right to enter their own home.
That said, I thinking searches the phones of visitors as a general policy is just a bad idea. I think it's inefficient, ineffective, and a bit rude.
Specially, the room lighting and the monitor brightness should be related so that the screen appears roughly as bright as a piece of paper held next to the monitor. The white areas of the monitor should appear white, like the paper, not like staring at a lightbulb in an otherwise dark room.
The statement was "there is no surface discontinuity". There is in fact a major shipping route separating Africa from Eurasia at Suez. Yeah at Suez the water isn't very deep, so it's handy that the claim was "SURFACE discontinuity".
More importantly, if we touch our fingertips together, that doesn't make us one person. That makes us two different people touching at one small spot. Prior the mid-1800s, Africa and Eurasia were two continents touching at one small spot. Now they are 100% separated by water.
Slashdot recently had an article regarding a law suit against Apple. The summary went something like this:
Google's lawyers said blah blah blah on Friday in the appeal they filed ABC's to law suit. Google says they blah blah blah. According to Google's lawyers, they are right because blah blah blah.
Not a single word about what the other company's position is. Does that sound like a fair and objective story?
Does such reporting *work*, does it strongly influence opinion? ALL of the comments posted on Slashdot were based purely on the claims in the summary (Google's claims) and therefore supportive of Google. I'm the only one who pointed out that Google made these in an APPEAL - the jury, after listening to evidence from both sides, had already decided that the other company was right. Therefore the other company most likely has a fair point or two - no mention in the Slashdot summary of what the other company said (and the court ruled was correct).
In almost all disagreements, both sides have a point, or a legitimate concern. One side may have a *stronger* point, but there *are* two sides - otherwise there wouldn't be a dispute. If a source fails to present both sides of an issue they are reporting on, it's probably a source of opinion, not news.
I don't think it was ever more objective, certainly not since William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s. Newspapers used to be more honest about their political leanings. For example, the Austin American Statesman used to be called the Austin American Democrat. Similar names can be found in smaller cities, the newspaper will be named Middletown Liberal Times or whatever.
The LA Times had a very clear policy of simply not reporting anything that didn't support their political leanings. In 1884 the ignored Grover Cleveland's election to president for several days, pretty much pretending it didn't happen.
> as there is no surface discontinuity between Europe, Asia and Africa, the notion of "continent" as we understand it was completely arbitrary
There's a rather large surface discontinuity between Africa and Eurasia, comprised of the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Prior to 1869, these two separate landmasses used to touch, but just because I touch you with my finger doesn't make us one body.
> And how do you intend to lift your nuclear reactor to orbit? Nuclear reactors are pretty heavy.
*Current* reactor designs produce just barely enough energy to lift themselves. You'd need rocket assist to lift everything else. Of course you'd also need to do the engineering to convert the nuclear power to thrust efficiently, but on it's face it's not impossible.
While a bogus 911 is a misdemeanor in the two states I checked (California and Texas), using a false name on a police report is a felony in California. That may apply. As you suggested, that would trigger the felony-murder rule.
You're right, that would probably be "mere preparation" and therefore not attempted murder. Though as someone else pointed out, if TWO people go get the knife, there's conspiracy to commit murder.
I agree it's an issue. The difference in penalties may be too great in many instances. There are of course a couple of reasons sentences are, and should be, different.
Keeping closest to the viewpoint you brought up, many things are dangerous. Heck, MOST things involve some risk. Consequences should fit the actual risk. Suppose I shoot off some fireworks in the middle of some soccer fields, full of short green, moist grass (which doesn't burn). Another person shoots off fireworks in their apartment complex. We've both committed the offense of shooting off fireworks within city limits. One of us was a much greater danger than the other. One method of measuring the actual danger posed is that my action did not in fact burn even a blade of grass, his action burned down an apartment building - with people in it. You can tell that his action truly could have killed people if it truly did kill people. Since my action actually did no harm, probably it wasn't really that dangerous.
If my brother has two or three drinks, you probably would never know it by having a conversation with him. Yet, his BAC is probably over 0.08%. My wife is the opposite. Three drinks and she'd probably wreck before she got out of the parking lot. The blood test doesn't measure the risk. What DOES demonstrate the degree of actual danger is if my wife actually plows through a crowd of people. Both drove over the limit - one drove without so much as running a red light, the other ran into people. Clearly, one is more of a danger to society than the other.
You mentioned murder vs attempted murder specifically. Buying a butcher knife with the intent to use it on someone is attempted murder (one can argue whether it *should* be, but it is). Someone who does that is a danger to society. Someone who actually stabs people to death, successfully, is clearly a greater danger.
Secondly, crime and punishment isn't all about the criminal, it's also about the victims (or potential victims). If somebody got plastered and ran over your child, after having been warned about the danger via a previous DWI charge, you'd probably want to kill the motherfucker who ran over your kid. As a society, we don't want parents, spouses, etc acting as judge, jury, and executioner, taking vengeance on the criminal - so we offer a better way. Victims can (hopefully) see justice done without taking justice into their own hands. If someone drives drunk and does *not* hurt anyone, you probably don't have the same urge to kill the motherfucker - society can see justice done with a lighter sentence if noone is harmed.
You might say "we shouldn't want justice, you shouldn't want to kill the motherfucker who ran over your kid." Perhaps so, perhaps not, but it's how we are. We can't "should" that away.
> If you're finding things wrong during QA at the end of an agile sprint, there's something seriously wrong
Suppose QA is blended into your four and a half days of planning, research, development, and testing. Somehow (magic?) you're testing the changes you've not yet finished against everyone else's unfinished changes. Obviously you're not testing how your changes work with the other guy's changes before you've decided how to write either change. So that gives you max maybe 7 hours integration testing and validation, spread throughout the last two days of the week. Do you *really* think a a couple hours of each (at the most) can replace several weeks of each? Really? If so, maybe you're the reason we catalog 100 vulnerabilities in other people's software *per day*.
With Scrum and Agile generally you have two options:
A) Knowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
B) Unknowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
Those are the choices. Do you have any idea what "release early" means? It means release before it's thoroughly tested, in the case of Scrum specifically, it generally means nobody has ever tested it at all - nobody other than (maybe) the developer has tried out the feature to see if it works correctly, and integrates correctly with everything else. Paying customers do alpha testing. (And no, automated unit tests (while useful) in no way replace beta testing, alpha testing, and validation. So you get speedy development but at a cost. Again your two choices are:
A) Knowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
B) Unknowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
You can either know what you're giving up, or not know. But nothing is free, there is a definite cost. If you think thorough testing is for chumps, perhaps you're the guy who wrote "goto fail".
Check out the environmental variable called PATH. It's this new thing added to computers in 1977 so you don't need to know the location of each executable.
The offender wasn't *trying* to kill Krebs. So not attempted murder.
Krebs didn't die, so not manslaughter.
The offender did act in a way to create a dangerous situation with no regard for the fact that Krebs, other people in his home, or police officers could be seriously injured. That neatly matches the definition of "reckless endangerment".
Had someone actually died, it would match the definition of "depraved-heart murder", which is second-degree homicide in many states. Depraved-heart murder is killing someone through actions not actually *intended* to kill them, but by reckless disregard for their safety.
My (mod funny) comment was a bit of a caricature of Agile, of course. Still, I'm surprised you said what you did, rather than chuckling. I thought you'd been doing professional development for a number of years. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong.
Agile emphasizes *automating* testing. Automated testing is a good thing. It sometimes catches regressions and fatal errors that completely break the build entirely. That saves your alpha and beta testers from dealing with some of the easy, dumb mistakes.
Scrum by the book says sprints should be 1 week preferably, up to 2 weeks, and you should have a release (or a minimum a releasable product at the end of each sprint (each week). If you're going to plan it and build it in a week, that doesn't leave more than a few hours for QA. Traditionally high quality software spends a few weeks in alpha testing and a few weeks in beta testing before it moves to limited release. If you follow Scrum as originally written, release comes at the sprint - alpha testing is done after release, by customers in production. That's advantageous in that customers get the cutting edge new features right away, and it also means they are getting alpha-grade software. Much like the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Many people like Fedora, which is cutting edge, on their desktops. Virtually nobody wants that on their production servers, they want the reliability of Red Hat or CentOS Enterprise, which has been tested for at least 18 months. Fedora is basically the beta test for RHEL, and that beta test takes 18 months, not 18 hours.
I would also think you'd know that an essential, fundamental concept behind Agile is that we don't know what the future holds, requirements change -- so long-term planning is basically pointless. That makes perfect sense - to everybody who hasn't yet been taught how to determine what the *real* requirements actually are. Certainly sitting in a meeting the users' boss's boss doesn't tell you what the users' actual needs are, but there are methods to determine the real needs, and plan for them even years in advance. Agile rejects that notion, though for those who have been shown how to do it, it's a proven fact that you *can* learn the requirements, and the likely future requirements. You just have to be taught how to do so.
I had originally written "the preceding or proceeding statement". That's reasonably clear, I think, though it stretches the definition of "proceeding". Then I realized that changes to the PRECEDING statement won't affect anything, so long as if that preceding statement is properly terminated with a semicolon. So I ended up with "the proceeding statement", which is poor wording.
Sure, I've seen many single-character bugs, and created a few. I imagine MOST experienced programmers have done this at least once:
if (a = b) {
When they meant: if (a == b) {
Every language I can think of has a common single-character bug. Many Microsoft SQL users routinely leave off the semicolon which terminates a statement. Sometimes that results in buggy behavior right away, sometimes not until two years later when a change is made to the *proceeding* statement.
> What about the tests?
This is crypto-currency, the hot new thing tests are for old fogeys who still use dollars. Get with the times, young programmers are Agile, they don't plan and test their work, they release early and often. They release the Minimum Viable Product (minimum piece of shit they can get away with for a moment), it's illegal now to even think about corner cases and make code robust.
> also if the management and the rest of the team is willing to make the effort to communicate and coordinate.
If you're the only person working remotely in a company where everyone else is in the office 9-5, I could see that being a problem. If a lot of people work remotely, even working from home two days per week, everyone figures out how to make that work.
In my professional career of almost 20 years I've only worked at a few different companies, but all did remote dev and ops work succesfully. In one company *most* people came to the office most days. Other people lived a thousand miles from the office. In all the other companies most people did not come in the office. I had one guy working for me and for months at a time I didn't know or care where in the world he was at the time.
Currently, I work at a place with scrums three times per week. That pretty well solves the communication issues. I'm not a big fan of Agile and Scrum overall, but it does facilitate communication. This company also has offices all over the world - I think that happened before people starting working remote a lot. Because different teams were already in different countries, all meetings include video conferencing by default. The whole infrastructure and everything is built on the assumption that people may be working from different locations. Therefore it doesn't matter if that location is our UK office or your house - either way I'm working with someone who isn't here in Dallas. Because I'm in Dallas, I *can* go into the office (other co-workers can't), but that requires sitting in traffic. Simply working from home instead of sitting in traffic saves an hour a day of unproductive time.
The company before this one, each person had a well-defined role. Each system had an "owner", someone responsible for that system. I developed amd maintained our online learning system (ecampus), someone else was responsible for the courses hosted on that ecampus, etc. That reduced the need for constant communication and coordination because you didn't have many chefs working on the same stew.
Before that, I worked at a very small company which at one point didn't have any two employees in the same city - we were all remote. At that company we used a ticket system for small jobs, larger jobs werw clearly assigned to one person, thereby reducing the need for constant communication.
As you said, it also depends on the individuals involved, some people are better at remote work than others. A big part of that is a few things you can learn (and teach). A company considering making changes to their remote work policy should consider a short training session for remote workers. Mainly covering these two items:
Set up a seperate work area, away from the normal distractions of the home. In my case, my office is the only thing upstairs, other than some storage and a guest bedroom. I go upstairs to work, I go downstairs to go home. There's never any confusion of whether I'm at work (upstairs) or at home (downstairs). If necessary, the office can be in one corner of a room, but it should be a defined place and with as few household distractions as possible.
Set and keep defined work hours. If I'm downstairs at 10:00 AM, I'm late for work. My wife needs me to do something around the house? I'll do that after 5:00, after work. Similarly, after 5:00 I'm at home with my family - I don't make it a habit to ignore my family at work all evening.
After doing this many years and establishing habits, I can *occasionally* work late in the evening or take care of a household issue during the day, just as people who drive to the office to work occasionally stay late. 90% of the time, though, I keep my work space and work time seperate from my home space and home time. Confusing the two leads to many of the problems people have working from home.
Yep, the USB device (aka gadget) tells the USB host (computer) what kind of device it is. Newer phones equipped with USB OTG have the hardware to work as either end of the connection.
Some chips used in common USB memory sticks can be programmed to act as a keyboard, sending keypresses to the computer when someone plugs in the "flash drive". I built one of those myself, using a usb flash drive with my company's logo on it. If I were to leave that drive laying around the office, one of my co-workers would probably think that because it's one of a batch of drives the company ordered with the company logo on it, it's safe to plug in. They wouldn't know I altered it to work as a keyboard. Currently it's set to press the appropriate keys to rickroll someone, opening a browser to YouTube playing Rick Astley.
There are a number of common vulnerabilities in corporate VPNs. The newest major ones, which came out in the last few months, are Sweet32 and a certificate validation bug. Aggressive mode IKE is also still quite common, though it's long been known to be less secure than desired. Just thinking about my recent experience testing corporate VPNs, without actually querying my database for exact numbers, I'd say around 50% of corporate VPNs are insecure to varying degrees.
The worst are the certificate validation issues - you can be using strong AES encryption, but talking to my spoofed endpoint and I don't even have to use a lot of CPU cracking the encryption.
A large number of vulnerabilities require MITM as prerequisite. These are also the vulnerabilities most likely to go unpatched, as people think the requirement for mitm makes the attack much less likely.
In the last few years, just against https alone, and only considering high-profile, named vulnerabilities, we have BEAST, CRIME, and BREACH off the top of my head. There are twice as many that don't have cool names, they're known as CVE-2016-xxxx.
Perhaps you'll use a VPN. Some common VPN configurations are vulnerable to an attack called Sweet32.
In theory, using encryption you can communicate securely across an untrusted network. In practice, a man-in-the-middle makes securing the communication quite difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
My income has quadrupled since I started, and I'm not too far from $125K today, with a year of school left to go.
One nice thing about WGU is that many of the classes end in industry certifications such as Cisco CNNA and Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Certifications. I have about eight professional certifications from WGU courses right now. In about two weeks I'll have my Cisco VNNA Security. Listing those certifications on LinkedIn absolutely does get recruiters calling.
Then when I have interviews, it's me, with fresh knowledge about the subject (and a respected certification) vs the guy who padded his resume claiming "networking knowledge" because he set up his Linksys. At my last interview, I was asked how a piece of data travels the network. When it became clear I knew everything end-to-end, when I could talk about the details of how a packet is processed inside the router, and how switches decide where to forward frames, the interview team was very impressed. They offered me a job at nearly twice the salary I had been making. A lot of that networking knowledge I learned at WGU.
Similar for other topics - the other guy *said* he knew Windows servers and Linux. I said I knew Windows servers and Linux *and* had certifications from Microsoft and LPI to back it up.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here:
> The problem is that citizens then become virtual prisoners in their country, because if they leave their basic rights don't have to be respected when they try to cross the border.
Are you talking about when a citizen is coming back home? I did say in my post citizens have a right to come home, in general*, and they don't (shouldn't) have to give up other rights to do so. On the other hand, citizens of Syria don't have a *right* to come to the United States - they are invited subject to conditions.
Do you mean if the US searches Syrian citizens, Syria may retaliate by being rude to US citizens? Too late - Syria hasn't respected human rights for many decades.
* For a few countries known to sponsor or harbor terrorists and such, I have no problem with a policy of "if you choose to go to Syria, be forewarned a) Syrians may chop your head off and b) the US will search you thoroughly when you return." You can decide whether you're willing to risk your life and a search before you travel to a hotbed of violence and terrorism like Syria.
I agree. As far as I know, there is little to be gained from a policy of searching phones.
I can think of some rare circumstances in which it might be the most efficient way to resolve a doubt, perhaps with consent. Consider a young man, maybe 20 years old, is wanting to visit and bring a $50,000 of cash across the border. He says the cash is for his business buying medical lab equipment at auction in one country and bringing it to the other. Given the total circumstances, his story seems suspicious. A quick look at his Facebook and a glance at his text messages may establish whether he appears to actually be in the medical lab equipment business, or if it looks more likely he's intending to run drugs. That's an unusual type of case though, and could probably be handled with a consent search ("sir, this pile of cash looks suspicious, mind if I look at your phone for a minute?)
There are a lot of judgement calls in these kinds of things, and looking at someone's phone *will* tell you a lot about what kind of person you're dealing with, but in general I don't think it should be routinely. Probably in most cases only consensually, when there is reason to check somebody out a bit, you could give them the option of speeding up the process by letting someone look through their phone rather than waiting to hear back from more official inquiries into their background.
> I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I've been there - I lived in a vacant lot under a tarp for a while, then moved into a dilapidated mobile home I shared with a roommate (rent $125/month). A few years later I was evicted from a house when I couldn't pay the rent. That was about 15 years ago.
> the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not.
Several years ago I learned that there are a few specific things that rich people do to get amd stay rich. I was surprised to learn that over 80% of millionaires never made more than $100,000 / year. I've tried to apply some of those principles and while I've not been very good at applying them consistently, I rarely very have to *worry* about money anymore. Now I'm concerned mostly about making less progress than planned toward becoming a millionaire so I can retire comfortably.
Actually I found out there are two distinct groups of "rich people" - roughly those who are financially comfortable and those who have more than $100 million dollars. The mega rich almost always give up everything else in their life to obsessively pursue money. Screw that, I don't want to do that. The people who have a few million get there by much more reasonable steps such as using a written budget with automatic saving as the first item. I can do that.
> My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege.
Ouch! You say she just started college. My college career was interrupted 25 years ago, so I'm just about to graduate now. At WGU (a state school) tuition and fees is $6,000/year. I get student loans of $3,000/year. The other $3,000/year is covered by the tax credit, my employer's tuition reimbursement, and me paying a bit of cash each year from working. I'll graduate with total student loans of $12,000. Well, I would have, but when I got some extra money (outside of my normal paycheck) I paid off $6,000, so I'll graduate with $6,000 in debt. With the degree I chose, that's about 2 1/2 weeks of income. You *could* talk to your daughter about debt and double check if the plan she has is something she's going to be happy about five or ten years from now. She doesn't *have* to have significant debt to get a college education. Of course she can go into major debt if she wants to.
I don't think border patrol should be searching phones, we agree on that. We disagree on the reason why.
> So while I can't run for US president, if I visit
If you visit, sure, no unreasonable search. Just as I treat visitors in my home respectfully, as I'm sure you do in your home.
Consider when a couple of thuggish looking guys, strangers, show up at my door one night. Not only am I not required to invite them in, but because my wife and 2 year old daughter are inside, I have a responsibility to my wife and daughter to NOT bring potentially dangerous people in. It is my duty to take some care regarding who I allow inside.
If you want to, you can throw a nude party in your house, and say "if you want to join the party, you need to be nude". Or you can throw a sober party, and say "if you want to come to my party, don't show up drunk." I can choose whether I want to come in under those conditions or not. You haven't violated my rights by setting ground rules for your party.
When someone standing at the border requesting entry, a country has no obligation to let them in. They in fact have some degree of responsibility to exercise a degree of care about who comes in and what they bring with them. Perhaps the government has no right to search X, for any X, but they DO have the right to say "no you can't come in", or impose any conditions they feel are proper before granting entry.
Once you're in the US (and while your outside the US), your rights as a human being should be fully respected.
On the other hand, it would be wrong for me to block your entry into your *own* house, saying "in order to go home, you have to get nude." That's the case of US citizens. Unlike people who wish to visit, peope have a right to enter their own home.
That said, I thinking searches the phones of visitors as a general policy is just a bad idea. I think it's inefficient, ineffective, and a bit rude.
> Setup your work area to have even lighting.
Specially, the room lighting and the monitor brightness should be related so that the screen appears roughly as bright as a piece of paper held next to the monitor. The white areas of the monitor should appear white, like the paper, not like staring at a lightbulb in an otherwise dark room.
The statement was "there is no surface discontinuity". There is in fact a major shipping route separating Africa from Eurasia at Suez. Yeah at Suez the water isn't very deep, so it's handy that the claim was "SURFACE discontinuity".
More importantly, if we touch our fingertips together, that doesn't make us one person. That makes us two different people touching at one small spot. Prior the mid-1800s, Africa and Eurasia were two continents touching at one small spot. Now they are 100% separated by water.
I correctly said "Google" five times in my comment, but I see I accidentally typed "Apple" in the first sentence.
Slashdot recently had an article regarding a law suit against Apple. The summary went something like this:
Google's lawyers said blah blah blah on Friday in the appeal they filed ABC's to law suit. Google says they blah blah blah. According to Google's lawyers, they are right because blah blah blah.
Not a single word about what the other company's position is. Does that sound like a fair and objective story?
Does such reporting *work*, does it strongly influence opinion? ALL of the comments posted on Slashdot were based purely on the claims in the summary (Google's claims) and therefore supportive of Google. I'm the only one who pointed out that Google made these in an APPEAL - the jury, after listening to evidence from both sides, had already decided that the other company was right. Therefore the other company most likely has a fair point or two - no mention in the Slashdot summary of what the other company said (and the court ruled was correct).
In almost all disagreements, both sides have a point, or a legitimate concern. One side may have a *stronger* point, but there *are* two sides - otherwise there wouldn't be a dispute. If a source fails to present both sides of an issue they are reporting on, it's probably a source of opinion, not news.
I don't think it was ever more objective, certainly not since William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s. Newspapers used to be more honest about their political leanings. For example, the Austin American Statesman used to be called the Austin American Democrat. Similar names can be found in smaller cities, the newspaper will be named Middletown Liberal Times or whatever.
The LA Times had a very clear policy of simply not reporting anything that didn't support their political leanings. In 1884 the ignored Grover Cleveland's election to president for several days, pretty much pretending it didn't happen.
> as there is no surface discontinuity between Europe, Asia and Africa, the notion of "continent" as we understand it was completely arbitrary
There's a rather large surface discontinuity between Africa and Eurasia, comprised of the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Prior to 1869, these two separate landmasses used to touch, but just because I touch you with my finger doesn't make us one body.
> And how do you intend to lift your nuclear reactor to orbit? Nuclear reactors are pretty heavy.
*Current* reactor designs produce just barely enough energy to lift themselves. You'd need rocket assist to lift everything else. Of course you'd also need to do the engineering to convert the nuclear power to thrust efficiently, but on it's face it's not impossible.
While a bogus 911 is a misdemeanor in the two states I checked (California and Texas), using a false name on a police report is a felony in California. That may apply. As you suggested, that would trigger the felony-murder rule.
You're right, that would probably be "mere preparation" and therefore not attempted murder. Though as someone else pointed out, if TWO people go get the knife, there's conspiracy to commit murder.
Anyway, a very weak attempt is an attempt.
I agree it's an issue. The difference in penalties may be too great in many instances. There are of course a couple of reasons sentences are, and should be, different.
Keeping closest to the viewpoint you brought up, many things are dangerous. Heck, MOST things involve some risk. Consequences should fit the actual risk. Suppose I shoot off some fireworks in the middle of some soccer fields, full of short green, moist grass (which doesn't burn). Another person shoots off fireworks in their apartment complex. We've both committed the offense of shooting off fireworks within city limits. One of us was a much greater danger than the other. One method of measuring the actual danger posed is that my action did not in fact burn even a blade of grass, his action burned down an apartment building - with people in it. You can tell that his action truly could have killed people if it truly did kill people. Since my action actually did no harm, probably it wasn't really that dangerous.
If my brother has two or three drinks, you probably would never know it by having a conversation with him. Yet, his BAC is probably over 0.08%. My wife is the opposite. Three drinks and she'd probably wreck before she got out of the parking lot. The blood test doesn't measure the risk. What DOES demonstrate the degree of actual danger is if my wife actually plows through a crowd of people. Both drove over the limit - one drove without so much as running a red light, the other ran into people. Clearly, one is more of a danger to society than the other.
You mentioned murder vs attempted murder specifically. Buying a butcher knife with the intent to use it on someone is attempted murder (one can argue whether it *should* be, but it is). Someone who does that is a danger to society. Someone who actually stabs people to death, successfully, is clearly a greater danger.
Secondly, crime and punishment isn't all about the criminal, it's also about the victims (or potential victims). If somebody got plastered and ran over your child, after having been warned about the danger via a previous DWI charge, you'd probably want to kill the motherfucker who ran over your kid. As a society, we don't want parents, spouses, etc acting as judge, jury, and executioner, taking vengeance on the criminal - so we offer a better way. Victims can (hopefully) see justice done without taking justice into their own hands. If someone drives drunk and does *not* hurt anyone, you probably don't have the same urge to kill the motherfucker - society can see justice done with a lighter sentence if noone is harmed.
You might say "we shouldn't want justice, you shouldn't want to kill the motherfucker who ran over your kid." Perhaps so, perhaps not, but it's how we are. We can't "should" that away.
> If you're finding things wrong during QA at the end of an agile sprint, there's something seriously wrong
Suppose QA is blended into your four and a half days of planning, research, development, and testing. Somehow (magic?) you're testing the changes you've not yet finished against everyone else's unfinished changes. Obviously you're not testing how your changes work with the other guy's changes before you've decided how to write either change. So that gives you max maybe 7 hours integration testing and validation, spread throughout the last two days of the week. Do you *really* think a a couple hours of each (at the most) can replace several weeks of each? Really? If so, maybe you're the reason we catalog 100 vulnerabilities in other people's software *per day*.
With Scrum and Agile generally you have two options:
A) Knowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
B) Unknowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
Those are the choices. Do you have any idea what "release early" means? It means release before it's thoroughly tested, in the case of Scrum specifically, it generally means nobody has ever tested it at all - nobody other than (maybe) the developer has tried out the feature to see if it works correctly, and integrates correctly with everything else. Paying customers do alpha testing. (And no, automated unit tests (while useful) in no way replace beta testing, alpha testing, and validation. So you get speedy development but at a cost. Again your two choices are:
A) Knowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
B) Unknowingly trade faster development at the cost of quality assurance.
You can either know what you're giving up, or not know. But nothing is free, there is a definite cost. If you think thorough testing is for chumps, perhaps you're the guy who wrote "goto fail".
Check out the environmental variable called PATH. It's this new thing added to computers in 1977 so you don't need to know the location of each executable.
The offender wasn't *trying* to kill Krebs. So not attempted murder.
Krebs didn't die, so not manslaughter.
The offender did act in a way to create a dangerous situation with no regard for the fact that Krebs, other people in his home, or police officers could be seriously injured. That neatly matches the definition of "reckless endangerment".
Had someone actually died, it would match the definition of "depraved-heart murder", which is second-degree homicide in many states. Depraved-heart murder is killing someone through actions not actually *intended* to kill them, but by reckless disregard for their safety.
My (mod funny) comment was a bit of a caricature of Agile, of course. Still, I'm surprised you said what you did, rather than chuckling. I thought you'd been doing professional development for a number of years. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong.
Agile emphasizes *automating* testing. Automated testing is a good thing. It sometimes catches regressions and fatal errors that completely break the build entirely. That saves your alpha and beta testers from dealing with some of the easy, dumb mistakes.
Scrum by the book says sprints should be 1 week preferably, up to 2 weeks, and you should have a release (or a minimum a releasable product at the end of each sprint (each week). If you're going to plan it and build it in a week, that doesn't leave more than a few hours for QA. Traditionally high quality software spends a few weeks in alpha testing and a few weeks in beta testing before it moves to limited release. If you follow Scrum as originally written, release comes at the sprint - alpha testing is done after release, by customers in production. That's advantageous in that customers get the cutting edge new features right away, and it also means they are getting alpha-grade software. Much like the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Many people like Fedora, which is cutting edge, on their desktops. Virtually nobody wants that on their production servers, they want the reliability of Red Hat or CentOS Enterprise, which has been tested for at least 18 months. Fedora is basically the beta test for RHEL, and that beta test takes 18 months, not 18 hours.
I would also think you'd know that an essential, fundamental concept behind Agile is that we don't know what the future holds, requirements change -- so long-term planning is basically pointless. That makes perfect sense - to everybody who hasn't yet been taught how to determine what the *real* requirements actually are. Certainly sitting in a meeting the users' boss's boss doesn't tell you what the users' actual needs are, but there are methods to determine the real needs, and plan for them even years in advance. Agile rejects that notion, though for those who have been shown how to do it, it's a proven fact that you *can* learn the requirements, and the likely future requirements. You just have to be taught how to do so.
I mean the following statement. This works okay:
SELECT 1
SELECT 2;
This doesn't:
SELECT 1
THROW
The latter is equivalent to:
SELECT 1 AS THROW
I had originally written "the preceding or proceeding statement". That's reasonably clear, I think, though it stretches the definition of "proceeding". Then I realized that changes to the PRECEDING statement won't affect anything, so long as if that preceding statement is properly terminated with a semicolon. So I ended up with "the proceeding statement", which is poor wording.
> A one character bug? Really?
Sure, I've seen many single-character bugs, and created a few. I imagine MOST experienced programmers have done this at least once:
if (a = b) {
When they meant:
if (a == b) {
Every language I can think of has a common single-character bug. Many Microsoft SQL users routinely leave off the semicolon which terminates a statement. Sometimes that results in buggy behavior right away, sometimes not until two years later when a change is made to the *proceeding* statement.
> What about the tests?
This is crypto-currency, the hot new thing tests are for old fogeys who still use dollars. Get with the times, young programmers are Agile, they don't plan and test their work, they release early and often. They release the Minimum Viable Product (minimum piece of shit they can get away with for a moment), it's illegal now to even think about corner cases and make code robust.
> also if the management and the rest of the team is willing to make the effort to communicate and coordinate.
If you're the only person working remotely in a company where everyone else is in the office 9-5, I could see that being a problem. If a lot of people work remotely, even working from home two days per week, everyone figures out how to make that work.
In my professional career of almost 20 years I've only worked at a few different companies, but all did remote dev and ops work succesfully. In one company *most* people came to the office most days. Other people lived a thousand miles from the office. In all the other companies most people did not come in the office. I had one guy working for me and for months at a time I didn't know or care where in the world he was at the time.
Currently, I work at a place with scrums three times per week. That pretty well solves the communication issues. I'm not a big fan of Agile and Scrum overall, but it does facilitate communication. This company also has offices all over the world - I think that happened before people starting working remote a lot. Because different teams were already in different countries, all meetings include video conferencing by default. The whole infrastructure and everything is built on the assumption that people may be working from different locations. Therefore it doesn't matter if that location is our UK office or your house - either way I'm working with someone who isn't here in Dallas. Because I'm in Dallas, I *can* go into the office (other co-workers can't), but that requires sitting in traffic. Simply working from home instead of sitting in traffic saves an hour a day of unproductive time.
The company before this one, each person had a well-defined role. Each system had an "owner", someone responsible for that system. I developed amd maintained our online learning system (ecampus), someone else was responsible for the courses hosted on that ecampus, etc. That reduced the need for constant communication and coordination because you didn't have many chefs working on the same stew.
Before that, I worked at a very small company which at one point didn't have any two employees in the same city - we were all remote. At that company we used a ticket system for small jobs, larger jobs werw clearly assigned to one person, thereby reducing the need for constant communication.
As you said, it also depends on the individuals involved, some people are better at remote work than others. A big part of that is a few things you can learn (and teach). A company considering making changes to their remote work policy should consider a short training session for remote workers. Mainly covering these two items:
Set up a seperate work area, away from the normal distractions of the home. In my case, my office is the only thing upstairs, other than some storage and a guest bedroom. I go upstairs to work, I go downstairs to go home. There's never any confusion of whether I'm at work (upstairs) or at home (downstairs). If necessary, the office can be in one corner of a room, but it should be a defined place and with as few household distractions as possible.
Set and keep defined work hours. If I'm downstairs at 10:00 AM, I'm late for work. My wife needs me to do something around the house? I'll do that after 5:00, after work. Similarly, after 5:00 I'm at home with my family - I don't make it a habit to ignore my family at work all evening.
After doing this many years and establishing habits, I can *occasionally* work late in the evening or take care of a household issue during the day, just as people who drive to the office to work occasionally stay late. 90% of the time, though, I keep my work space and work time seperate from my home space and home time. Confusing the two leads to many of the problems people have working from home.
Yep, the USB device (aka gadget) tells the USB host (computer) what kind of device it is. Newer phones equipped with USB OTG have the hardware to work as either end of the connection.
Some chips used in common USB memory sticks can be programmed to act as a keyboard, sending keypresses to the computer when someone plugs in the "flash drive". I built one of those myself, using a usb flash drive with my company's logo on it. If I were to leave that drive laying around the office, one of my co-workers would probably think that because it's one of a batch of drives the company ordered with the company logo on it, it's safe to plug in. They wouldn't know I altered it to work as a keyboard. Currently it's set to press the appropriate keys to rickroll someone, opening a browser to YouTube playing Rick Astley.
There are a number of common vulnerabilities in corporate VPNs. The newest major ones, which came out in the last few months, are Sweet32 and a certificate validation bug. Aggressive mode IKE is also still quite common, though it's long been known to be less secure than desired. Just thinking about my recent experience testing corporate VPNs, without actually querying my database for exact numbers, I'd say around 50% of corporate VPNs are insecure to varying degrees.
The worst are the certificate validation issues - you can be using strong AES encryption, but talking to my spoofed endpoint and I don't even have to use a lot of CPU cracking the encryption.
A large number of vulnerabilities require MITM as prerequisite. These are also the vulnerabilities most likely to go unpatched, as people think the requirement for mitm makes the attack much less likely.
In the last few years, just against https alone, and only considering high-profile, named vulnerabilities, we have BEAST, CRIME, and BREACH off the top of my head. There are twice as many that don't have cool names, they're known as CVE-2016-xxxx.
Perhaps you'll use a VPN. Some common VPN configurations are vulnerable to an attack called Sweet32.
In theory, using encryption you can communicate securely across an untrusted network. In practice, a man-in-the-middle makes securing the communication quite difficult.