I know she is blaming others, but I think that Clinton was her own worst enemy. She had like a quarter of the campaign stops of Trump AND she disenfranchised many people who were active in the DNC by essentially cheating Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. After offending a large chunk of her most energetic supporters, she greatly reduced her chances of winning against any candidate.
Almost the same thing happened in 2008 and 2012 to the Republicans when they chose a mediocre, establishment candidate, who had all the connections. They corruptly censored their outsider candidate, Ron Paul, who also happened to have the most energized base. Then they sat around moping, not understanding why there was no energy behind their campaign.
The lesson of this election for Democrats, and the lesson of the previous two elections for Republicans, is that you cannot win without energy. While using an establishment candidate preserves the jobs of those in power, it also serves to disenfranchise the energetic workers you need to win elections.
While there might be something to your argument that past pollutants were high in the US, it does not translate into the current pollution levels in the US. I've been to major cities all around the world, and in most cases, I would gladly choose to breath U.S. big city air over most other places. Visit Asia much? How about South America?
I know Slashdot has a long tradition of weekly inflammatory hit pieces on their pet issues, but this is disingenuous. You need to gauge current action and current levels if you are pushing a change in current behavior.
I have no idea whether this error was politically motivated or not, and frankly, I do not care. I come here for tech news, not random bashing on ANY politician for some surrogate doing something stupid. If Obama or Trump or any other politician did this, it would not be newsworthy of the technology site, we call Slashdot. I would appreciate if Slashdot could focus on all the technological issues and discoveries in the world and focus less on political jabbing.
As a side note, I'm a software engineer, not an accountant. I am a pretty successful one at that. But at times, I've made really dumb mistakes and spent hours or days tracking down the bug that was "elementary". It happens. In our industry, we don't fire someone over a stupid mistake. Instead, we use it as a learning experience. If they learn from it and move on, good for them.
All this accounting is done by some low level government official. I would not want them fired for this unless it happens repeatedly. Hopefully, the person who made the error uses this as a great learning experience and does better the next time.
We keep trying to force people to do things they will not do. I am annoyed as the next person when some teenager sits at the traffic light texting their friend rather than going forward on green, but I think we go about the solution the wrong way. Fines certainly have their place, but when you see a trend develop that is not easy to correct, you need to think outside your paradigms and come up with more creative solutions.
An example of such creative thinking is how residential neighborhoods solved speeding issues. Many newer neighborhoods created road patterns that made it difficult to speed. Their first attempts punished everybody - they created speed bumps all over the road. Later attempts were more friendly to the law abiding drivers because they found that by putting in curves, the roads became visually appealing and it reduced speed.
Instead of thinking that fines and enforcement campaigns will solve this issue, we need to find better ways to adapt the technology and make it safer and less distracting. I don't have the ultimate solution on this, but handsfree devices in cars have helped greatly with voice calls. There is still a very big issue with text messages. That solution is still in the future. It is clear that people will not just give up text-message-like communication while driving, and it is also clear that there is no way to evenly enforce punishments on such a large percentage of people. Therefore, the best hope of a long term solutions lies in innovation and new ideas.
The key here is redirection. If a behavior cannot be solved by education and/or punishment, we must find ways to redirect the behavior into something safer.
Funny story, I worked at a legacy code place where programmers never wrote decent comments.
Being naive, I thought, oh that is strange, I'll do better on my code and write some nice comments to help direct the next guy using this piece of code. After submitting my code to my superior for review, you would have thought I just stole a mainframe from the company. I evidently committed a quite nasty sin, and one that I was careful not to repeat again. But I got out of that place as soon as I could.
My experience in such companies has led me to conclude that large COBOL code bases might be due to a culture of the company, especially if the company always says their goal is to "update" but they can never successfully advance the projects to do so.
If it matters so much to you, I am in no way lacking respect at my workplace (I report directly to the president of the company, and all that fun stuff). I have my own office, and never get questioned about budgets of projects. I get to wear what I want and I have a flexible schedule. I worked quite hard to get where I am at. I am not a slacker by any means. I have engineered many of the systems my company uses and brought them a lot of business by my work. My workplace can depend on me, and I have the freedom to "do it my way". To me, I think I am doing "adult" pretty well.
You may want to reconsider your definition of being a successful adult. Living in fear of not being respected by management is a terrible way to live. At the end of it all, you'll be the type whose health fails shortly after retirement because you've centered your life around pleasing those over you.
In fact, I used to wear a suit at another place and I did not feel better about myself. You can have your suit and your smug attitude toward the less "professionally dressed" people of the world. I have a job that I love, and get to work in a comfortable environment, with a private office, and a large budget. I work with friendly people and leave work with a smile on my face nearly every day. You can't beat the good life. If you work hard enough at learning important skills, you could also have the good life.
For my last interview, I dressed nice, but not too nice. The reason, I wanted to work for a company that judged an engineer based on their abilities and not on some stupid dress code. If they had said "Wow, nice work, but your dress code does not fit our culture", I would have happily walked away from the opportunity. But, instead they welcomed me because of my skill level. So I am happily employed at a company where I can wear hoodies and jeans:-)
I have previously worked at places where there was constant drama over dress code and I did not like it one bit. I always dressed appropriately, but I knew employees who were amazingly gifted, but were shamed and scolded by their bosses for wearing sneakers, or for being to casual. The company chased those gifted individuals away and we were left with individuals who over-focused on appearance to make up for their lack of abilities.
It will not be that hard. I used to build software in the tax industry. Do you know how many regional tax rules are out there? Yet, somehow, everyone manages to get along with that. Besides, every single ISP already has to deal with not only state regulations, but even the local community regulators when providing service to the area. This will be no different. It is just one more template that must be customized for the jurisdiction. Besides, they could always opt for the easy option and just choose to do right by their customers and NOT SHARE their customers' data.
Given that this is a tech site, I think a lot of us would recognize the ambiguity in this sentence as a problem with design of the language. In this case, it is the way legal documents are written. As an earlier comment pointed out, Maine's own legislative manual says not to use the Oxford comma.
The solution to this ambiguity is to introduce other language constructs into the so called "legalease". This really should be analysed and corrected for future laws.
One suggestion is that they could introduce bullet points into the legal documents. Another possibility is that lists could also be explicitly declared through a list indicator... i.e. All lists must be put in parentheses and put in a delimited format. They should really consult architects and teachers of computer languages when standardizing on a format. But the point is that there should be no ambiguity when reading the document.
I remember having a conversation with a woman tech executive at a very large company. She told me that she has done everything in her power to attract women into the field and specifically into their workplace. Yet, she was unable to break through this imbalance. And this was the top tech exec at the company and she said they just could not maintain the levels of females in the workforce in their company that she wanted. It was, in fact, far, far, below the levels she wanted.
After being in the tech industry for years, I can honestly say that I really do not encounter the implied institutional discrimination in the tech industry. Is there an imbalance in representation? Yes. However, I feel like these imbalances are indicators of other things. It could be cultural things. It could be something else. Maybe even in specific companies, there is a problem. But I feel like these statistics are more of indicators of some other cause than discrimination within the tech industry as a whole.
You don't know how to get the length of a string in Python? That's OK, provided you don't claim to know Python.
I'd probably flub that part. Not because I haven't written that line of code many times, but because I've written it in many different languages and they're all different. Is it len(string) or string.len() or array_length(string) or something else? I don't trust myself to remember that kind of stuff.
I agree. I've used so many languages in my career, that sometimes I have to look up a really basic function when picking it back up again to "get in the zone" on a particular language. Once I begin coding in that language, I do quite well.
When interviewing someone, I am more interested in their way of organizing their thoughts, how they might pseudo-code a solution, and what their overall work ethic looks like. If you are smart, hard working, and not afraid to learn a new syntax, I want you on my team. If you can't organize your thoughts, or could care less about programming after work is done, I'd rather see you go elsewhere (possibly to our competition). I've worked with too many good-at-textbook yet terrible-at-thinking programmers who could memorize like nobody's business, but could never come up with real solutions to something not found in a textbook.
Hi, my name is Vince. I interviewed for Amazon, specifically for their PHP API for AWS development team. Despite an entire background of 10+ years of developing front-facing PHP APIs for other businesses, plus having a major part of my code available for public review on GitHub, I failed their interview process because they wanted me to write a specific type of searching and sorting algorithm, by hand, on white-board. This type of code would never have been used on the job, ever. Yet this is what they interview on. The job was to build a PHP API so PHP developers can call basic PHP functions, and the library would translate them over to HHTPS calls to AWS. All of the complex computing/searching/sorting is handled by the existing AWS services.
Amazon did you a favor by not hiring you. Ending up there would have stressed you out beyond belief with lower pay and a toxic environment. I've not worked there myself, but known many who have, and you are better off without them.
Wow, I wish I had Russian genetics. They seem to be able to do all the really big scary computer stuff that us non-russians are not capable of doing. I am not trying to denegrate Russians here, but the media is so incredibly naive. It is as if putting "Russian" in front of it, no matter the evidence, turns the so called hack into something mysterious, huge, and scary.
Most of the so called hacks, are simply social engineering and phishing scams. The Podesta thing could have been done by any old graphic designer that just made a nice looking "official" password reset email. I am really quite disappointed at what passes for a hack these days. In fact, if a Russian spat on someones shoe, the headline would probably be "Russians hack shoes".
Yes, Russia does have many brilliant developers. But they also are a historic safe haven for VPN services. Of course most attacks "originate" from such areas. Anybody with half a brain knows you don't do something nefarious online without redirecting your trail through territories that are not friendly to your home's prosecutors.
I think the media owes it to every self respecting programmer to start narrowing the definition of "hack". Did they use a man in the middle to fraudulently update a software package? That might be a hack... Did they cause the buffer to overflow in some C program, exposing information contained in parts of the memory? Ok, that is a hack too. I can think of lots of scenarios where hacks could take place.
But... if they simply sent an email asking someone to put in their existing password and tricked some tech-illiterate into doing something stupid, that is not a hack.
I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks.
Thus making you part of the problem.
You pick your hill to die on. For me, this is not that hill. Ticking off your customer just to make the "correct" design decision is a good way to get black listed by everyone. I can imagine that, with such a smug attitude, you must be a pleasant person to work with.
Caveat: I am not a designer, but I do program some programming for various Apps/Websites as a side job(but focus on more behind the scenes stuff in my day job).
I do not understand all the design decisions, especially the proliferation of interfaces with generic icons that could be mistook for Ikea instructions. It is frustrating when you run into an icon that could be interpreted as "light phone on fire" or "turbo mode" but you really don't know for sure which it is. Do you try it???
That being said, if I create an app or website that has nice instructions on it, the end user's first impression is to hate it. They say it does not look modern enough. However, it is intuitive to use and they can figure it out quickly. On the other hand, if I create an Apple/Material design type app, customers love it and accept it immediately. Of course, the UI is impossible for their customers, but hey, at least the company that requested the app likes it.
I think a lot of this stems from the Instagram/Pinterest world we live in. Everyone wants to be blown away by the beauty of the app when they casually glance at it. Of course, that beauty greatly limits the possibilities to make an app intuitive and easy to use.
As a developer, I find that I try to balance these things. But as someone who generally likes to get paid for my work, I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks. The quicker I make them happy, the sooner I can get paid and move on to the next gig.
Tying this to audio only is a bad UI design. Otherwise we are going to be seeing a lot more audio applications.
This should not be arbitrarily set by Google. Instead, it should come up as a permissions pop-up like the location permissions...
For example, it could say... This application wishes to update in the background more frequently than the recommended levels. This may affect battery life. Do you approve" [Yes] [No]
Welcome to currency trading. The reason your grandparents did not bet the farm on currency is because of the wild swings. Somebody gains big and somebody loses big here. These sort of swings in currency are exactly how George Soros made his fortunes. I do not think the current swing indicates good or bad days ahead for BitCoin. It only indicates that it is being used for huge profits by some.
Here is a little explanation of what just happened: One of the biggest emerging Bitcoin markets is in China. China's Yuan has been weak and even a small percentage of investors moving their Yuan investments in and out of Bitcoin can cause the market to fluctuate greatly. China's Yuan is much bigger than Bitcoin, so relatively small waves in China really rock the boats in the Bitcoin world. There was a spike in Yuan value, and some investors assumed better days ahead for China and cashed out bitcoins for Yuan. As you can see from the current charts, investors now saw cheap Bitcoin and are buying those again.
If it were only so simple... This does nothing to actually prevent ransomware.
At least the good people of California can cite a specific law instead of the broader extortion laws when they are victimized. I really think there is no point to this law. It has no means to solve the ransomware issue, it simply makes a specific case out of something that was already illegal.
I said this before the election, when everyone assumed the election was going to have different results, and I will say it now. Why on earth do we allow contractors to build machines that are closed source?
No matter which way this election went, we were bound to have claims of fraud. I am not accusing one way or another here, it is just that without the ability for the public to audit the means of counting, it is unfair and unethical. The reason for a paper vote, as opposed to a voice vote, was partially as an audit trail and public record. The voting machines themselves should be audit-able before they begin counting and the public has a right to know that they have not been tampered with. It is a conflict of interest to have secretary of states be in charge of "verifying" the voting machines, while they themselves are often part of the political machine. While at some level, this is inevitable, we can introduce a measure of integrity through open sourcing of the machines themselves.
The government should require as part of the contract with voting machine producers, that the system is open and audit-able. They should test ahead of time and agree upon a finished version before the election. This version and hash code should be available to the public at each voting machine. It should be a crime to use "unverified" versions of the software, unless under direct orders from a judge.
I have a better idea. Whether or not we have an electoral college, you will always have the "haves" and "have-nots". The real solution is to give the majority and minority party a voice. We need to change up the rules for running for president. I propose the highest vote getter becomes president and the second highest vote getter becomes vice president. That way, the minority party is still represented in a powerful office in government.
I think that this could be beneficial. In fact, in some crucial areas, where there is a public interest in accountability, the government should almost certainly require a contractor to open source the produced software. Of particular interest in the current news, I think that the recently reported issues with voter machines could be remedied with open source and independently auditable software.
Whether or not there is anything interesting, wrong, or nefarious with the software, it would give people a peace of mind knowing that when they use such a machine, the underlying code could be viewed by anyone who knows what they are doing. It would also help to expose errors quickly to ensure that everything is as fair as possible. If the government was to release such code early enough in advance, it could be reviewed and hashed out far in advance of elections.
I am sure there are dozens of other such applications where we could prevent even the possibility of some corruption (or accusations of corruption when a mistake is made) by simply open sourcing some government software products.
I don't have skin in this game. But I will offer this. Everyone on both sides of the aisle at least appeared to have the belief that this vote counted before the vote took place. Does perception matter? I would think so. The UK government made this referendum out to be something important. Therefore, it should be seen as important. To nullify it after the results come in, because you don't like it, is disingenuous and wrong. Either the vote mattered or it didn't.
It is kind of like a crook coming up to you at night, holding his hand in his shirt in the shape of a gun and ordering you to give you money. Your perception matters here. Sure, the guy had no intention to kill, but he got the results he wanted, and he can be charged with an assault or an act of violence because of it. When government have a vote and say there will be consequences, the people should expect to believe that the government is being honest and not crooked like the aforementioned criminal.
When a government creates a vote, bills it as a referendum, then re-bills it as something else when they get an unexpected outcome, it screams to the people that their vote does not matter. And in fact, it probably proves that their vote really does not matter. We can say they found a constitutional loophole or whatever, but in the end, that loophole should have been broadcast all over the place BEFORE the Brexit vote. Otherwise the implied intent of the vote was something completely different from what they now claim.
The federal government signs their paychecks and the voters ask for congress's protection and wisdom in making laws.
But... most in congress don't just get paychecks. There is a second group that pays checks to congress as well (aka lobbyists and those in need of special favors). In reality, these entities also have a "job" congress is paid to do.
So the question is largely a matter of perspective. Most in congress stand to gain far more by the checks coming from the second group. Especially when they get further up in the ranks after spending a lifetime serving the "people", err I mean the check writers.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't worn a watch in years because I have my smartphone.
My compelling reason to wear a computer (other than the smartphone unobtrusively in my pocket) is ... ?
Exactly how I feel! Why where a watch and have a phone on me. Watches make my wrist sweaty and for me, carrying a phone is more useful/comfortable.
I know she is blaming others, but I think that Clinton was her own worst enemy. She had like a quarter of the campaign stops of Trump AND she disenfranchised many people who were active in the DNC by essentially cheating Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. After offending a large chunk of her most energetic supporters, she greatly reduced her chances of winning against any candidate.
Almost the same thing happened in 2008 and 2012 to the Republicans when they chose a mediocre, establishment candidate, who had all the connections. They corruptly censored their outsider candidate, Ron Paul, who also happened to have the most energized base. Then they sat around moping, not understanding why there was no energy behind their campaign.
The lesson of this election for Democrats, and the lesson of the previous two elections for Republicans, is that you cannot win without energy. While using an establishment candidate preserves the jobs of those in power, it also serves to disenfranchise the energetic workers you need to win elections.
While there might be something to your argument that past pollutants were high in the US, it does not translate into the current pollution levels in the US. I've been to major cities all around the world, and in most cases, I would gladly choose to breath U.S. big city air over most other places. Visit Asia much? How about South America?
I know Slashdot has a long tradition of weekly inflammatory hit pieces on their pet issues, but this is disingenuous. You need to gauge current action and current levels if you are pushing a change in current behavior.
I have no idea whether this error was politically motivated or not, and frankly, I do not care. I come here for tech news, not random bashing on ANY politician for some surrogate doing something stupid. If Obama or Trump or any other politician did this, it would not be newsworthy of the technology site, we call Slashdot. I would appreciate if Slashdot could focus on all the technological issues and discoveries in the world and focus less on political jabbing.
As a side note, I'm a software engineer, not an accountant. I am a pretty successful one at that. But at times, I've made really dumb mistakes and spent hours or days tracking down the bug that was "elementary". It happens. In our industry, we don't fire someone over a stupid mistake. Instead, we use it as a learning experience. If they learn from it and move on, good for them.
All this accounting is done by some low level government official. I would not want them fired for this unless it happens repeatedly. Hopefully, the person who made the error uses this as a great learning experience and does better the next time.
We keep trying to force people to do things they will not do. I am annoyed as the next person when some teenager sits at the traffic light texting their friend rather than going forward on green, but I think we go about the solution the wrong way. Fines certainly have their place, but when you see a trend develop that is not easy to correct, you need to think outside your paradigms and come up with more creative solutions.
An example of such creative thinking is how residential neighborhoods solved speeding issues. Many newer neighborhoods created road patterns that made it difficult to speed. Their first attempts punished everybody - they created speed bumps all over the road. Later attempts were more friendly to the law abiding drivers because they found that by putting in curves, the roads became visually appealing and it reduced speed.
Instead of thinking that fines and enforcement campaigns will solve this issue, we need to find better ways to adapt the technology and make it safer and less distracting. I don't have the ultimate solution on this, but handsfree devices in cars have helped greatly with voice calls. There is still a very big issue with text messages. That solution is still in the future. It is clear that people will not just give up text-message-like communication while driving, and it is also clear that there is no way to evenly enforce punishments on such a large percentage of people. Therefore, the best hope of a long term solutions lies in innovation and new ideas.
The key here is redirection. If a behavior cannot be solved by education and/or punishment, we must find ways to redirect the behavior into something safer.
Funny story, I worked at a legacy code place where programmers never wrote decent comments.
Being naive, I thought, oh that is strange, I'll do better on my code and write some nice comments to help direct the next guy using this piece of code. After submitting my code to my superior for review, you would have thought I just stole a mainframe from the company. I evidently committed a quite nasty sin, and one that I was careful not to repeat again. But I got out of that place as soon as I could.
My experience in such companies has led me to conclude that large COBOL code bases might be due to a culture of the company, especially if the company always says their goal is to "update" but they can never successfully advance the projects to do so.
If it matters so much to you, I am in no way lacking respect at my workplace (I report directly to the president of the company, and all that fun stuff). I have my own office, and never get questioned about budgets of projects. I get to wear what I want and I have a flexible schedule. I worked quite hard to get where I am at. I am not a slacker by any means. I have engineered many of the systems my company uses and brought them a lot of business by my work. My workplace can depend on me, and I have the freedom to "do it my way". To me, I think I am doing "adult" pretty well.
You may want to reconsider your definition of being a successful adult. Living in fear of not being respected by management is a terrible way to live. At the end of it all, you'll be the type whose health fails shortly after retirement because you've centered your life around pleasing those over you.
In fact, I used to wear a suit at another place and I did not feel better about myself. You can have your suit and your smug attitude toward the less "professionally dressed" people of the world. I have a job that I love, and get to work in a comfortable environment, with a private office, and a large budget. I work with friendly people and leave work with a smile on my face nearly every day. You can't beat the good life. If you work hard enough at learning important skills, you could also have the good life.
For my last interview, I dressed nice, but not too nice. The reason, I wanted to work for a company that judged an engineer based on their abilities and not on some stupid dress code. If they had said "Wow, nice work, but your dress code does not fit our culture", I would have happily walked away from the opportunity. But, instead they welcomed me because of my skill level. So I am happily employed at a company where I can wear hoodies and jeans :-)
I have previously worked at places where there was constant drama over dress code and I did not like it one bit. I always dressed appropriately, but I knew employees who were amazingly gifted, but were shamed and scolded by their bosses for wearing sneakers, or for being to casual. The company chased those gifted individuals away and we were left with individuals who over-focused on appearance to make up for their lack of abilities.
It will not be that hard. I used to build software in the tax industry. Do you know how many regional tax rules are out there? Yet, somehow, everyone manages to get along with that. Besides, every single ISP already has to deal with not only state regulations, but even the local community regulators when providing service to the area. This will be no different. It is just one more template that must be customized for the jurisdiction. Besides, they could always opt for the easy option and just choose to do right by their customers and NOT SHARE their customers' data.
Given that this is a tech site, I think a lot of us would recognize the ambiguity in this sentence as a problem with design of the language. In this case, it is the way legal documents are written. As an earlier comment pointed out, Maine's own legislative manual says not to use the Oxford comma.
The solution to this ambiguity is to introduce other language constructs into the so called "legalease". This really should be analysed and corrected for future laws.
One suggestion is that they could introduce bullet points into the legal documents. Another possibility is that lists could also be explicitly declared through a list indicator... i.e. All lists must be put in parentheses and put in a delimited format. They should really consult architects and teachers of computer languages when standardizing on a format. But the point is that there should be no ambiguity when reading the document.
I remember having a conversation with a woman tech executive at a very large company. She told me that she has done everything in her power to attract women into the field and specifically into their workplace. Yet, she was unable to break through this imbalance. And this was the top tech exec at the company and she said they just could not maintain the levels of females in the workforce in their company that she wanted. It was, in fact, far, far, below the levels she wanted.
After being in the tech industry for years, I can honestly say that I really do not encounter the implied institutional discrimination in the tech industry. Is there an imbalance in representation? Yes. However, I feel like these imbalances are indicators of other things. It could be cultural things. It could be something else. Maybe even in specific companies, there is a problem. But I feel like these statistics are more of indicators of some other cause than discrimination within the tech industry as a whole.
You don't know how to get the length of a string in Python? That's OK, provided you don't claim to know Python.
I'd probably flub that part. Not because I haven't written that line of code many times, but because I've written it in many different languages and they're all different. Is it len(string) or string.len() or array_length(string) or something else? I don't trust myself to remember that kind of stuff.
I agree. I've used so many languages in my career, that sometimes I have to look up a really basic function when picking it back up again to "get in the zone" on a particular language. Once I begin coding in that language, I do quite well.
When interviewing someone, I am more interested in their way of organizing their thoughts, how they might pseudo-code a solution, and what their overall work ethic looks like. If you are smart, hard working, and not afraid to learn a new syntax, I want you on my team. If you can't organize your thoughts, or could care less about programming after work is done, I'd rather see you go elsewhere (possibly to our competition). I've worked with too many good-at-textbook yet terrible-at-thinking programmers who could memorize like nobody's business, but could never come up with real solutions to something not found in a textbook.
Hi, my name is Vince. I interviewed for Amazon, specifically for their PHP API for AWS development team. Despite an entire background of 10+ years of developing front-facing PHP APIs for other businesses, plus having a major part of my code available for public review on GitHub, I failed their interview process because they wanted me to write a specific type of searching and sorting algorithm, by hand, on white-board. This type of code would never have been used on the job, ever. Yet this is what they interview on. The job was to build a PHP API so PHP developers can call basic PHP functions, and the library would translate them over to HHTPS calls to AWS. All of the complex computing/searching/sorting is handled by the existing AWS services.
Amazon did you a favor by not hiring you. Ending up there would have stressed you out beyond belief with lower pay and a toxic environment. I've not worked there myself, but known many who have, and you are better off without them.
Wow, that escalated quickly!
Wow, I wish I had Russian genetics. They seem to be able to do all the really big scary computer stuff that us non-russians are not capable of doing. I am not trying to denegrate Russians here, but the media is so incredibly naive. It is as if putting "Russian" in front of it, no matter the evidence, turns the so called hack into something mysterious, huge, and scary.
Most of the so called hacks, are simply social engineering and phishing scams. The Podesta thing could have been done by any old graphic designer that just made a nice looking "official" password reset email. I am really quite disappointed at what passes for a hack these days. In fact, if a Russian spat on someones shoe, the headline would probably be "Russians hack shoes".
Yes, Russia does have many brilliant developers. But they also are a historic safe haven for VPN services. Of course most attacks "originate" from such areas. Anybody with half a brain knows you don't do something nefarious online without redirecting your trail through territories that are not friendly to your home's prosecutors.
I think the media owes it to every self respecting programmer to start narrowing the definition of "hack". Did they use a man in the middle to fraudulently update a software package? That might be a hack... Did they cause the buffer to overflow in some C program, exposing information contained in parts of the memory? Ok, that is a hack too. I can think of lots of scenarios where hacks could take place.
But... if they simply sent an email asking someone to put in their existing password and tricked some tech-illiterate into doing something stupid, that is not a hack.
I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks.
Thus making you part of the problem.
You pick your hill to die on. For me, this is not that hill. Ticking off your customer just to make the "correct" design decision is a good way to get black listed by everyone. I can imagine that, with such a smug attitude, you must be a pleasant person to work with.
Caveat: I am not a designer, but I do program some programming for various Apps/Websites as a side job(but focus on more behind the scenes stuff in my day job).
I do not understand all the design decisions, especially the proliferation of interfaces with generic icons that could be mistook for Ikea instructions. It is frustrating when you run into an icon that could be interpreted as "light phone on fire" or "turbo mode" but you really don't know for sure which it is. Do you try it???
That being said, if I create an app or website that has nice instructions on it, the end user's first impression is to hate it. They say it does not look modern enough. However, it is intuitive to use and they can figure it out quickly. On the other hand, if I create an Apple/Material design type app, customers love it and accept it immediately. Of course, the UI is impossible for their customers, but hey, at least the company that requested the app likes it.
I think a lot of this stems from the Instagram/Pinterest world we live in. Everyone wants to be blown away by the beauty of the app when they casually glance at it. Of course, that beauty greatly limits the possibilities to make an app intuitive and easy to use.
As a developer, I find that I try to balance these things. But as someone who generally likes to get paid for my work, I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks. The quicker I make them happy, the sooner I can get paid and move on to the next gig.
Tying this to audio only is a bad UI design. Otherwise we are going to be seeing a lot more audio applications.
This should not be arbitrarily set by Google. Instead, it should come up as a permissions pop-up like the location permissions...
For example, it could say... This application wishes to update in the background more frequently than the recommended levels. This may affect battery life. Do you approve" [Yes] [No]
Welcome to currency trading. The reason your grandparents did not bet the farm on currency is because of the wild swings. Somebody gains big and somebody loses big here. These sort of swings in currency are exactly how George Soros made his fortunes. I do not think the current swing indicates good or bad days ahead for BitCoin. It only indicates that it is being used for huge profits by some.
Here is a little explanation of what just happened:
One of the biggest emerging Bitcoin markets is in China. China's Yuan has been weak and even a small percentage of investors moving their Yuan investments in and out of Bitcoin can cause the market to fluctuate greatly. China's Yuan is much bigger than Bitcoin, so relatively small waves in China really rock the boats in the Bitcoin world. There was a spike in Yuan value, and some investors assumed better days ahead for China and cashed out bitcoins for Yuan. As you can see from the current charts, investors now saw cheap Bitcoin and are buying those again.
If it were only so simple... This does nothing to actually prevent ransomware.
At least the good people of California can cite a specific law instead of the broader extortion laws when they are victimized. I really think there is no point to this law. It has no means to solve the ransomware issue, it simply makes a specific case out of something that was already illegal.
I said this before the election, when everyone assumed the election was going to have different results, and I will say it now. Why on earth do we allow contractors to build machines that are closed source?
No matter which way this election went, we were bound to have claims of fraud. I am not accusing one way or another here, it is just that without the ability for the public to audit the means of counting, it is unfair and unethical. The reason for a paper vote, as opposed to a voice vote, was partially as an audit trail and public record. The voting machines themselves should be audit-able before they begin counting and the public has a right to know that they have not been tampered with. It is a conflict of interest to have secretary of states be in charge of "verifying" the voting machines, while they themselves are often part of the political machine. While at some level, this is inevitable, we can introduce a measure of integrity through open sourcing of the machines themselves.
The government should require as part of the contract with voting machine producers, that the system is open and audit-able. They should test ahead of time and agree upon a finished version before the election. This version and hash code should be available to the public at each voting machine. It should be a crime to use "unverified" versions of the software, unless under direct orders from a judge.
I have a better idea. Whether or not we have an electoral college, you will always have the "haves" and "have-nots". The real solution is to give the majority and minority party a voice. We need to change up the rules for running for president. I propose the highest vote getter becomes president and the second highest vote getter becomes vice president. That way, the minority party is still represented in a powerful office in government.
I think that this could be beneficial. In fact, in some crucial areas, where there is a public interest in accountability, the government should almost certainly require a contractor to open source the produced software. Of particular interest in the current news, I think that the recently reported issues with voter machines could be remedied with open source and independently auditable software.
Whether or not there is anything interesting, wrong, or nefarious with the software, it would give people a peace of mind knowing that when they use such a machine, the underlying code could be viewed by anyone who knows what they are doing. It would also help to expose errors quickly to ensure that everything is as fair as possible. If the government was to release such code early enough in advance, it could be reviewed and hashed out far in advance of elections.
I am sure there are dozens of other such applications where we could prevent even the possibility of some corruption (or accusations of corruption when a mistake is made) by simply open sourcing some government software products.
I don't have skin in this game. But I will offer this. Everyone on both sides of the aisle at least appeared to have the belief that this vote counted before the vote took place. Does perception matter? I would think so. The UK government made this referendum out to be something important. Therefore, it should be seen as important. To nullify it after the results come in, because you don't like it, is disingenuous and wrong. Either the vote mattered or it didn't.
It is kind of like a crook coming up to you at night, holding his hand in his shirt in the shape of a gun and ordering you to give you money. Your perception matters here. Sure, the guy had no intention to kill, but he got the results he wanted, and he can be charged with an assault or an act of violence because of it. When government have a vote and say there will be consequences, the people should expect to believe that the government is being honest and not crooked like the aforementioned criminal.
When a government creates a vote, bills it as a referendum, then re-bills it as something else when they get an unexpected outcome, it screams to the people that their vote does not matter. And in fact, it probably proves that their vote really does not matter. We can say they found a constitutional loophole or whatever, but in the end, that loophole should have been broadcast all over the place BEFORE the Brexit vote. Otherwise the implied intent of the vote was something completely different from what they now claim.
Congress needs to shut up and start doing its job
What job are they paid best to do, exactly?
It depends on who you ask...
The federal government signs their paychecks and the voters ask for congress's protection and wisdom in making laws.
But... most in congress don't just get paychecks. There is a second group that pays checks to congress as well (aka lobbyists and those in need of special favors). In reality, these entities also have a "job" congress is paid to do.
So the question is largely a matter of perspective. Most in congress stand to gain far more by the checks coming from the second group. Especially when they get further up in the ranks after spending a lifetime serving the "people", err I mean the check writers.