Nice. you disagree, so I have to be a dumbass. Brilliant. Seems like a knee-jerk reaction. What are you trying to hide?
I never wrote that domestic intelligence gathering was the primary purpose of US Foreign Intelligence Agencies. I wrote that it was a bad idea to tempt fate by messing with any US intelligence agencies.
By the way, the DHS, FBI, and the NYPD (for instance) have plenty of domestic intelligence gathering capability.
By the way, insulting people with opposing viewpoints never won a debate. It just makes you look stupid.
Poking at the "U.S. Intelligence Community" as smart as pulling on Superman's cape or giving Batman a wedgie.
Anonymous? Guy Fawkes masks. CIA/FBI/No Such Agency -- a near-unending supply of money, guns, badges, warrants, subpoenas, and black bag jobs -- and that's just for the U.S. citizens IN THIS COUNTRY.
You in another country? How about a little extraordinary rendition and an all expense paid trip to a black prison?
Just today, here on/. -- "25 Alleged Anonymous Hackers Arrested By Interpol".
Jabbing a hornet's nest with a short stick is not smart. Not smart at all.
The cry of the software industry "I can't get any experienced developers" in America is bullshit.
What they can't get is experienced developers who will work for peanuts.
A company can outsource a development job to India for around $20/hour, and not have to pay FICA, health insurance, etc. on that. Compared to paying a decent fresh-out a salary of $60-70K, plus taxes and benefits, that's over twice the cost of the outsourced labor.
The same is true for H1-B visa holders. By law, they are supposed to be paid at the "prevailing wage", which means ~$25/hour around here. Trust me, they are not getting paid the same as a similarly qualified American. Again, this is way cheaper than hiring a decent fresh-out.
In both cases, the H1-B or outsourced, overseas labor is likely less (way less!) than half the price of hiring a competent American developer. However, there is a steep price to be paid elsewhere. The H1-B or outsourced developer is a mercenary, available to the highest bidder. He has no loyalty to the company, and, if offshore, is hard to pursue if IP is wrongfully appropriated. He knows his employment is temporary from the start, there is no need to develop for the future. Get the job done, and move along. It will be somebody else's problem next year.
Still, short-sighted management seeks the best numbers on quarterly P&L statements. Long term value is sacrificed for short term gains. Management makes their numbers and makes their bonus. They don't understand the business, or just don't care about the long term viability of the business. Software development (and probably semiconductor engineering) is not like manufacturing, where human automatons repeat the same tasks endlessly. Development is both a skill and a craft, and both grow over the developer's career. Development is also unlike manufacturing, where manufacturing creates the same product over and over again, a worker may become more adept at that one task, software grows and morphs from release to release, and this is where the high turn of H1-B and offshore workers really hurts a company. Product knowledge and domain knowledge, acquired over years, is what seasoned developers (and engineers) have, and what makes them worth the money.
Industry lobbyists cry "we cannot get good help" and bribe Congress to allow more cheap temporary foreign labor in. This is good, short term, for the companies that hire these mercenaries. It is bad, short term for the American worker who's job is displaced. It's bad, long term, for technical professions in America; how can you convince a young person to study for a career that has no future? It is also bad, long term, for all Americans, to see well-paying jobs disappear, and our economy, once the most powerful in the world, shrivel like a raisin in the sun.
If ol' Barack is serious about this problem, the H1-B visa cap should be proportionally adjusted based on unemployment numbers of American engineers. 4% unemployment for engineers? Let some H1-Bs in. 6% unemployment for engineers? Let NONE in.
I'll tell you who loses. Apple. While they rake huge profits now, "think different" looks too different, and as their attention get gathered, Americans are going to be just as upset as they were about similar abuses in the clothing industry, for example. Foxconn also loses, big, as it is going to become unpalatable for American businesses to with them, lest they suffer a similar castigation as Apple is about to feel.
The ones that lost the most are the Chinese workers who have been bid all the way to the bottom. I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
You may never see a device driver coded in C# or Java. Not for a physical machine, at least. They run too far from the metal.
Most **modern** OSes are written in C, though even unix was originally written in assembler. And pretty much every OS has a bootloader, and a fair bit of the library written in assembler. None of this is going to Java or C# (gachhk!). Too inefficient. Too proprietary. Nobody's going there.
The comments on this thread are unbelievable to me. CS grads that are only fluent in one programming language! Would you like fries with that? Shit.
By the way, the latest C language standard is C11. As in 2011. Same with C++. 2011.
The Feds have given them the authority. It's "reasonable", and unfortunately currently legal.
Don't like it? Write your congress-critter. Run for office. Lobby. Protest. Sue the feds. Don't fly.
Me? I don't like it, but I like how a jet aircraft can get me 1,000 miles away in ~2 hours, compared to driving 15-20 hours. The TSA screening is a minor annoyance. So I tolerate it.
I'd rather the TSA have a asshole detector at the checkpoint, or a assholes-don't-fly-list. There are a lot of completely rude assholes on airplanes. Trust me, your fellow passengers are far more obnoxious and deserving of an ass-whipping than some poor schmuck TSA agent.
Consider who will be using the information, why, and when.
Determine the most common use cases for the information you have collected. Then organize the information to suit.
Server died. What do I do?
Add a user: What do I do?
etc. Think about where you will be in a year, and how this information will be used when you have forgotten most of it, or in panic firefight mode, or gone on to another job.
The TSA agents are people, people that need a job. Just because their job make your airport visit a little less comfortable does not mean you should wish cancer or infirmity on them. Bad Karma on you, I say.
They absolutely should be wearing dosimeters. OSHA should be all over this, but that would be like your cop uncle giving your dad a parking ticket.
As far as the policy goes, I agree with Bruce Schneier, it is "security theater" and I don't believe it is effective.
"Within an hour, two of the three lanes at our location are shut down because of possible radiation leakage from the X-ray machines—an inspection reveals that the heavy flaps which seal the compartment are defective. A co-worker who's been on the job since before 9/11 tells me that screeners used to be given dosimeters to measure their exposure to radiation but that the devices were eliminated in a cost-cutting measure. We were told in training that OSHA has determined that our exposure levels are acceptable, and that is the last time I hear it mentioned. It takes days before the machines are back up and running."
NH only allows open carry without a permit. You need a permit for concealed, and that permit will do you no good in Mass.
It's still bad advice. "If it is legal, and you are willing to start some trouble..." -- I don't think I want to "start trouble" with the police, TSA, or any other government agency while carrying a concealed firearm . A significant proportion of those types are power-crazed, trigger-happy bullies, and if all that happens to you is arrest and confiscation of your firearm you should consider yourself very lucky.
in Massachusetts, possession of a handgun without a permit, concealed or not, will land you in jail. So this is not good advice for riding the T at all.
if you overload the RF amp, you're screwed. That's probably what's happening. The front ends on consumer GPS units were not engineered to deal with a high-power signal 25 MHz away. It is theoretically possible to engineer GPS receivers that can withstand that, but none have been built yet. So if LightSquared goes live, 75% of consumer (and possibly commercial) GPS units will have serious problems.
Still, this will go through like grass through a goose, the taxpayers will get screwed, and most existing GPS units will suffer serious degradation. Mark my words.
What's this guys beef if he is innocent? The more he fights extradition for questioning, the guiltier he looks.
I don't buy for one femtosecond the concept that the Swedes are acting as a proxy for the Americans to punish him. (Though I might if it was the British. sorry.)
Trust me, if the American government wanted him that badly, he would already have been disappeared, Britain or not, by extraordinary rendition with a bag tied over his head, into a black prison and never seen again.
Assange looks like a man trying to dodge a rape conviction. All women, and any man with sisters, wives or daughters should be outraged!
There are editors too stupid for BoingBoing? You want to talk about groupthink, look over there. Host a steampunk convention at the moveon.org headquarters and they'd all be there... Oh shit, the slashdot groupthink is going to mod me down now, because I made fun of steampunky liberals. Shit.
I think that the title of the article is wrong, it looks to me like Google improperly cited slashdot's moderation system as prior art, but it sounds a lot like they are patenting something pretty close to the same thing. Perhaps the title should be Google Patents Slashdot Moderation System.
Good luck suing them. If they really have absconded with CmdrTaco's idea, maybe the folks at Groklaw might be interested.
I always ask them what they do when they aren't at work, and what the last book they read was. Somebody with a passion for their hobby is more interesting than somebody who "plays with their dog and watches television", and more likely to have a passion for their work... Somebody who read a Dean Koontz book as their last is probably not the deepest thinker (apologies to Mr. Koontz).
I've had some crazy and some crazy stupid interviews. I've walked away from a lot of those offers.
I expect that many of the "brilliant" engineers aren't interested in the Silicon Valley / SF / Bay Area rat race and lifestyle.
Advice to Silly Valley companies looking for top talent: geographic diversity. There's a lot of smart people in Boston, NYC, DC, RTP, Atlanta (and maybe even in the Midwest, though apparently not in Minnesota, based on the stellar grammar and writing skills of said Wong.)
Slashdot Mirror
Jupiter was eclipsed by Neptune. Or something.
Cosmic thunder from Maynard, my eye.
Pardon me, but...
Don't they have something better to do?
This is like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns.
I thought that was Oscar Goldman's department...
Nice. you disagree, so I have to be a dumbass. Brilliant. Seems like a knee-jerk reaction. What are you trying to hide?
I never wrote that domestic intelligence gathering was the primary purpose of US Foreign Intelligence Agencies. I wrote that it was a bad idea to tempt fate by messing with any US intelligence agencies.
By the way, the DHS, FBI, and the NYPD (for instance) have plenty of domestic intelligence gathering capability.
By the way, insulting people with opposing viewpoints never won a debate. It just makes you look stupid.
Poking at the "U.S. Intelligence Community" as smart as pulling on Superman's cape or giving Batman a wedgie.
Anonymous? Guy Fawkes masks. CIA/FBI/No Such Agency -- a near-unending supply of money, guns, badges, warrants, subpoenas, and black bag jobs -- and that's just for the U.S. citizens IN THIS COUNTRY.
You in another country? How about a little extraordinary rendition and an all expense paid trip to a black prison?
Just today, here on /. -- "25 Alleged Anonymous Hackers Arrested By Interpol".
Jabbing a hornet's nest with a short stick is not smart. Not smart at all.
Does it really matter who is bribed, which party?
It is offensive enough when politicians of either party get bribed, corporations get special treatment, and the public gets stiffed.
The "surprise" here is that (in this case) the democrats got bribed by big business, who they normally rail against.
Usually they get bribed by big labor.
The cry of the software industry "I can't get any experienced developers" in America is bullshit.
What they can't get is experienced developers who will work for peanuts.
A company can outsource a development job to India for around $20/hour, and not have to pay FICA, health insurance, etc. on that. Compared to paying a decent fresh-out a salary of $60-70K, plus taxes and benefits, that's over twice the cost of the outsourced labor.
The same is true for H1-B visa holders. By law, they are supposed to be paid at the "prevailing wage", which means ~$25/hour around here. Trust me, they are not getting paid the same as a similarly qualified American. Again, this is way cheaper than hiring a decent fresh-out.
In both cases, the H1-B or outsourced, overseas labor is likely less (way less!) than half the price of hiring a competent American developer. However, there is a steep price to be paid elsewhere. The H1-B or outsourced developer is a mercenary, available to the highest bidder. He has no loyalty to the company, and, if offshore, is hard to pursue if IP is wrongfully appropriated. He knows his employment is temporary from the start, there is no need to develop for the future. Get the job done, and move along. It will be somebody else's problem next year.
Still, short-sighted management seeks the best numbers on quarterly P&L statements. Long term value is sacrificed for short term gains. Management makes their numbers and makes their bonus. They don't understand the business, or just don't care about the long term viability of the business. Software development (and probably semiconductor engineering) is not like manufacturing, where human automatons repeat the same tasks endlessly. Development is both a skill and a craft, and both grow over the developer's career. Development is also unlike manufacturing, where manufacturing creates the same product over and over again, a worker may become more adept at that one task, software grows and morphs from release to release, and this is where the high turn of H1-B and offshore workers really hurts a company. Product knowledge and domain knowledge, acquired over years, is what seasoned developers (and engineers) have, and what makes them worth the money.
Industry lobbyists cry "we cannot get good help" and bribe Congress to allow more cheap temporary foreign labor in. This is good, short term, for the companies that hire these mercenaries. It is bad, short term for the American worker who's job is displaced. It's bad, long term, for technical professions in America; how can you convince a young person to study for a career that has no future? It is also bad, long term, for all Americans, to see well-paying jobs disappear, and our economy, once the most powerful in the world, shrivel like a raisin in the sun.
If ol' Barack is serious about this problem, the H1-B visa cap should be proportionally adjusted based on unemployment numbers of American engineers. 4% unemployment for engineers? Let some H1-Bs in. 6% unemployment for engineers? Let NONE in.
The US lost? I don't think so.
NOBODY wants those kind of jobs in the U.S.
I'll tell you who loses. Apple. While they rake huge profits now, "think different" looks too different, and as their attention get gathered, Americans are going to be just as upset as they were about similar abuses in the clothing industry, for example. Foxconn also loses, big, as it is going to become unpalatable for American businesses to with them, lest they suffer a similar castigation as Apple is about to feel.
The ones that lost the most are the Chinese workers who have been bid all the way to the bottom. I feel genuinely sorry for those people.
Thank you for saving me the time to write this. Vote with your feet, don't buy that crap.
Who is Microsoft, anyway? Are they relevant any more?
PIPA is still alive.
40 (FORTY!) senators are co-sponsors of PIPA, the last time I checked.
Write them. Don't email them. Don't waste your time on online petitions. Write a letter, and then send it by **FAX** to your senator.
Why fax? because snail-mail gets quarantined, email is too easy to ignore, but an old-fashioned piece of paper is something bureaucrats understand.
We had our technology stolen, because we can't secure our own network, our customers suffered intrusions as a result... and this is a good thing!
This guy should be the White House Press Secretary!
You may never see a device driver coded in C# or Java. Not for a physical machine, at least. They run too far from the metal.
Most **modern** OSes are written in C, though even unix was originally written in assembler. And pretty much every OS has a bootloader, and a fair bit of the library written in assembler. None of this is going to Java or C# (gachhk!). Too inefficient. Too proprietary. Nobody's going there.
The comments on this thread are unbelievable to me. CS grads that are only fluent in one programming language! Would you like fries with that? Shit.
By the way, the latest C language standard is C11. As in 2011. Same with C++. 2011.
Your argument is, at best, a ridiculous hyperbole.
read this: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2010/11/20/how-the-tsa-legally-circumvents-the-fourth-amendment/
The Feds have given them the authority. It's "reasonable", and unfortunately currently legal.
Don't like it? Write your congress-critter. Run for office. Lobby. Protest. Sue the feds. Don't fly.
Me? I don't like it, but I like how a jet aircraft can get me 1,000 miles away in ~2 hours, compared to driving 15-20 hours. The TSA screening is a minor annoyance. So I tolerate it.
I'd rather the TSA have a asshole detector at the checkpoint, or a assholes-don't-fly-list. There are a lot of completely rude assholes on airplanes. Trust me, your fellow passengers are far more obnoxious and deserving of an ass-whipping than some poor schmuck TSA agent.
Consider who will be using the information, why, and when.
Determine the most common use cases for the information you have collected. Then organize the information to suit.
Server died. What do I do?
Add a user: What do I do?
etc. Think about where you will be in a year, and how this information will be used when you have forgotten most of it, or in panic firefight mode, or gone on to another job.
The TSA agents are people, people that need a job. Just because their job make your airport visit a little less comfortable does not mean you should wish cancer or infirmity on them. Bad Karma on you, I say.
They absolutely should be wearing dosimeters. OSHA should be all over this, but that would be like your cop uncle giving your dad a parking ticket.
As far as the policy goes, I agree with Bruce Schneier, it is "security theater" and I don't believe it is effective.
read this: http://www.cntraveler.com/travel-tips/safety-and-security/2007/03/Inside-Job-My-Life-as-an-Airport-Screener.print to find out what it's like on the other side.
"Within an hour, two of the three lanes at our location are shut down because of possible radiation leakage from the X-ray machines—an inspection reveals that the heavy flaps which seal the compartment are defective. A co-worker who's been on the job since before 9/11 tells me that screeners used to be given dosimeters to measure their exposure to radiation but that the devices were eliminated in a cost-cutting measure. We were told in training that OSHA has determined that our exposure levels are acceptable, and that is the last time I hear it mentioned. It takes days before the machines are back up and running."
NH only allows open carry without a permit. You need a permit for concealed, and that permit will do you no good in Mass.
It's still bad advice. "If it is legal, and you are willing to start some trouble..." -- I don't think I want to "start trouble" with the police, TSA, or any other government agency while carrying a concealed firearm . A significant proportion of those types are power-crazed, trigger-happy bullies, and if all that happens to you is arrest and confiscation of your firearm you should consider yourself very lucky.
in Massachusetts, possession of a handgun without a permit, concealed or not, will land you in jail. So this is not good advice for riding the T at all.
That's not what TFA said. TFA said 75% of tested units. Trimble and Garmin and OnStar. The "precision" GPS units have not been tested yet.
If you had been following along, and perhaps read TFA, you might have seen this.
LightSquared "volunteered" to not use the offending spectrum... until 2012. Which is next month.
I smell a rat.
if you overload the RF amp, you're screwed. That's probably what's happening. The front ends on consumer GPS units were not engineered to deal with a high-power signal 25 MHz away. It is theoretically possible to engineer GPS receivers that can withstand that, but none have been built yet. So if LightSquared goes live, 75% of consumer (and possibly commercial) GPS units will have serious problems.
Still, this will go through like grass through a goose, the taxpayers will get screwed, and most existing GPS units will suffer serious degradation. Mark my words.
What's this guys beef if he is innocent? The more he fights extradition for questioning, the guiltier he looks.
I don't buy for one femtosecond the concept that the Swedes are acting as a proxy for the Americans to punish him. (Though I might if it was the British. sorry.)
Trust me, if the American government wanted him that badly, he would already have been disappeared, Britain or not, by extraordinary rendition with a bag tied over his head, into a black prison and never seen again.
Assange looks like a man trying to dodge a rape conviction. All women, and any man with sisters, wives or daughters should be outraged!
There are editors too stupid for BoingBoing? You want to talk about groupthink, look over there. Host a steampunk convention at the moveon.org headquarters and they'd all be there... Oh shit, the slashdot groupthink is going to mod me down now, because I made fun of steampunky liberals. Shit.
I think that the title of the article is wrong, it looks to me like Google improperly cited slashdot's moderation system as prior art, but it sounds a lot like they are patenting something pretty close to the same thing. Perhaps the title should be Google Patents Slashdot Moderation System.
Good luck suing them. If they really have absconded with CmdrTaco's idea, maybe the folks at Groklaw might be interested.
I like how Chrome can display most PDFs right in the browser. No troublesome plugin required.
The last few versions of Acrobat Reader have so much bloat and need to be updated so often, it is nearly more trouble than it's worth.
To have Firefox display PDF directly is wonderful news. Good job!
I always ask them what they do when they aren't at work, and what the last book they read was. Somebody with a passion for their hobby is more interesting than somebody who "plays with their dog and watches television", and more likely to have a passion for their work... Somebody who read a Dean Koontz book as their last is probably not the deepest thinker (apologies to Mr. Koontz).
I've had some crazy and some crazy stupid interviews. I've walked away from a lot of those offers.
Hell! You've got that right. Didja ever wonder why the producers of "The Social Network" did not get sued for libel? I didn't either.
I expect that many of the "brilliant" engineers aren't interested in the Silicon Valley / SF / Bay Area rat race and lifestyle.
Advice to Silly Valley companies looking for top talent: geographic diversity. There's a lot of smart people in Boston, NYC, DC, RTP, Atlanta (and maybe even in the Midwest, though apparently not in Minnesota, based on the stellar grammar and writing skills of said Wong.)