Tell your friends that you're quitting, and ask if they would be willing to be references for future employment. Get their contact information and hold onto it.
Get copies of your performance reviews from HR. Once they are in your hands, tell HR what your manager is doing.
Tell HR that effective immediately you quit, and you are quitting because of the pressure your manager is attempting to bring to bear upon you. Tell HR that if your manager had played nice, you would've played nice — but if your manager is going to play hardball, then you have to, too. Be very nice to HR. Be apologetic, even. Make sure HR recognizes you're angry at one specific manager, and not at the entire company.
My name is Robert Hansen. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact I grew up near to where he grew up. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact we're from the same state and attended the same university. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact we're in the same field and have spoken at some of the same conferences (and journalists seeking him have contacted me by mistake). And finally, not Robert Hanssen, either.
I have been mistaken for all of those people at least once.
I get around it by signing everything, everything, as "Robert J. Hansen." That cuts down name collisions an awful lot.
Grassley is a fifty-year union man, dating back all the way to when he was working an assembly line as a young man. Why does it surprise you that a solid union man is going to advocate that jobs should go preferentially to American citizens?
"Coming from a Republican I find this especially amusing..." -- yeah, well. Might help to actually learn about the Republican first, you know?
ObDisclosure: Charles Grassley is a family friend. I haven't had a conversation with him in several years, though.
Grassley is a vanishing breed. He's a small-town Iowan who still runs his own family farm. He's a child of the Depression and stretches a buck like it's nobody's business. He's the stereotype of Republicans from old Frank Capra movies: you can easily imagine him in a green-tinted eye visor making quiet, forlorn grief over how he forgot to get a receipt for lunch at McDonald's.
He was part of a labor union when he worked on an assembly line, and he has been current in his union dues for the last five decades. Yes, Chuck Grassley, a 28-year Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, is a lifelong union man and an advocate for organized labor.
He is no fan of the FBI. He's spoken out many times about FBI abuses of power, lack of accountability, and the FBI's tendency to retaliate against whistleblowers. He's shielded many whistleblowers from retaliation.
My favorite Grassley story comes from my father, who once phoned me up after he went for a drive with him. Grassley was pulling into an underground parking garage... shut off the engine, put the car in neutral... and coasted down five levels of parking. He explained to Dad that the price of gas just kept on going up and up and up, and he was trying to cut back on his usage.
So yeah. Grassley's the real deal. He's part of a dying, vanishing breed of Republicanism. God knows I'd much rather have Republicans like him than GWB any day of the week.
The UNIX API is written in C. If you don't know C, you won't be able to understand UNIX system calls.
Beyond that, learn Java and learn Python. You yourself say you have a "fear of Java." Sounds like a pretty good reason to learn it. Likewise, you say you're not sure about Python's use of indentation. Sounds like another good reason to learn it.
It is usually good practice to learn one new language a year. These recommendations should be seen as beginnings not endings.
My final bit of advice is to learn PROLOG, LISP, Haskell or Erlang. And by 'learn,' I mean 'become fluent in.' These languages are radically different from anything you've experienced before. Learning how to think differently about problems will make you a much better programmer, regardless of what language you ultimately wind up using in the private sector.
First off, don't ask "can I be sued for this?" You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. The important question is whether you'll face legal action over this, and only secondarily whether you'll prevail. Court process today is so messed up that paying for a lawsuit, in both time and money, is often more ruinous than the final judgment against you.
Being in the legal right does not insulate you from lawsuits. It never has. You should be more concerned with pre-emptively preventing a lawsuit from being filed, not whether you would prevail in court if one were to be filed.
One of the reasons why so many people say "get a lawyer!" is because, believe it or not, lawyers are very good at this sort of thing. Lawyers are excellent business negotiators. Talk to a lawyer, explain what you want to do, explain that you don't want to be sued. The odds are very good the lawyer will be able to get you a way in which you get to do what you want to do without worrying about a lawsuit being filed.
A good lawyer wins lawsuits. A great lawyer prevents lawsuits from being filed in the first place.
This is not a 'perfect world' scenario. This is very much a real world scenario.
In the real world, if you commit a felony, you will get hung out to dry in a heartbeat while the company circles the wagons to try and protect the unindicted. Look at, e.g., the HP spying scandal, where people all the way up to the Board of Director level were left hanging. HP wasn't going to say they authorized the identity theft, or that they approved of it in any way.
How many whistle blowers have been hired by other corporates and been promoted to CEOs?
Right, because being a whistleblower means you're qualified to be a CEO. It doesn't. But generally, yes, whistleblowers do get protection, as long as they go within official channels and make sure to dot their is and cross their ts.
A few years ago I blew the whistle on some grossly unethical practices at my workplace. I showed up to a senior executive's office with my whistleblower ombudsman in tow and presented the issues. Didn't harm my career one bit. I left that job a few months ago and received glowing recommendations from my former bosses -- including the ones I blew the whistle on.
Y'see, their boss was the guy I reported to... and he made it very clear to his underlings that I was going to get the best recommendation letter they'd ever written.
You clearly don't know much about corporate politics or how to navigate these situations. I would respectfully suggest that while Dilbert is a great resource, it is also a rather one sided one, and you really need to get some firsthand experience.
You are an employee of a corporate: protected by its immunity.
Employees have no immunity from felony prosecution. Bang, period, end of sentence. There is no immunity anywhere in corporate life. There is indemnity, which is a separate issue, which protects you from civil lawsuit; it does not protect you in any way from felony charges.
If you commit a felony and the police come knocking, expect to get charged. The corporation won't be.
And if you really think that protecting your company from a lawsuit and reporting possibly felonious actions to the company's legal department will get you not hired anywhere else, you really need to spend more time in corporate America. This is the way you handle these things. You don't involve the police and you don't go to the press. You go to the corporation's own internal hierarchy and say "my manager is doing something aggressively stupid which, if discovered, will get me in a ton of trouble and expose the company to massive financial risk. Please make him stop."
What do you think Legal exists for? They're there to protect the company -- from internal threats as well as external ones.
Your boss is asking you to commit a felony. You probably do not want to do this.
Send your boss this email. Print off two copies: put one someplace safe, and then walk down to Legal with the other.
Bob:
After reviewing what you have asked me to do, I have come to the conclusion that it is possibly a violation of federal law. By violating the terms of service, we will be accessing computers in excess of our authority, which is a felony under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and could expose the company to substantial financial risk.
For obvious reasons, I am not comfortable proceeding forward without getting Legal in on this. If they say it's fine, then I will certainly implement it.
... This will almost certainly torpedo your relationship with your boss, but if he's asking you to violate the CFAA then you don't have much of a relationship with him anyway. Your company's legal counsel will jump all over this and make it clear to your boss that (a) he's not allowed to violate federal computer fraud laws in order to make a buck, and (b) he's not allowed to exact retribution against you due to various whistleblower-protection statutes.
I had some very high hopes for this Q&A session. You did not deliver on these hopes. A lot of other people here are going to talk (are already talking) about how "content free" your answers were. I'm going to talk instead about how I think you could have done better--in many cases, a lot better.
First, it was probably a mistake for you to come here in the first place. The average Slashdotter has about as much wisdom and insight as a mentally challenged turtle. When you enter this domain, you need to expect discourse to drop to that level. Slashdot is not a forum for insight and erudition: it is principally a forum for young tech-savvy people to throw around their prejudices as if they were established fact. My first suggestion for your after-action review is "what is it you needed to accomplish, and why did you think you could accomplish it here?"
Second, your public affairs staff did you a misservice in how they briefed you for this audience. You're addressing a crowd of people with analytical abilities which border on the profound. (Which, of course, makes the lack of wisdom all the more striking. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, as Frank Zappa said.) A large number of Slashdotters are professional programmers, system administrators, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and more. These are all professions which require the ability to slice apart arguments, statements, propositions. Your answers are absolutely awful in this crowd. Consider your first set of questions:
What are the limits on this jurisdiction? Who enforces these limits, and how is the public informed of that status? How are efforts to extend being safeguarded from creating mission creep that threatens all civil discourse in the United States and abroad form targeting, suppression, propaganda and extra-legal surveillance?
Your answer, stripped of the PAO gibberish, reduces down to "that's an excellent question, we won't need new laws, we cooperate with other agencies." I think you'll agree that your answer not only failed to answer some of the questions, it failed to answer any of the questions.
General, what would happen to a newly-minted second lieutenant who tried to answer one of your direct questions with such an evasion? Would that lieutenant even have a career by the time you were finished with him? You'd accuse him of sophistry, of insubordination, and--what is worse--you would accuse him of thinking you're an idiot.
General, you must think I'm an idiot. Most of your answers are insults to my intelligence.
Your PAO is probably selling you on a line that in the internet era, all interviews are given to a global audience, and you have to answer with that in mind. If this is the case, get a new PAO. The audience is potentially global, but you definitely have a very select audience in front of you. Optimizing your answers for a potential audience just means that nobody in the wider world will bother reading these pasteboard answers, and the select audience in front of you will walk away believing you have disrespected them. That's fatal in public relations, and your PAO ought to know it.
Third, you are an officer and a gentleman in the United States Air Force. You are to comport yourself at all times in a manner most befitting that uniform you wear. USING STUPID TEXT MESSAGING ACRONYMS MAKES YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS. The people to whom you are speaking may be the most ridiculous, venal and self-absorbed people you've ever met, but you need to be better than that. You need to be an airman.
My uncle was an Air Force counterintelligence officer. One of my best friends recently left USAF OSI. You are not living up to the high standards I have seen them set.
My recommendations are pretty simple:
Rethink why you came here in the first place. Figure out what you need to accomplish and whether success is possible in t
I think this says a lot more about a psychology mindset (if one exists) than about an engineering mindset (which I will concede exists).
The "engineering mindset" is one that is fiercely analytical and follows the analysis wherever it leads. After taking a graduate level course in game theory I and many other people in the class became staunch economic conservatives. We'd seen the math, we'd proven the math worked, and we believed it to be irresponsible for anyone to advocate inefficient allocation schemes. (Keep in mind that inefficient allocation schemes means malnutrition and/or starvation for millions, as happened in India a few decades ago. People were starving to death even while there was plenty of grain in government warehouses. The problem wasn't a lack of food--only a lack of an efficient way to allocate it.)
The "psychology mindset" is more touchy-feely and far less analytical. A psychologist would look at my economic conservativism and say "so, you believe in free markets because they're mathematically optimal, efficient, and rational. But you don't seriously believe people are mathematically optimal, efficient, or rational, do you?" It's an intellectually honest criticism: I'm not setting them up as straw men, but instead only showing that the psychology mindset is at odds with an engineering mindset. Just as the "engineering mindset" has led me and many others to economic conservativism, the "psychology mindset" has led many others to embracing Big Government, price controls, and market interventions.
If the psychology community wants to accuse the engineering community of being correlated with terrorism, I figure we should accuse the psychology community of being correlated with famine, poverty and pestilence. But it would be much, much more productive if such inflammatory rhetoric could be scaled back.
ObDisclosure: I am a graduate student doing research into heuristic approximation algorithms. I'm more the implementation side of the crew than the research side of the crew, but hey.:)
For a very large portion of the problem space, TSP is really quite tractable once you use a proper heuristic. I've seen damn near perfect approximations to a 100-city TSP problem computed in under ten seconds.
Good heuristics are just frighteningly good.
If you want to see an example of this, take a look at Djinni, which implements simulated and compressed annealing algorithms. Once built there's a nice little GTK+ app that shows you a path through a 100-city TSP. (ObDisclosure: I'm one of Djinni's authors.)
As a very simple example of a real-world Traveling Salesman Problem, FedEx delivery trucks do this every single day.
They actually do a variant of the problem called the TSPTW, the TSP with Time Windows, where the salesman has to visit each point within a certain time window. In FedEx's case, this corresponds to the time the recipient is expecting delivery.
There's another variation, the Vehicle Routing Problem, which is basically giving a set of vehicles a set of clients to visit and apportioning stops to each truck in a way to minimize the total cost.
Etc., etc. FedEx, UPS, DHL and the USPS are willing to throw lots of money at researchers in order to get a better handle on these problems.
The definition of NP-completeness--or at least one of them, you can define it in several different (but all equivalent) ways--is a problem which exists in NP, but is also NP-HARD.
You appear to not understand complexity theory. I would suggest brushing up on it.
(ObDisclosure: I am a graduate student in CompSci. One of my research areas involves the TSP. I have spoken at CodeCon 2006 and OSCON 2006 on new approaches in heuristic approximators for NP-complete algorithms.)
Please learn how the Constitution is construed before you attempt to argue it.
If I'm shouting condemnation against George Bush, Bush has absolutely no right to suppress me. But you're entirely within rights to yell at me "either shut up or get off my lawn!"
The Bill of Rights is a prohibition on what the government or its functionaries may do. It has absolutely nothing to say about what private citizens or groups can do.
"Due process" does not necessarily mean you get your day in court, true. However, the courts have established some pretty strong guidelines for what constitutes due process in an educational setting. I cannot imagine that due process was followed in this case, given the student was given absolutely no opportunity to rebut the allegations against him, and the perception of clear and present danger appears to be mostly fantasy.
It's a state university. That means they're bound by the Constitution and cannot expel students without affording them due process.
Had this been a private school, he would have had utterly no recourse: expulsion at will for any reason, even none at all, is one of the perks (if you're an administrator) of being at a private school.
I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science with a focus in information security. I have also worked in the private sector in a variety of IT jobs, so don't think I'm some propellerheaded academic. I have also taught programming courses at the university level. I call shenanigans on your entire argument.
I am a headhunter for high end roles at investment banks, and we are close to classifying CompSci as a "non degree", along with media studies, languages, etc
So, what, you're going to hire math geeks only? People with degrees in mathematics or operations research, or perhaps some of the hard sciences? In my own experience, while there are some non-CS degrees that are excellent preparation for a CS career, only a CS degree is a CS degree. It is lamentable that some schools have embraced the trade-school mentality, but many more have not. When I was teaching courses as a graduate student (just a couple of years ago), the curriculum began with Java and quickly shifted to Haskell. A neighboring institution still uses Ada as an undergraduate language. There's also a legion of Knights of the Lambda Calculus who are trying to get Scheme reintroduced to the undergraduate curricula in several institutions in the area. Intellectual diversity about languages is alive and well in the academy, based on the institutions I've seen up close and personal.
Also, who is this "we"? You and someone else who shares your prejudices? Or is this you and the senior engineering staff? If you're about to decree CS as a non degree, maybe you should get the input of the people who will be most brutally affected by your shortsightedness.
Java is fine for teaching design patterns, and classical algorithms like Quicksort, or binary search. But you can't do operating systems
So glad to know that you think design patterns and classic algorithms are worth studying.
Look, pick up a copy of Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein's Algorithms textbook sometime. That's the definitive work on algorithms--if you need an algorithm, it's probably sitting in CLRS somewhere, along with some beautiful mathematical exposition about it. Every algorithm listed in the book can be trivially converted into Java. So why the hate for teaching CS with Java? It's a perfectly sensible language for many very important parts of CS.
Further, I've taught operating system design in Python. Yes, Python. When talking about how a translation lookaside buffer works, I don't write C code on the board. I write pseudocode in Python and say "so, this is how it looks from twenty thousand feet." On those rare occasions when we have to get down and dirty with the bare metal, then it's time to break out C--and we leave C behind as soon as possible. I want students to be focused on the ideas of translation lookaside buffers, not the arcane minutiae of implementations.
After all. Implementing it is their homework, and it involves hacking up the Minix code. In C.
Their reason apparently is that it is "easier". I have zero interest in kids who have studied "easy" subjects.
If it was an easy subject, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
If it was a spectacularly hard subject with a 50% washout rate, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
I've been in courses where 50% of the class washed. They were horrible, horrible classes. The pedagogy needed to change. The learning curve needed to be smoothed out and made gentler. This is in no way equivalent to saying it was made easy. The fact you think otherwise brands you as an intellectual elitist who can't be bothered to think logically about his own prejudices.
A computer "expert" is not someone who knows template metaprogramming in C++, or compiler archaeology in BCPL, or the vagaries of the Windows scheduler. It is someone who understands computers at multiple leve
I would suggest reading Christina Hoff Summers' Who Stole Feminism? sometime. It's a well-written book authored by a women's studies professor who takes to task some of the extreme elements of the field. If you can find it, it's plenty worth reading, and might bring you some more hope.
I will sit down and listen to an old-school equity feminist like Summers any time. I have no patience for the new school of gender feminism.
In 1993 I was a freshman at a large university. I saw a fellow student staggering under a double armload of textbooks, and I did precisely what I would do for any student in a fellow situation: I opened the door. The fact this student was female had no bearing on my decision. In return for this, I got a glare and then a shouted "You know, it's because of domineering, overbearing males like you that one in four college women is raped!" Then she stormed off and found another entrance to the building, just so she could avoid the door I opened for her.
But wait, she's not the caricature the far-right draws of the militant feminist. She was just a jerk. Women can be jerks as easily as men.
A few years ago I was talking to a Women's Studies professor at Florida State and I related this story. I also mentioned how angry I had been at the time, still was, to be lumped in with rapists just because I opened a door for someone who had a double armload of books. This professor listened, considered her words very carefully, and then said clearly I needed to take her introductory Women's Studies course so that I could understand the jerk's "context". I said I didn't really care about her context, it was a stupid comparison to make, and the hate directed at me was entirely undeserved and uncivilized. "Yes, but that's the point, you see," she explained to me patiently. "You've never opened your eyes and thought about what sort of life experiences could make her react in such a way, or the actions you did which provoked this response. You only care about your own male-oriented view and undercutting the validity of her life experience." (I am not quoting her exactly, but I am quoting her pretty darn close. It's been a few years, but the outrageousness of the dialog has made it stick in my memory very clearly.)
She went on for about another ten minutes before I had enough and stormed away.
The woman in 1993 was just a jerk. The Florida State Women's Studies prof who defended her and not once expressed a sentiment of "yes, she was a jerk"? She was the right-wing caricature of a feminazi.
Fortunately, people like her seem to be rare. At least, I've never found one outside of a Women's Studies department. (And I've met one Women's Studies prof since then who characterized the Florida State prof as "what a bitch!", which did my heart no end of good.)
If I say that Pauling's book should be taken seriously and allowed to be a citation in an undergraduate paper despite the book not being peer-reviewed, then I'm committing academic hubris and appealing to authority.
If I say that some anonymous patent clerk's papers should be taken seriously and allowed to be a citation in an undergraduate paper despite the clerk's papers not being substantially peer-reviewed (after all, who besides Einstein understood relativity well enough to review it?), then I'm in the clear.
So ultimately, whether citing someone is hubris or not depends entirely on whether they have two Nobel Prizes in two unrelated fields.
Your arguments are inconsistent and incoherent. You have a pretty severe anti-intellectual bias going there. I would suggest looking into that. Given that I only know how to argue with reason, and you appear to be bringing emotional values to the discussion, I'm going to have to call it finished here.
Naturally if you are writting a paper or thesis then all citations should go to the original peer-reviewed source
As a look at this thread will show, this is exactly what I have been writing about. Given that you've just agreed with me, I don't quite know how to respond to this, except to say "thank you".
Wikipedia is a great resource for beginning your inquiry. When it comes time to write a paper you need to go elsewhere, and if you cite Wikipedia as an authority, you should expect to get dinged hard.
Yes. Being wrong, but documenting it clearly so that someone who comes after you can discover that you're wrong, is far better than being right, but documenting it so vaguely that the people who come after you cannot recreate the original chain of reasoning that led you to your conclusions.
I really don't care if you're right or wrong in a paper. I care about whether you can prove that you're right or wrong. The two are completely different. If you're wrong but you supply me with your evidence, your chains of reasoning, your sources, then your paper is worth much, much more than someone who is right but cannot document a thing.
"Print media" means something written by a knowledgeable practitioner of the art and printed by a reputable outfit--i.e., not a vanity press. For instance, if you were writing a paper on the role of vitamin C in health, it would be acceptable to quote from Linus Pauling's books, despite the fact that (a) it's not a peer reviewed journal and (b) Pauling had some weird obsessions about vitamin C. Your prof would probably red-pen it and say "this has been discredited", but that's a big difference from red-penning and saying "this is not a credible reference". You can get a good grade for citing a two-time Nobel Laureate who had some crackpot ideas; you can't get a good grade for citing Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
My name is Robert Hansen. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact I grew up near to where he grew up. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact we're from the same state and attended the same university. No, not Robert Hansen, despite the fact we're in the same field and have spoken at some of the same conferences (and journalists seeking him have contacted me by mistake). And finally, not Robert Hanssen, either.
I have been mistaken for all of those people at least once.
I get around it by signing everything, everything, as "Robert J. Hansen." That cuts down name collisions an awful lot.
Good luck!
Grassley is a fifty-year union man, dating back all the way to when he was working an assembly line as a young man. Why does it surprise you that a solid union man is going to advocate that jobs should go preferentially to American citizens?
"Coming from a Republican I find this especially amusing..." -- yeah, well. Might help to actually learn about the Republican first, you know?
ObDisclosure: Charles Grassley is a family friend. I haven't had a conversation with him in several years, though.
Grassley is a vanishing breed. He's a small-town Iowan who still runs his own family farm. He's a child of the Depression and stretches a buck like it's nobody's business. He's the stereotype of Republicans from old Frank Capra movies: you can easily imagine him in a green-tinted eye visor making quiet, forlorn grief over how he forgot to get a receipt for lunch at McDonald's.
He was part of a labor union when he worked on an assembly line, and he has been current in his union dues for the last five decades. Yes, Chuck Grassley, a 28-year Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, is a lifelong union man and an advocate for organized labor.
He is no fan of the FBI. He's spoken out many times about FBI abuses of power, lack of accountability, and the FBI's tendency to retaliate against whistleblowers. He's shielded many whistleblowers from retaliation.
My favorite Grassley story comes from my father, who once phoned me up after he went for a drive with him. Grassley was pulling into an underground parking garage... shut off the engine, put the car in neutral... and coasted down five levels of parking. He explained to Dad that the price of gas just kept on going up and up and up, and he was trying to cut back on his usage.
So yeah. Grassley's the real deal. He's part of a dying, vanishing breed of Republicanism. God knows I'd much rather have Republicans like him than GWB any day of the week.
This question is remarkably easy.
The UNIX API is written in C. If you don't know C, you won't be able to understand UNIX system calls.
Beyond that, learn Java and learn Python. You yourself say you have a "fear of Java." Sounds like a pretty good reason to learn it. Likewise, you say you're not sure about Python's use of indentation. Sounds like another good reason to learn it.
It is usually good practice to learn one new language a year. These recommendations should be seen as beginnings not endings.
My final bit of advice is to learn PROLOG, LISP, Haskell or Erlang. And by 'learn,' I mean 'become fluent in.' These languages are radically different from anything you've experienced before. Learning how to think differently about problems will make you a much better programmer, regardless of what language you ultimately wind up using in the private sector.
First off, don't ask "can I be sued for this?" You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. The important question is whether you'll face legal action over this, and only secondarily whether you'll prevail. Court process today is so messed up that paying for a lawsuit, in both time and money, is often more ruinous than the final judgment against you.
Being in the legal right does not insulate you from lawsuits. It never has. You should be more concerned with pre-emptively preventing a lawsuit from being filed, not whether you would prevail in court if one were to be filed.
One of the reasons why so many people say "get a lawyer!" is because, believe it or not, lawyers are very good at this sort of thing. Lawyers are excellent business negotiators. Talk to a lawyer, explain what you want to do, explain that you don't want to be sued. The odds are very good the lawyer will be able to get you a way in which you get to do what you want to do without worrying about a lawsuit being filed.
A good lawyer wins lawsuits. A great lawyer prevents lawsuits from being filed in the first place.
Good luck! :)
This is not a 'perfect world' scenario. This is very much a real world scenario.
In the real world, if you commit a felony, you will get hung out to dry in a heartbeat while the company circles the wagons to try and protect the unindicted. Look at, e.g., the HP spying scandal, where people all the way up to the Board of Director level were left hanging. HP wasn't going to say they authorized the identity theft, or that they approved of it in any way.
How many whistle blowers have been hired by other corporates and been promoted to CEOs?
Right, because being a whistleblower means you're qualified to be a CEO. It doesn't. But generally, yes, whistleblowers do get protection, as long as they go within official channels and make sure to dot their is and cross their ts.
A few years ago I blew the whistle on some grossly unethical practices at my workplace. I showed up to a senior executive's office with my whistleblower ombudsman in tow and presented the issues. Didn't harm my career one bit. I left that job a few months ago and received glowing recommendations from my former bosses -- including the ones I blew the whistle on.
Y'see, their boss was the guy I reported to... and he made it very clear to his underlings that I was going to get the best recommendation letter they'd ever written.
You clearly don't know much about corporate politics or how to navigate these situations. I would respectfully suggest that while Dilbert is a great resource, it is also a rather one sided one, and you really need to get some firsthand experience.
You are an employee of a corporate: protected by its immunity.
Employees have no immunity from felony prosecution. Bang, period, end of sentence. There is no immunity anywhere in corporate life. There is indemnity, which is a separate issue, which protects you from civil lawsuit; it does not protect you in any way from felony charges.
If you commit a felony and the police come knocking, expect to get charged. The corporation won't be.
And if you really think that protecting your company from a lawsuit and reporting possibly felonious actions to the company's legal department will get you not hired anywhere else, you really need to spend more time in corporate America. This is the way you handle these things. You don't involve the police and you don't go to the press. You go to the corporation's own internal hierarchy and say "my manager is doing something aggressively stupid which, if discovered, will get me in a ton of trouble and expose the company to massive financial risk. Please make him stop."
What do you think Legal exists for? They're there to protect the company -- from internal threats as well as external ones.
Your boss is asking you to commit a felony. You probably do not want to do this.
Send your boss this email. Print off two copies: put one someplace safe, and then walk down to Legal with the other.
... This will almost certainly torpedo your relationship with your boss, but if he's asking you to violate the CFAA then you don't have much of a relationship with him anyway. Your company's legal counsel will jump all over this and make it clear to your boss that (a) he's not allowed to violate federal computer fraud laws in order to make a buck, and (b) he's not allowed to exact retribution against you due to various whistleblower-protection statutes.
I had some very high hopes for this Q&A session. You did not deliver on these hopes. A lot of other people here are going to talk (are already talking) about how "content free" your answers were. I'm going to talk instead about how I think you could have done better--in many cases, a lot better.
First, it was probably a mistake for you to come here in the first place. The average Slashdotter has about as much wisdom and insight as a mentally challenged turtle. When you enter this domain, you need to expect discourse to drop to that level. Slashdot is not a forum for insight and erudition: it is principally a forum for young tech-savvy people to throw around their prejudices as if they were established fact. My first suggestion for your after-action review is "what is it you needed to accomplish, and why did you think you could accomplish it here?"
Second, your public affairs staff did you a misservice in how they briefed you for this audience. You're addressing a crowd of people with analytical abilities which border on the profound. (Which, of course, makes the lack of wisdom all the more striking. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, as Frank Zappa said.) A large number of Slashdotters are professional programmers, system administrators, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and more. These are all professions which require the ability to slice apart arguments, statements, propositions. Your answers are absolutely awful in this crowd. Consider your first set of questions:
Your answer, stripped of the PAO gibberish, reduces down to "that's an excellent question, we won't need new laws, we cooperate with other agencies." I think you'll agree that your answer not only failed to answer some of the questions, it failed to answer any of the questions.
General, what would happen to a newly-minted second lieutenant who tried to answer one of your direct questions with such an evasion? Would that lieutenant even have a career by the time you were finished with him? You'd accuse him of sophistry, of insubordination, and--what is worse--you would accuse him of thinking you're an idiot.
General, you must think I'm an idiot. Most of your answers are insults to my intelligence.
Your PAO is probably selling you on a line that in the internet era, all interviews are given to a global audience, and you have to answer with that in mind. If this is the case, get a new PAO. The audience is potentially global, but you definitely have a very select audience in front of you. Optimizing your answers for a potential audience just means that nobody in the wider world will bother reading these pasteboard answers, and the select audience in front of you will walk away believing you have disrespected them. That's fatal in public relations, and your PAO ought to know it.
Third, you are an officer and a gentleman in the United States Air Force. You are to comport yourself at all times in a manner most befitting that uniform you wear. USING STUPID TEXT MESSAGING ACRONYMS MAKES YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS. The people to whom you are speaking may be the most ridiculous, venal and self-absorbed people you've ever met, but you need to be better than that. You need to be an airman.
My uncle was an Air Force counterintelligence officer. One of my best friends recently left USAF OSI. You are not living up to the high standards I have seen them set.
My recommendations are pretty simple:
I think this says a lot more about a psychology mindset (if one exists) than about an engineering mindset (which I will concede exists).
The "engineering mindset" is one that is fiercely analytical and follows the analysis wherever it leads. After taking a graduate level course in game theory I and many other people in the class became staunch economic conservatives. We'd seen the math, we'd proven the math worked, and we believed it to be irresponsible for anyone to advocate inefficient allocation schemes. (Keep in mind that inefficient allocation schemes means malnutrition and/or starvation for millions, as happened in India a few decades ago. People were starving to death even while there was plenty of grain in government warehouses. The problem wasn't a lack of food--only a lack of an efficient way to allocate it.)
The "psychology mindset" is more touchy-feely and far less analytical. A psychologist would look at my economic conservativism and say "so, you believe in free markets because they're mathematically optimal, efficient, and rational. But you don't seriously believe people are mathematically optimal, efficient, or rational, do you?" It's an intellectually honest criticism: I'm not setting them up as straw men, but instead only showing that the psychology mindset is at odds with an engineering mindset. Just as the "engineering mindset" has led me and many others to economic conservativism, the "psychology mindset" has led many others to embracing Big Government, price controls, and market interventions.
If the psychology community wants to accuse the engineering community of being correlated with terrorism, I figure we should accuse the psychology community of being correlated with famine, poverty and pestilence. But it would be much, much more productive if such inflammatory rhetoric could be scaled back.
ObDisclosure: I am a graduate student doing research into heuristic approximation algorithms. I'm more the implementation side of the crew than the research side of the crew, but hey. :)
For a very large portion of the problem space, TSP is really quite tractable once you use a proper heuristic. I've seen damn near perfect approximations to a 100-city TSP problem computed in under ten seconds.
Good heuristics are just frighteningly good.
If you want to see an example of this, take a look at Djinni, which implements simulated and compressed annealing algorithms. Once built there's a nice little GTK+ app that shows you a path through a 100-city TSP. (ObDisclosure: I'm one of Djinni's authors.)
As a very simple example of a real-world Traveling Salesman Problem, FedEx delivery trucks do this every single day.
They actually do a variant of the problem called the TSPTW, the TSP with Time Windows, where the salesman has to visit each point within a certain time window. In FedEx's case, this corresponds to the time the recipient is expecting delivery.
There's another variation, the Vehicle Routing Problem, which is basically giving a set of vehicles a set of clients to visit and apportioning stops to each truck in a way to minimize the total cost.
Etc., etc. FedEx, UPS, DHL and the USPS are willing to throw lots of money at researchers in order to get a better handle on these problems.
TSP is most assuredly an NP-complete problem.
The definition of NP-completeness--or at least one of them, you can define it in several different (but all equivalent) ways--is a problem which exists in NP, but is also NP-HARD.
You appear to not understand complexity theory. I would suggest brushing up on it.
(ObDisclosure: I am a graduate student in CompSci. One of my research areas involves the TSP. I have spoken at CodeCon 2006 and OSCON 2006 on new approaches in heuristic approximators for NP-complete algorithms.)
Please learn how the Constitution is construed before you attempt to argue it.
If I'm shouting condemnation against George Bush, Bush has absolutely no right to suppress me. But you're entirely within rights to yell at me "either shut up or get off my lawn!"
The Bill of Rights is a prohibition on what the government or its functionaries may do. It has absolutely nothing to say about what private citizens or groups can do.
"Due process" does not necessarily mean you get your day in court, true. However, the courts have established some pretty strong guidelines for what constitutes due process in an educational setting. I cannot imagine that due process was followed in this case, given the student was given absolutely no opportunity to rebut the allegations against him, and the perception of clear and present danger appears to be mostly fantasy.
The Supreme Court has incorporated the federal Due Process clause into a state-level protection via the 14th Amendment.
It's a state university. That means they're bound by the Constitution and cannot expel students without affording them due process.
Had this been a private school, he would have had utterly no recourse: expulsion at will for any reason, even none at all, is one of the perks (if you're an administrator) of being at a private school.
So, what, you're going to hire math geeks only? People with degrees in mathematics or operations research, or perhaps some of the hard sciences? In my own experience, while there are some non-CS degrees that are excellent preparation for a CS career, only a CS degree is a CS degree. It is lamentable that some schools have embraced the trade-school mentality, but many more have not. When I was teaching courses as a graduate student (just a couple of years ago), the curriculum began with Java and quickly shifted to Haskell. A neighboring institution still uses Ada as an undergraduate language. There's also a legion of Knights of the Lambda Calculus who are trying to get Scheme reintroduced to the undergraduate curricula in several institutions in the area. Intellectual diversity about languages is alive and well in the academy, based on the institutions I've seen up close and personal.
Also, who is this "we"? You and someone else who shares your prejudices? Or is this you and the senior engineering staff? If you're about to decree CS as a non degree, maybe you should get the input of the people who will be most brutally affected by your shortsightedness.
So glad to know that you think design patterns and classic algorithms are worth studying.
Look, pick up a copy of Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein's Algorithms textbook sometime. That's the definitive work on algorithms--if you need an algorithm, it's probably sitting in CLRS somewhere, along with some beautiful mathematical exposition about it. Every algorithm listed in the book can be trivially converted into Java. So why the hate for teaching CS with Java? It's a perfectly sensible language for many very important parts of CS.
Further, I've taught operating system design in Python. Yes, Python. When talking about how a translation lookaside buffer works, I don't write C code on the board. I write pseudocode in Python and say "so, this is how it looks from twenty thousand feet." On those rare occasions when we have to get down and dirty with the bare metal, then it's time to break out C--and we leave C behind as soon as possible. I want students to be focused on the ideas of translation lookaside buffers, not the arcane minutiae of implementations.
After all. Implementing it is their homework, and it involves hacking up the Minix code. In C.
If it was an easy subject, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
If it was a spectacularly hard subject with a 50% washout rate, would changes need to be made to make it easier?
I've been in courses where 50% of the class washed. They were horrible, horrible classes. The pedagogy needed to change. The learning curve needed to be smoothed out and made gentler. This is in no way equivalent to saying it was made easy. The fact you think otherwise brands you as an intellectual elitist who can't be bothered to think logically about his own prejudices.
I would suggest reading Christina Hoff Summers' Who Stole Feminism? sometime. It's a well-written book authored by a women's studies professor who takes to task some of the extreme elements of the field. If you can find it, it's plenty worth reading, and might bring you some more hope.
I will sit down and listen to an old-school equity feminist like Summers any time. I have no patience for the new school of gender feminism.
In 1993 I was a freshman at a large university. I saw a fellow student staggering under a double armload of textbooks, and I did precisely what I would do for any student in a fellow situation: I opened the door. The fact this student was female had no bearing on my decision. In return for this, I got a glare and then a shouted "You know, it's because of domineering, overbearing males like you that one in four college women is raped!" Then she stormed off and found another entrance to the building, just so she could avoid the door I opened for her.
But wait, she's not the caricature the far-right draws of the militant feminist. She was just a jerk. Women can be jerks as easily as men.
A few years ago I was talking to a Women's Studies professor at Florida State and I related this story. I also mentioned how angry I had been at the time, still was, to be lumped in with rapists just because I opened a door for someone who had a double armload of books. This professor listened, considered her words very carefully, and then said clearly I needed to take her introductory Women's Studies course so that I could understand the jerk's "context". I said I didn't really care about her context, it was a stupid comparison to make, and the hate directed at me was entirely undeserved and uncivilized. "Yes, but that's the point, you see," she explained to me patiently. "You've never opened your eyes and thought about what sort of life experiences could make her react in such a way, or the actions you did which provoked this response. You only care about your own male-oriented view and undercutting the validity of her life experience." (I am not quoting her exactly, but I am quoting her pretty darn close. It's been a few years, but the outrageousness of the dialog has made it stick in my memory very clearly.)
She went on for about another ten minutes before I had enough and stormed away.
The woman in 1993 was just a jerk. The Florida State Women's Studies prof who defended her and not once expressed a sentiment of "yes, she was a jerk"? She was the right-wing caricature of a feminazi.
Fortunately, people like her seem to be rare. At least, I've never found one outside of a Women's Studies department. (And I've met one Women's Studies prof since then who characterized the Florida State prof as "what a bitch!", which did my heart no end of good.)
So, let me get this straight:
If I say that Pauling's book should be taken seriously and allowed to be a citation in an undergraduate paper despite the book not being peer-reviewed, then I'm committing academic hubris and appealing to authority.
If I say that some anonymous patent clerk's papers should be taken seriously and allowed to be a citation in an undergraduate paper despite the clerk's papers not being substantially peer-reviewed (after all, who besides Einstein understood relativity well enough to review it?), then I'm in the clear.
So ultimately, whether citing someone is hubris or not depends entirely on whether they have two Nobel Prizes in two unrelated fields.
Your arguments are inconsistent and incoherent. You have a pretty severe anti-intellectual bias going there. I would suggest looking into that. Given that I only know how to argue with reason, and you appear to be bringing emotional values to the discussion, I'm going to have to call it finished here.
Wikipedia is a great resource for beginning your inquiry. When it comes time to write a paper you need to go elsewhere, and if you cite Wikipedia as an authority, you should expect to get dinged hard.
Yes. Being wrong, but documenting it clearly so that someone who comes after you can discover that you're wrong, is far better than being right, but documenting it so vaguely that the people who come after you cannot recreate the original chain of reasoning that led you to your conclusions.
I really don't care if you're right or wrong in a paper. I care about whether you can prove that you're right or wrong. The two are completely different. If you're wrong but you supply me with your evidence, your chains of reasoning, your sources, then your paper is worth much, much more than someone who is right but cannot document a thing.
"Print media" means something written by a knowledgeable practitioner of the art and printed by a reputable outfit--i.e., not a vanity press. For instance, if you were writing a paper on the role of vitamin C in health, it would be acceptable to quote from Linus Pauling's books, despite the fact that (a) it's not a peer reviewed journal and (b) Pauling had some weird obsessions about vitamin C. Your prof would probably red-pen it and say "this has been discredited", but that's a big difference from red-penning and saying "this is not a credible reference". You can get a good grade for citing a two-time Nobel Laureate who had some crackpot ideas; you can't get a good grade for citing Wikipedia.