At least in 2 jobs I've worked the lawyers came before a lawsuit and said it reasonable to expect a subpoena in the future so we need to preserve a copy of EVERY email/file/paper/whatever TODAY (the day the the lawyer found out). Once you suspect something could be legal evidence in the future you are knowingly destroying evidence. You may not be thrown in jail, but the other side can tell the jury to assume the worst in what you destroyed - and the court can just say "it's your fault for destroying the things you say prove your innocence. Too bad for you."
Unless she is dumber than than any republican on the planet thinks, she had reason to believe that Congress would want to see the emails (not the courts but still a legal issue where subpoenas, perjury, etc apply). And if she was "too busy" to understand what was happening her lawyers, who were involved in selecting emails to delete, certainly know. And they decided to allow her to destroy evidence rather than risk having the emails exposed.
Even if there was not a single email that implicated her in anything illegal or anything that Congress was even interested in, it was "destroying evidence". They can't be used to show her innocence - some questions cannot be resolved either way because of the choice she (intentionally) made.
Their admin tools can be slow at times but have always worked. I've managed 5-10 domains at a time for over a decade - some with hosting at godaddy and some at other places. If I need to add service quick it's always been easy (e.g. a client decides they need godaddy's email blaster today or I decide they need a CMS set up for something they just decided to do this weekend).
Support has been 50/50 the few times I or my client has needed to contact them so it helps if you know what you're doing with domains, email, cms, etc.
The problem I've seen in CS grads over the last 10-15 years is they have little to no engineering background (even when their degree is "Computer Engineering"). Most applications are complex systems. And most CS grads don't understand systems. I've been able to teach EEs, a chem E, a civil E, an MD and a CPA (among others) how to program. And they've had no trouble implementing solid class hierarchies and robust applications. It's much harder to teach a CS grad about structural integrity, analyzing a design for weaknesses, and root cause analysis. In some cases they won't accept those are even an issue since "software is so different from physical structures". So they keep building things that pass all the tests but repeatedly fall down once they get to production.
I know quite a few "normal" people who have developed software. I've worked with a doctor (MD) and CPA who learned programming on their own and decided to switch careers. No to mention a lot of people with non-technical backgrounds who got into designing web sites, then javascript, then backend work.
If anything it's getting too easy to get a "software development" job. Lot's of "programmers" work their way up to all levels of "software development" without expanding their understanding of software systems. Lots of others do learn along the way and belong where they rise to. But there is a lot of learning that needs to be done and many colleges don't even give a broad base to start with so even that's not always a good start. My guess is that healthcare.gov had too many people who knew how to program (i.e. "programmers") and not enough who understood systems/engineering ("software engineers" though that term is misused often since people don't understand the "engineering" aspect which takes a lot of learning )
If you want to see "exclusion" from a job try to help a sheetrocker, electrician, or plumber be allowed to be the lead architect for the next 70-story skyscraper. Or see if they can work their way up to that responsibility over the next 20 years without "requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication".
Is the IG obligated to tell the people anything? Or is this an attempt for them to find out (and cover up) any wrongdoings before we find out?
"Mr S found out about a part of project X. We need to tighten security on that project before the wrong workers find out about the rest of project X. Also start monitoring all of Mr S's personal communications and arrest him if anything looks suspicious and save anything that we can use to attack him publicly and destroy his credibility if he tells a reporter that we are doing something illegal and didn't stop when it was pointed out."
Lego skills are very useful for engineering. I've been in software development 30+ years and still apply skills I learned from lego, lincoln logs, and erector sets in the 60s and 70s. You can use these sets to build almost identical looking structures in many ways . Some will fall over when you barely touch them. Some can be rolled and even tossed a short distance without falling apart. Software is the same. You can put classes together to make a robust & stable system, or use similar classes to make a similar looking fragile system.
An understanding of structural stability is the biggest lack I've seen in developers the last 10 years. Non-software engineers are generally better than software engineers right out of school because the physical engineers got some understanding of structures in school. You can't test stability in. You need to be aware of it in all phases - design, throughout implementation, and finding root causes when there are problems rather than just fixing the bug (which needs to be fixed but may or may not be the root cause).
Think of all of the warnings we hear from scientists/experts.
Mudslides, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes - there are lots of places we just shouldn't live because some day there will be a disaster.
Bridges, buildings, subways - there are lots of man-made structures we need to repair. some will collapse
Diet, medicine, excessive - it will harm society if we are allowed 20 oz drinks or salt at the table.
We could probably list legitimate warnings all day. And I'll probably experience dozens of things today that scientists have warned about. This situation is tragic but it doesn't mean anyone is to blame. With 1000s of warnings from scientists, some will happen - but most don't.
If there's anywhere to focus it's on how to evaluate and prioritize warnings across a wide variety of areas (natural disaster, diet, structures, etc). We don't have the resources to fix everything we are warned about - where do we start?
The other thing we may want to learn is that the media should not over-hype all warnings. People need to know better what warnings to pay attention to. When we watch the news and scientists say "just about everything you do today" may kill you (or the planet), why even try to fix anything?
Detection of extreme weather events hasn't been consistent so it's hard to say for example if there are more or more powerful hurricanes now than in the 1930's. Hurricanes need an eye witness to label them. These days we see something on radar and send a plane. In the 1930's it depended on having a boat in the area or making landfall in a populated area. One result is that there are a lot more recorded cat 1 and 2s now than 100 years ago but not so many more 4s and 5s (very likely they usually made land or were big enough that a boat recorded them before as now).
Around TAR timeframe this was not a generally accepted explanation so skeptics were called wrong when they pointed it out. But now it is more accepted and the latest IPCC report reduced their confidence that AGW will make hurricanes worse.
We can "prove or dis-prove" a lot if you're talking about 20-30 years. When you go back further it's much harder to say things are worse. Methods and devices have changed. We don't always even have access to those devices or the people who used them, especially if you want to go back 100s of years. We know about a few decadal oscillation and 60 year oscillations and there's evidence of multi-century natural oscillations. We don't know enough about the longer oscillations to say where we are in them and how extreme weather events are affected by them vs AGW. The medieval warm period and little ice age could cause problems for AGW supporters if it ends up that there is a multi-century cycle peaking that contributes to these extreme events. But, we really don't know much about those centuries or weather events in them.
I liked what I saw co-workers able to do with it and saw potential once I got it figured out so I kept at it. It took me a few weeks to get used to it but once I did, I loved it.
I was part of dozens (20-40) of projects at a time and it was great for keeping all of my notes about each project organized as I went from meeting to meeting. After I left that job (too many meetings) I didn't have a paid version of office. I've been more than happy with substitutes for everything else but have missed OneNote.
The government should be studying civilization, but if this is where NASA decides to spend money, we need private businessmen funding any space related science. Maybe we can get the USDA to fund the next Mars mission.
That's what I've seen in a very big company (100s of web sites)
Once you've met accessibility laws and blown this year's budget on new cookie laws and have done a lot to ensure privacy and security is a big cost and risk to be mobile friendly.
Add to that creative agencies who are GREAT at non-interactive but just getting good at desktop Web usability and mobile is tough. Agencies aren't always good with you going somewhere else for Web/mobile. And the interactive agencies aren't always good at understanding brand equity which is VERY important to the overall marketing strategy.
There are many other reasons (crappy old CMS). But I'd put legal and creative as the two biggest by far.
The front door on my house works great for me. A bank wouldn't want to use it to protect their vault.
My router does fine for me. I'd like my politicians, and boss, and many other people who's decisions & actions affect me to be better protected than I am, but I can't build a custom router for them.
Credit card companies could google all of the numbers for cards they have issued and take care of it themselves. Why would this be google's responsibility?
Many development project don't need a 'rock star'. They can be done with "typical" architectures, existing frameworks, and just need "assembly-line-type" workers for all of the steps. I'd even say "most" projects are like this and any project can survive without a rock star.
There are also different types of 'rock stars' and they can help on even the most basic project. In general, the 'rock star' can do any/all of these things, but what do they do on a day to day basis varies based on their individual "specialty"
* some can architect the "difficulty 10" projects so it can be implemented in assembly-line fashion by "typical" developers
* some can implement the "difficulty 10" projects that wasn't architected well (when a team of N "normal" developers would end up with a late and buggy implementation)
* some can debug like nothing most people have ever seen (they don't usually create difficult-to-find bugs but are a huge asset to the team when the bugs come up which can happen on even the most trivial project)
* some just implement so well (speed of development + lack of bugs) that they literally will be cheaper than a team of N people (so, to the manager they aren't necessary but would be preferred)
* some can mentor, and find other people's strengths, and reorganize efforts on the fly. they can help everyone else be more productive, and can adapt the process/team as requirements change and can be critical to delivering on time and above requirements especially when things go wrong.
* some can help where ever needed (front-end, db, back-end, sysadmin, security, build, etc) and can step in without losing a beat when another member of the team is out (sick, vacation, left for another job).
* some can find bugs in 3rd party libraries or system components (without the source code). find workarounds and/or patch those libraries to continue development quickly while sending the bug fix and appropriate level of explanation to the library developer to get a permanent fix. If you've ever been on a "difficulty 5" project which found a show-stopper bug in a critical 3rd party library during QA, you'll really appreciate this skill. I have seen one case on a "trivial" project where this skill was necessary and a few other cases where it really helped.
I've worked with a very small number of "rock stars" over 30 years. They all had multiple of the above skills. I've worked with 3x as many people who were considered "rock stars" (by themselves and sometimes others) but weren't. In almost all cases, the "fake rock stars" slowed the project down more than they helped and the team would have been better off with one less member.
I have a low-end phone. It came with a number of google apps that "work" (google play music/books/mags, youtube, google+). When I set "automatically update" it gives me new versions that eat up the battery, run in the background when I don't want, or fail to update because they are too big. I can't disable the new apps unless I uninstall back to the original and I can't uninstall the original but only disable it. So I have to update manually and only get the apps I want to update.
scientists can calculate the forcing effect of greenhouse gases with certainty. The IPCC convinces people of that (which should be easy since it's true). Then they switch from talk of forcing to talk of feedback which is what "is going to kill us". There is no certainty of feedback and they don't make a significant claim of certainty but they fail to point out that they've made the switch, so people believe that feedback is also certain.
If feedback is so deadly, we need to be talking much more about soot, aerosols, urbanization (not urban heat islands), deforestation, greenhouse gasses other than CO2 and other man-made causes of warming (pro-AWG scientists are no longer denying these and they add up to more warming than CO2). We also need to worry about potential heating of the sun or other natural causes even if we don't expect them because, if feedback is what the models say, ANY cause of warming will kill us and there has been warming before without man-made reasons.
Most people I worked with in the 80s (and learned from in the 70s) had a good feel for concepts like "stable systems", "structural integrity", "load bearing weight", and other physical engineering concepts. Many from engineering degrees (most of them weren't CS grads like me), and a lot from playing with legos, erector sets, chemistry sets, building treehouses (and real houses). These concepts are just as important in software systems, but I can only think of a handful of people I've worked with over the last 20 years who had a feel for the stability of a system (physical or software) or an ability to find system weaknesses when a bug is found rather than fix a programming error.
That's very important for development time and quality. To go fast you need to know where it's important to go slow. You have to know what's important to get right at the start (structurally) so you can change requirements as needed and not risk breaking the system or requiring a lot of rewriting (or refactoring). Your framework should be a stable "frame" for the system (like a building or car), not a set of libraries you cobble together for speed of implementation. After deploy, "bugs" are easy to fix but system weaknesses are not.
On the other hand, a lot of things have improved. Tools, methods, and specializations allow a team to be comprised of some people who understand systems (architects, senior developers) and others who specialize in certain areas (html, db, communication protocols, builds, etc). And there are many more people available who are capable in specific areas so far more teams can exist doing many more applications. If we only had the same percentage of people writing software now as in the 70s & 80s and those people had the backgrounds developers had then, we'd be producing better software but orders of magnitude less of it.
Hosed my machine. The usb system restore I made before I started won't work (boots but can't recover). Resinstalling now. 20+ years installing from NT to Windows 8 and this is the first time I remember that I haven't been able to recover from a command prompt (which I can get now) or the restore media (which I have) or a live cd. I have a small SSD for c: with junction points to other drives for some of the bigger directories (users, program files, etc) Maybe it didn't like that.
He seems to want to focus on the 300 "numbers only" they checked and not the big database of "phone records" that exists. But I'm sure the "database of millions of U.S. phone records" he refers to is at least as secure as the existence of the program itself. It's not doubt more secure but that doesn't mean it's safe. And many attackers would love to just get a handful of records (congressmen, judges, candidates, ceos, opposition party leaders).
Plus I've already heard quotes from politicians and other government officials that the database needs to be more widely shared. FBI and DHS need access now. I imagine the IRS could find a few things and "improve" tax collection if it was shared with them. We better not get used to being ok with the NSA having access to "numbers only". The nature of government is to expand and make "better" use of data, not to ignore a valuable resource because of privacy concerns. And also to protect those in power, so any 3rd party leader making progress better have a squeaky clean record. One place the 2 parties can agree is on attacking any opposition to their power.
Instead of spending so much time writing about social needs and advancing their own "journalism" or "pundit" careers, they should put 80-100 hours/week into anti-problem entrepreneurship.
if your survey includes mostly people who do those things you'll get different answers but this survey was almost entirely of people who don't print 3D guns. I wouldn't be surprised if surveys found that 53% of the population said any of these if the survey is mostly of people who don't do them
I don't buy 16+ ounce sodas. Nobody should.
I don't drink. nobody should.
I don't smoke. nobody should.
I don't vote republican. nobody should.
I don't get food stamps. nobody should
I don't own a gun. nobody should.
I don't send my kids to private school. nobody should.
At least for most companies. Most nerds don't have a clue about the document management tools and processes that managers selected (especially 10+ years ago). And also don't understand the government regulations around documents.
It took me almost 8 years of training before I accepted that "copy it to a DVD" isn't a records management process for a large company. Everyone in my company has mandatory yearly "records management" training and as you move up in management, you have training to learn more and more about the reasons. And when you have a bogus (or legit) law suit against you requesting "every mention of X-Corp in all company documents", it makes sense why it's important to destroy records AND record the destruction so the lawyers can respond with "Here's ALL records and here's proof that we don't have anything else".
I know one company that keeps track of cost per document. The average per jpeg image is over $17,000 over it's lifetime. For some images, a lot of that is production or licensing. But most of it is managing the licenses. Even if a developer makes an image for a web site they keep a record of who/when/why/etc so the lawyers can respond when someone claims it was stolen. That all has to be stored, indexed, backed up, accessed, etc. A stack of DVDs in a warehouse somewhere does nothing but cost money. And takes a lot of time to find what you want if/when it's needed. Better to be able to say it doesn't exist for documents that you aren't required by law to keep or have a reasonable expectation that they will be involved in a law suit (in which case you maintain them in the records management system). As much as I dislike SCO, I'd guess they have a lot of records that shouldn't be involved in any lawsuit. If they destroy records that hide a crime, that's a different issue.
yep. Or, I could have easily taken the pic then backed up and changed my choice. But, my neighbor who wants me to come turn on her computer after the power goes out may not realize that there are alternatives to posting her actual ballot (either from lack of know-how or fear of being caught).
Think of the emails we've been seeing that employers have sent to their workers. I think many of those employers would love to see how everyone votes. If showing your ballot becomes the norm, I'd expect "someone" at the business to start throwing a "we voted" party with a slideshow of everyone's ballot. You may want to keep yours secret, but "everyone does it" so make sure to send your pic to the party organizer to prepare the slideshow. And if you don't care about employers seeing votes, maybe you care about unions, churches, schools, bar owners, or neighborhood thug. Best to not allow proof of votes if we care about keeping them secret.
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At least in 2 jobs I've worked the lawyers came before a lawsuit and said it reasonable to expect a subpoena in the future so we need to preserve a copy of EVERY email/file/paper/whatever TODAY (the day the the lawyer found out). Once you suspect something could be legal evidence in the future you are knowingly destroying evidence. You may not be thrown in jail, but the other side can tell the jury to assume the worst in what you destroyed - and the court can just say "it's your fault for destroying the things you say prove your innocence. Too bad for you."
Unless she is dumber than than any republican on the planet thinks, she had reason to believe that Congress would want to see the emails (not the courts but still a legal issue where subpoenas, perjury, etc apply). And if she was "too busy" to understand what was happening her lawyers, who were involved in selecting emails to delete, certainly know. And they decided to allow her to destroy evidence rather than risk having the emails exposed.
Even if there was not a single email that implicated her in anything illegal or anything that Congress was even interested in, it was "destroying evidence". They can't be used to show her innocence - some questions cannot be resolved either way because of the choice she (intentionally) made.
Their admin tools can be slow at times but have always worked. I've managed 5-10 domains at a time for over a decade - some with hosting at godaddy and some at other places. If I need to add service quick it's always been easy (e.g. a client decides they need godaddy's email blaster today or I decide they need a CMS set up for something they just decided to do this weekend).
Support has been 50/50 the few times I or my client has needed to contact them so it helps if you know what you're doing with domains, email, cms, etc.
The problem I've seen in CS grads over the last 10-15 years is they have little to no engineering background (even when their degree is "Computer Engineering"). Most applications are complex systems. And most CS grads don't understand systems. I've been able to teach EEs, a chem E, a civil E, an MD and a CPA (among others) how to program. And they've had no trouble implementing solid class hierarchies and robust applications. It's much harder to teach a CS grad about structural integrity, analyzing a design for weaknesses, and root cause analysis. In some cases they won't accept those are even an issue since "software is so different from physical structures". So they keep building things that pass all the tests but repeatedly fall down once they get to production.
I know quite a few "normal" people who have developed software. I've worked with a doctor (MD) and CPA who learned programming on their own and decided to switch careers. No to mention a lot of people with non-technical backgrounds who got into designing web sites, then javascript, then backend work.
If anything it's getting too easy to get a "software development" job. Lot's of "programmers" work their way up to all levels of "software development" without expanding their understanding of software systems. Lots of others do learn along the way and belong where they rise to. But there is a lot of learning that needs to be done and many colleges don't even give a broad base to start with so even that's not always a good start. My guess is that healthcare.gov had too many people who knew how to program (i.e. "programmers") and not enough who understood systems/engineering ("software engineers" though that term is misused often since people don't understand the "engineering" aspect which takes a lot of learning )
If you want to see "exclusion" from a job try to help a sheetrocker, electrician, or plumber be allowed to be the lead architect for the next 70-story skyscraper. Or see if they can work their way up to that responsibility over the next 20 years without "requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication".
Is the IG obligated to tell the people anything? Or is this an attempt for them to find out (and cover up) any wrongdoings before we find out?
"Mr S found out about a part of project X. We need to tighten security on that project before the wrong workers find out about the rest of project X. Also start monitoring all of Mr S's personal communications and arrest him if anything looks suspicious and save anything that we can use to attack him publicly and destroy his credibility if he tells a reporter that we are doing something illegal and didn't stop when it was pointed out."
Lego skills are very useful for engineering. I've been in software development 30+ years and still apply skills I learned from lego, lincoln logs, and erector sets in the 60s and 70s. You can use these sets to build almost identical looking structures in many ways . Some will fall over when you barely touch them. Some can be rolled and even tossed a short distance without falling apart. Software is the same. You can put classes together to make a robust & stable system, or use similar classes to make a similar looking fragile system.
An understanding of structural stability is the biggest lack I've seen in developers the last 10 years. Non-software engineers are generally better than software engineers right out of school because the physical engineers got some understanding of structures in school. You can't test stability in. You need to be aware of it in all phases - design, throughout implementation, and finding root causes when there are problems rather than just fixing the bug (which needs to be fixed but may or may not be the root cause).
Think of all of the warnings we hear from scientists/experts.
Mudslides, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes - there are lots of places we just shouldn't live because some day there will be a disaster.
Bridges, buildings, subways - there are lots of man-made structures we need to repair. some will collapse
Diet, medicine, excessive - it will harm society if we are allowed 20 oz drinks or salt at the table.
We could probably list legitimate warnings all day. And I'll probably experience dozens of things today that scientists have warned about. This situation is tragic but it doesn't mean anyone is to blame. With 1000s of warnings from scientists, some will happen - but most don't.
If there's anywhere to focus it's on how to evaluate and prioritize warnings across a wide variety of areas (natural disaster, diet, structures, etc). We don't have the resources to fix everything we are warned about - where do we start?
The other thing we may want to learn is that the media should not over-hype all warnings. People need to know better what warnings to pay attention to. When we watch the news and scientists say "just about everything you do today" may kill you (or the planet), why even try to fix anything?
Detection of extreme weather events hasn't been consistent so it's hard to say for example if there are more or more powerful hurricanes now than in the 1930's. Hurricanes need an eye witness to label them. These days we see something on radar and send a plane. In the 1930's it depended on having a boat in the area or making landfall in a populated area. One result is that there are a lot more recorded cat 1 and 2s now than 100 years ago but not so many more 4s and 5s (very likely they usually made land or were big enough that a boat recorded them before as now).
Around TAR timeframe this was not a generally accepted explanation so skeptics were called wrong when they pointed it out. But now it is more accepted and the latest IPCC report reduced their confidence that AGW will make hurricanes worse.
We can "prove or dis-prove" a lot if you're talking about 20-30 years. When you go back further it's much harder to say things are worse. Methods and devices have changed. We don't always even have access to those devices or the people who used them, especially if you want to go back 100s of years. We know about a few decadal oscillation and 60 year oscillations and there's evidence of multi-century natural oscillations. We don't know enough about the longer oscillations to say where we are in them and how extreme weather events are affected by them vs AGW. The medieval warm period and little ice age could cause problems for AGW supporters if it ends up that there is a multi-century cycle peaking that contributes to these extreme events. But, we really don't know much about those centuries or weather events in them.
I liked what I saw co-workers able to do with it and saw potential once I got it figured out so I kept at it. It took me a few weeks to get used to it but once I did, I loved it.
I was part of dozens (20-40) of projects at a time and it was great for keeping all of my notes about each project organized as I went from meeting to meeting. After I left that job (too many meetings) I didn't have a paid version of office. I've been more than happy with substitutes for everything else but have missed OneNote.
The government should be studying civilization, but if this is where NASA decides to spend money, we need private businessmen funding any space related science. Maybe we can get the USDA to fund the next Mars mission.
another way of saying "jack up parking fees".
That's what I've seen in a very big company (100s of web sites)
Once you've met accessibility laws and blown this year's budget on new cookie laws and have done a lot to ensure privacy and security is a big cost and risk to be mobile friendly.
Add to that creative agencies who are GREAT at non-interactive but just getting good at desktop Web usability and mobile is tough. Agencies aren't always good with you going somewhere else for Web/mobile. And the interactive agencies aren't always good at understanding brand equity which is VERY important to the overall marketing strategy.
There are many other reasons (crappy old CMS). But I'd put legal and creative as the two biggest by far.
The front door on my house works great for me. A bank wouldn't want to use it to protect their vault.
My router does fine for me. I'd like my politicians, and boss, and many other people who's decisions & actions affect me to be better protected than I am, but I can't build a custom router for them.
Credit card companies could google all of the numbers for cards they have issued and take care of it themselves. Why would this be google's responsibility?
Many development project don't need a 'rock star'. They can be done with "typical" architectures, existing frameworks, and just need "assembly-line-type" workers for all of the steps. I'd even say "most" projects are like this and any project can survive without a rock star.
There are also different types of 'rock stars' and they can help on even the most basic project. In general, the 'rock star' can do any/all of these things, but what do they do on a day to day basis varies based on their individual "specialty"
* some can architect the "difficulty 10" projects so it can be implemented in assembly-line fashion by "typical" developers
* some can implement the "difficulty 10" projects that wasn't architected well (when a team of N "normal" developers would end up with a late and buggy implementation)
* some can debug like nothing most people have ever seen (they don't usually create difficult-to-find bugs but are a huge asset to the team when the bugs come up which can happen on even the most trivial project)
* some just implement so well (speed of development + lack of bugs) that they literally will be cheaper than a team of N people (so, to the manager they aren't necessary but would be preferred)
* some can mentor, and find other people's strengths, and reorganize efforts on the fly. they can help everyone else be more productive, and can adapt the process/team as requirements change and can be critical to delivering on time and above requirements especially when things go wrong.
* some can help where ever needed (front-end, db, back-end, sysadmin, security, build, etc) and can step in without losing a beat when another member of the team is out (sick, vacation, left for another job).
* some can find bugs in 3rd party libraries or system components (without the source code). find workarounds and/or patch those libraries to continue development quickly while sending the bug fix and appropriate level of explanation to the library developer to get a permanent fix. If you've ever been on a "difficulty 5" project which found a show-stopper bug in a critical 3rd party library during QA, you'll really appreciate this skill. I have seen one case on a "trivial" project where this skill was necessary and a few other cases where it really helped.
I've worked with a very small number of "rock stars" over 30 years. They all had multiple of the above skills. I've worked with 3x as many people who were considered "rock stars" (by themselves and sometimes others) but weren't. In almost all cases, the "fake rock stars" slowed the project down more than they helped and the team would have been better off with one less member.
I have a low-end phone. It came with a number of google apps that "work" (google play music/books/mags, youtube, google+). When I set "automatically update" it gives me new versions that eat up the battery, run in the background when I don't want, or fail to update because they are too big. I can't disable the new apps unless I uninstall back to the original and I can't uninstall the original but only disable it. So I have to update manually and only get the apps I want to update.
scientists can calculate the forcing effect of greenhouse gases with certainty. The IPCC convinces people of that (which should be easy since it's true). Then they switch from talk of forcing to talk of feedback which is what "is going to kill us". There is no certainty of feedback and they don't make a significant claim of certainty but they fail to point out that they've made the switch, so people believe that feedback is also certain.
If feedback is so deadly, we need to be talking much more about soot, aerosols, urbanization (not urban heat islands), deforestation, greenhouse gasses other than CO2 and other man-made causes of warming (pro-AWG scientists are no longer denying these and they add up to more warming than CO2). We also need to worry about potential heating of the sun or other natural causes even if we don't expect them because, if feedback is what the models say, ANY cause of warming will kill us and there has been warming before without man-made reasons.
Most people I worked with in the 80s (and learned from in the 70s) had a good feel for concepts like "stable systems", "structural integrity", "load bearing weight", and other physical engineering concepts. Many from engineering degrees (most of them weren't CS grads like me), and a lot from playing with legos, erector sets, chemistry sets, building treehouses (and real houses). These concepts are just as important in software systems, but I can only think of a handful of people I've worked with over the last 20 years who had a feel for the stability of a system (physical or software) or an ability to find system weaknesses when a bug is found rather than fix a programming error.
That's very important for development time and quality. To go fast you need to know where it's important to go slow. You have to know what's important to get right at the start (structurally) so you can change requirements as needed and not risk breaking the system or requiring a lot of rewriting (or refactoring). Your framework should be a stable "frame" for the system (like a building or car), not a set of libraries you cobble together for speed of implementation. After deploy, "bugs" are easy to fix but system weaknesses are not.
On the other hand, a lot of things have improved. Tools, methods, and specializations allow a team to be comprised of some people who understand systems (architects, senior developers) and others who specialize in certain areas (html, db, communication protocols, builds, etc). And there are many more people available who are capable in specific areas so far more teams can exist doing many more applications. If we only had the same percentage of people writing software now as in the 70s & 80s and those people had the backgrounds developers had then, we'd be producing better software but orders of magnitude less of it.
Hosed my machine. The usb system restore I made before I started won't work (boots but can't recover). Resinstalling now. 20+ years installing from NT to Windows 8 and this is the first time I remember that I haven't been able to recover from a command prompt (which I can get now) or the restore media (which I have) or a live cd. I have a small SSD for c: with junction points to other drives for some of the bigger directories (users, program files, etc) Maybe it didn't like that.
He seems to want to focus on the 300 "numbers only" they checked and not the big database of "phone records" that exists. But I'm sure the "database of millions of U.S. phone records" he refers to is at least as secure as the existence of the program itself. It's not doubt more secure but that doesn't mean it's safe. And many attackers would love to just get a handful of records (congressmen, judges, candidates, ceos, opposition party leaders).
Plus I've already heard quotes from politicians and other government officials that the database needs to be more widely shared. FBI and DHS need access now. I imagine the IRS could find a few things and "improve" tax collection if it was shared with them. We better not get used to being ok with the NSA having access to "numbers only". The nature of government is to expand and make "better" use of data, not to ignore a valuable resource because of privacy concerns. And also to protect those in power, so any 3rd party leader making progress better have a squeaky clean record. One place the 2 parties can agree is on attacking any opposition to their power.
Instead of spending so much time writing about social needs and advancing their own "journalism" or "pundit" careers, they should put 80-100 hours/week into anti-problem entrepreneurship.
if your survey includes mostly people who do those things you'll get different answers but this survey was almost entirely of people who don't print 3D guns.
I wouldn't be surprised if surveys found that 53% of the population said any of these if the survey is mostly of people who don't do them
I don't buy 16+ ounce sodas. Nobody should.
I don't drink. nobody should.
I don't smoke. nobody should.
I don't vote republican. nobody should.
I don't get food stamps. nobody should
I don't own a gun. nobody should.
I don't send my kids to private school. nobody should.
At least for most companies. Most nerds don't have a clue about the document management tools and processes that managers selected (especially 10+ years ago). And also don't understand the government regulations around documents.
It took me almost 8 years of training before I accepted that "copy it to a DVD" isn't a records management process for a large company. Everyone in my company has mandatory yearly "records management" training and as you move up in management, you have training to learn more and more about the reasons. And when you have a bogus (or legit) law suit against you requesting "every mention of X-Corp in all company documents", it makes sense why it's important to destroy records AND record the destruction so the lawyers can respond with "Here's ALL records and here's proof that we don't have anything else".
I know one company that keeps track of cost per document. The average per jpeg image is over $17,000 over it's lifetime. For some images, a lot of that is production or licensing. But most of it is managing the licenses. Even if a developer makes an image for a web site they keep a record of who/when/why/etc so the lawyers can respond when someone claims it was stolen. That all has to be stored, indexed, backed up, accessed, etc. A stack of DVDs in a warehouse somewhere does nothing but cost money. And takes a lot of time to find what you want if/when it's needed. Better to be able to say it doesn't exist for documents that you aren't required by law to keep or have a reasonable expectation that they will be involved in a law suit (in which case you maintain them in the records management system). As much as I dislike SCO, I'd guess they have a lot of records that shouldn't be involved in any lawsuit. If they destroy records that hide a crime, that's a different issue.
yep. Or, I could have easily taken the pic then backed up and changed my choice. But, my neighbor who wants me to come turn on her computer after the power goes out may not realize that there are alternatives to posting her actual ballot (either from lack of know-how or fear of being caught).
Think of the emails we've been seeing that employers have sent to their workers. I think many of those employers would love to see how everyone votes. If showing your ballot becomes the norm, I'd expect "someone" at the business to start throwing a "we voted" party with a slideshow of everyone's ballot. You may want to keep yours secret, but "everyone does it" so make sure to send your pic to the party organizer to prepare the slideshow. And if you don't care about employers seeing votes, maybe you care about unions, churches, schools, bar owners, or neighborhood thug. Best to not allow proof of votes if we care about keeping them secret.