You do seem to be confusing "sympathy", a feeling sorrow at another's discomfort, with "empathy" a sharing of similar feelings of any kind. It would seem to be very easy to feel "empathetic" about someone who's been careless or risked their customer's services on good luck with datacenters, without feeling any sympathy towards for their carelessness.
Also be aware that many small ISP's operate on a shoestring: Their features may be something important, such as refusing to store or sell client data to spammers and properly encrypting their client data to prevent abusive Patriot Act searches. I know a small ISP co-location site that does precisely this, and they had some very disruptive downtime when faced with a subpoena that they could not serve: the lawyers, and the judge, took quite a long time to understand that they were deliberately careful *not* to store the kinds of data the subpoena was for, and to accept that the ISP could not and would not just change overnight.
I'd not be so sure. When I was on college, I certainly saw students cheating or having enormous opportunity to cheat because of poor care of exam notes and problem set answers by the teaching assistants. On several occasions, I saw the notes lying around and deliberately did my work an entirely different way, or with additional work deliberately added to demonstrate my actual knowledge of the subject rather than simply copying those answers, and notified the professor that the answers had been left lying out where students could see them.
This does not mean I was a "nice guy finishing last". It was seeing someone cheating and beating them _anyway_, in ways that meant if the cheaters won, I could take it to the deans and make a huge affair out of it.
I'll beg to disagree with the idea that history is irrelevant to CS. Protocols, and practices, did not eveolve in a vacuum. Knowledge of how early principles were derived, and why we've migrated to newer approaches, is critical to understanding ongoing changes in a field. Moore's law, for example, led us from extremely limited command line interfaces to today's sophisticated GUI's. But understanding the original command line interfaces is vital to seeing _why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases.
Learn C to learn how things really work for the last few decades in the kernel and library spaces, learn the original specs of HTML to understand what Hypertext was really for, and learn C-Kermit to learn what configuraiton and control over a limited interface really means.
As you said: lynx does what it supports quite well. It's also very portable, and very broadly available. The unnecessary use of HTML tables, while common, often confuses and interferes with text-speech synthesizers and simple parsing of web content for people with visual problems or very little screen space.
There is no way to enforce this, except to scan people's home directories for unsecured keys. It's also awkward if they are using "ssh-agent" or other passprase unlocking tools on a shared host, such as a server where I have administrative access or when someone has set up software to use passphrase-free keys as part of a regularly scheduled task, such as a backup system for databases. I've used these approaches to borrow other user's SSH keys when needed, not always with their advance knowledge. (I always let them know I borrowed their keys, and tried to help guide them to practices that would protect their keys.)
"lynx" is also 64-bit, and works very well for visually impaired people who need robust text-speech. If your website does not work with lynx, it's probably too gizmo filled for ordinary use, anyway.
The reverse is often also true. As a senior engineer, I'm aware of older tools and subtleties that a developer may not know. Sanitizing inputs, the differences between the tools in the installed operating system, and those within the installer environment itself are excellent examples. For Fedora and Red Hat, most people installing Linux are unaware that you can hit "Ctrl-Alt-F2" to get an active shell in the installation environment, a shell with which one can probe and even reconfigure disks and network devices manually, then hit "Ctrl-Alt-F1" to get back to the installation console or use commands like "Ctrl-Alt-F6" to get back to the X based login, They're also unaware that you can stop just before rebooting and use the same "Ctrl-Alt-Fn" commands to do some manual fine tuning of your configuration before that reboot. But this sort of workaround is counter to the new Fedora installer model, even though it's vital for dealing with attached storage or critical kernel patches.
I applaud many of Fedora's open source and development efforts: partners and colleagues I work with certainly benefit from bleeding edge access to such tools to test, modify, and patch in production and personal use. But my test last weekend of this installer is tha it is burdensome. They've lost track of the idea that the installer is not there to show off technological expertise of the developers. It's there to accomplish distinct, linear tasks that need to be extremely robust and not dependent on complex additional toolkits.
JSTOR is not-for-profit. And a very effective one: they really do provide a useful service, and their fees are quite moderate for the kind of indexing and archiving they provide.
I'm afraid that it's necessary for logic, and science, to judge the _provenance_ of claims. This can be quite subtle, and dangerous when used to entirely reject claims without any review of actual data. When a a skilled colleague claims that the internal DNS is failing, they've generally earned credence by doing competent work. When the manager who resents your IT budget makes such a claim, and that manger's other claims have been ill-founded, you have to handle it differently or waste endless hours trying to deduce how the DNS was broken, but still works for everyone else. When the real problem was that the manager had connected a VPN to some other site that did not see internal DNS. (In which case, DNS is not broken, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.) And yet, on another occasion last year, the manager made a similar claim that was completely correct: an old DHCP server had been reconnected to the network, and given his freshly booted laptop bad DNS settings.
Exactly this occurred last month for me: you have to factor in the provenance of the data being presented, and the character of the claimant or anyone relaying the claim or relaying the data is critical. It's also why you apply different tests to verify the most basic claims from someone who's repeatedly proven unreliable. In good science or engineering, it's also an excellent opportunity to _teach_ the claimant how to do good testing and to safely analyze their data, rather than generating complex fantasies from a few unreliable data points.
I'm forced to agree with an underlying point: poor tools discourage students from striving further. Modern carpenters don't have to cut their own boards from trees in order to get planks, nor do they have to mine their own ore and make their own nails to learn carpentry. But in modern technology, too often we have to do just that sort of assembly of a complex toolchain to get our tols working. The result is a lengthy and often burdensome apprenticeship learning mechanical skills. Masterpieces are much easier to create when you don't hve to engage in so much drudgery and spend your most inspired, intellectually active youth learning rote mechanical skills that can be replaced by good tools.
In fact, this is why Perl has done so well. Its tools are not perfect, but it is legible and tolerant and powerful enough to let you get some work done quickly and move on to the next project. And often, someone else has already built a similar version of the tool over at CPAN that you can find and work from.
This is one of the places where the story rings false. Given any 30 people involved in full-time spying on dozens of other people, it is _inevitable_ that at least one of them would notify the police of this operation. Not only because the activity is illegal, but because very few people can keep quiet about what their wage paying job is for an extended period, and they would inevitably inform lovers, family, or friends. That then multiplies the number of people who might inform on the operation in a plea bargain.
For anyone who's been involved in handling security of any kind, such as a shared administrative password or simply keeping a corporate merger private before the public announcement, it's simply not feasible: it _will_ leak out with many participants.
"Dues" are not the problem. It's strikes: union employees' dues help support them during strikes, but non-union employees don't collect any money if they strike, and in effect are automatic "scabs" if a strike happens. It helps reduce the impact of strikes, which seriously reduces the power of unions.
There are some benefits to workers. Some unions have, historically, been essentially organized crime centers rife with corruption, and held effective monopolies against businesses that chose not to cooperate with them, or simply didn't have the funds to cover union dues. The teamster's unions are _infamous_ for their corruption, and the Screen Actor's Guild have any number of very strange policies that interfere with small film makers.
I'd like to respectfully disagree about insulting HP for this. When you're trimming a department, you sometimes have contractual obligations that require you to retain _some_ of the department or group, to support existing services. When they all leave en masse, it can put a very large hole in your infrastructure: when someone leaving poaches from their former group, it's usually a contract violation, written into the contract _precisely_ to protect assets a company has invested in and built up over time.
I've been involved, numerous times, in cleaning up after that kind of loss of personnel. The loss of institutional knowledge can be devastating: there may be no one left who knows _why_ things were done certain ways, and it can really endanger ongoing services and other contracts to lose that much of a key department without some kind of plan. And while I can't speak for HP, there are few things as devastating to the surviving remnant, who may believe in what they do or may really need the job to feed their families and keep medical insurance, when the "elite few" depart and leave them holding the undocumented remnants of their work.
And if I ever do a departure interview with one such departing member of a horde who says "there is no documentation, just read the code!" I'm going to warn the staff who organize bids for my company that our hourly rates need to double, and explain why.
No, it's written. And merely _insulting_ someone is neither. The statements would have to be clearly false, and damaging to the author's reputation.
Do note that getting the courts involved can help get the domains yanked or websites de-activated by most reputable registrars. The ex-husband might try to transfer the domains, but that can cost money as well.
He did apologize for it, quite quickly, and agreed that reverting the change was appropriate. He also asked a good question: why can't pulseaudio deal with other error codes, error codes that might be technically correct, though not in current use?
The developer wasn't being nasty, underhanded, manipulative, etc. It's possible to break user land by fixing broken behavior that userland depends on, and it's been an ongoing issue for all kernels. (Take a look at the history of the egcs variant compiler and Linux kernel compilation.)
> Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?
Not in my direct experience. MS Word format has _never_ been fully standardized or had a robust API, standards for which features are compatible with which revisions of MS Word. The result has been absolute chaos with old documents, and is part of the reason that governments have tried to switch to an "open" and documented format such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice use. Microsoft finally published an API, referred to as "OOXML", to get by government requirements for documented formats.
But the history of the lobbying to get OOXML passed as an ISO standard was a horrific abuse of a standards process. It should _never_ have passed in that broken state,and Microsoft _does not follow the standard_ they worked so hard to legislate. The result is disastrous and unpredictable loss of document content. And _LibreOffice can often recover content that MS Word cannot_ in such corrupted documents.
I'll add my support for Notepad++. It's a very powerful and much, much lighter weight tool than Word or LibreOffice, suitable for configuration files, source code, HTML, and most scripting languages. It integrates very will with the file browser, and handles multiple documents and multiple applications opening the same document better than either Word or LibreOffice.
Sadly, training students to gain expertise with such a specific toolkit as MS Word in preference to tools like Notepad++ is a serious error and waste of their limited school time. They _will_ spend much of their document creation time on the colors, the formats, the fonts, the indentation, and the inevitable document losses and downtime during forced upgrades of a too-powerful toolkit that encourages appearance over content.
Google documents are intriguing in their features. I'll be curious to see if they're mature enough, in the next few years, to actually use in the workplace. (My colleagues and business partners have been, unfortunately, tied to MS Word formats for business documents.)
There's the prosecution of Phil Zimmerman for publishing PGP, the failed attempt to publish the "SkipJack" algorighm with all keys held for law enforcment use, the new "Trusted Computing" toolkit with all keys held by Microsoft with no legal assurance of their privacy against warrant-free access under the "Patriot Act", there's the Patriot Act isself, and then there is US federal law at http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=9ae4a21068f2bd41d4a5aee843b63ef1&c=ecfr&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title15/15cfrv2_02.tpl#730.
It's frightening reading. Widespread domestic security for electronic documents is being sacrificed to permit government access to communications, both foreign and domestic, with and without court order or knowledge of anyone being monitored. The fiber optic taps in AT&T's core data center planted by the NSA were quite real, quite illegal, and the personnel involved have been given immunity.
Human Resources is not usually a leadership group: they're following practices set forth by the company's management. If they're scheduling events 3 months in advance without an actual date, and setting the date in the last week at their own convenience and not the convenience of the job candidate, that means the problem is a policy one above the pay grade of the individual HR person. A job interview is always a two way process: let this be a strong hint that you'd be merely a cog in a very big machine.
The different nature of the exam than what this candidate expected should not have been a surprise. Concluding the nature of an interview from how far ahead it was scheduled is the sort of extrapolation without data that will waste everyone's time, socially and in programming. Someone who'd been through a few technical interviews would know that such interviews very widely, would do their "due diligence", and find out the nature of the exam in advance. That's why "LinkedIn" is very useful for, both ways: to examine a company through employees whose candid opinions might be helpful, and to get other references about an employee. These references are vital, and can give information that HR or a company brochure would _never_ provide, or might never think to ask for.
One of the best candidates I interviewed had been mishandled by our own HR: poor scheduling and insensitivity to the candidate's needs for confidentiality had almost cost them their current job. (We had VP approval at their current company to interview the candidate, because the department was being closed: but the candidate's supervisor hadn't been told yet. It was a strange situation.) When that candidate arrived, they were very upset. They and I spent almost the whole interview going over how to arrange layers of access to information in _our_ systems, to allow HR to do their jobs but to protect them and us from similar confusion and from possible lawsuits about gender, age, or medical conditions. They came away with the realization that we'd screwed up, but wouldn't repeat the problem, and that we actually _did_ try to treat our employees based on skill, and to treat employees as people. And we saw that they took bad situations as problems to resolve, rather than as personal insults.
We didn't hire them. (They got an internal company transfer, much to their benefit.) But they've worked with us on some projects since then to both our benefit.
There can be many reasons for this, such as empire building (where a manager's pay scale and promotions depend on the number of people they manage). Getting outside review can also sometimes stabilize a project: I, and my colleagues, have sometimes _been_ the consultants brought in to help integrate a new project. There are few projects as doomed to failure as exciting technical innovations that were actually done better years ago, are already available in their existing tools, and they just didn't know how to use them so they've re-invented the wheel.
Can you find out why your manager thinks it needs additional layers of human complexity? Does that manager think your time is too committed and you won't have enough left for all the work? Doing good work on QA and documentation, and making sure you manager knows it's there, might help reduce their need to add layers of consultants and extraneous testing or planning cycles.
You _do_ realize that NAMBLA, the organization, was never convicted of anything? They were effectively sued to death, with numerous prosecutions that were dismissed in court, but drained their limited coffers. And with journalists and the FBI constantly infiltrating their ranks, I assume they knew that anything criminal they did would be reported almost instantly. Their original involvement with gay political groups was effectively ended when they were expelled from those groups.
B4U-ACT is fascinating. They do seem to be encouraging mental treatment of pedophilia as a disorder, recognizing pedophilia as a disorder, and they do not claim that engaging in it physically is proper. Given that prisoners have sometimes died in jail becuase other inmates were told, truthfully or not, that those prisoners were child molesters, I can understand their desire for better education and treatment.
So no, they're not the "same freaks, same message, new management". It's a related issue but very different approach to it.
It means that "social networking" is often expected to be used, not for frank communications, but for company managed advertising. I've actually attended staff meetings where staff were urged to talk up their own company's products and to help drive criticisms of their products to the next page of product reviews. I was not surprised, but saddened: the flaws were very real and could have been used as a great opportunity for the company to address the problems and turn that negative review into a great example of customer support, at a much lower cost in manpower.
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You do seem to be confusing "sympathy", a feeling sorrow at another's discomfort, with "empathy" a sharing of similar feelings of any kind. It would seem to be very easy to feel "empathetic" about someone who's been careless or risked their customer's services on good luck with datacenters, without feeling any sympathy towards for their carelessness.
Also be aware that many small ISP's operate on a shoestring: Their features may be something important, such as refusing to store or sell client data to spammers and properly encrypting their client data to prevent abusive Patriot Act searches. I know a small ISP co-location site that does precisely this, and they had some very disruptive downtime when faced with a subpoena that they could not serve: the lawyers, and the judge, took quite a long time to understand that they were deliberately careful *not* to store the kinds of data the subpoena was for, and to accept that the ISP could not and would not just change overnight.
I'd not be so sure. When I was on college, I certainly saw students cheating or having enormous opportunity to cheat because of poor care of exam notes and problem set answers by the teaching assistants. On several occasions, I saw the notes lying around and deliberately did my work an entirely different way, or with additional work deliberately added to demonstrate my actual knowledge of the subject rather than simply copying those answers, and notified the professor that the answers had been left lying out where students could see them.
This does not mean I was a "nice guy finishing last". It was seeing someone cheating and beating them _anyway_, in ways that meant if the cheaters won, I could take it to the deans and make a huge affair out of it.
It's just you, and it wasn't the "socialism" in the USSR. It was the totalitarianism that made them really frightening to live with.
It's a matter of degree: the USA is certainly committing abuses, both legally and illegally, against its own citizens.
I'll beg to disagree with the idea that history is irrelevant to CS. Protocols, and practices, did not eveolve in a vacuum. Knowledge of how early principles were derived, and why we've migrated to newer approaches, is critical to understanding ongoing changes in a field. Moore's law, for example, led us from extremely limited command line interfaces to today's sophisticated GUI's. But understanding the original command line interfaces is vital to seeing _why_ modern tools aren't all in XML with back end databases.
Learn C to learn how things really work for the last few decades in the kernel and library spaces, learn the original specs of HTML to understand what Hypertext was really for, and learn C-Kermit to learn what configuraiton and control over a limited interface really means.
As you said: lynx does what it supports quite well. It's also very portable, and very broadly available. The unnecessary use of HTML tables, while common, often confuses and interferes with text-speech synthesizers and simple parsing of web content for people with visual problems or very little screen space.
There is no way to enforce this, except to scan people's home directories for unsecured keys. It's also awkward if they are using "ssh-agent" or other passprase unlocking tools on a shared host, such as a server where I have administrative access or when someone has set up software to use passphrase-free keys as part of a regularly scheduled task, such as a backup system for databases. I've used these approaches to borrow other user's SSH keys when needed, not always with their advance knowledge. (I always let them know I borrowed their keys, and tried to help guide them to practices that would protect their keys.)
"lynx" is also 64-bit, and works very well for visually impaired people who need robust text-speech. If your website does not work with lynx, it's probably too gizmo filled for ordinary use, anyway.
The reverse is often also true. As a senior engineer, I'm aware of older tools and subtleties that a developer may not know. Sanitizing inputs, the differences between the tools in the installed operating system, and those within the installer environment itself are excellent examples. For Fedora and Red Hat, most people installing Linux are unaware that you can hit "Ctrl-Alt-F2" to get an active shell in the installation environment, a shell with which one can probe and even reconfigure disks and network devices manually, then hit "Ctrl-Alt-F1" to get back to the installation console or use commands like "Ctrl-Alt-F6" to get back to the X based login, They're also unaware that you can stop just before rebooting and use the same "Ctrl-Alt-Fn" commands to do some manual fine tuning of your configuration before that reboot. But this sort of workaround is counter to the new Fedora installer model, even though it's vital for dealing with attached storage or critical kernel patches.
I applaud many of Fedora's open source and development efforts: partners and colleagues I work with certainly benefit from bleeding edge access to such tools to test, modify, and patch in production and personal use. But my test last weekend of this installer is tha it is burdensome. They've lost track of the idea that the installer is not there to show off technological expertise of the developers. It's there to accomplish distinct, linear tasks that need to be extremely robust and not dependent on complex additional toolkits.
JSTOR is not-for-profit. And a very effective one: they really do provide a useful service, and their fees are quite moderate for the kind of indexing and archiving they provide.
I'm afraid that it's necessary for logic, and science, to judge the _provenance_ of claims. This can be quite subtle, and dangerous when used to entirely reject claims without any review of actual data. When a a skilled colleague claims that the internal DNS is failing, they've generally earned credence by doing competent work. When the manager who resents your IT budget makes such a claim, and that manger's other claims have been ill-founded, you have to handle it differently or waste endless hours trying to deduce how the DNS was broken, but still works for everyone else. When the real problem was that the manager had connected a VPN to some other site that did not see internal DNS. (In which case, DNS is not broken, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.) And yet, on another occasion last year, the manager made a similar claim that was completely correct: an old DHCP server had been reconnected to the network, and given his freshly booted laptop bad DNS settings.
Exactly this occurred last month for me: you have to factor in the provenance of the data being presented, and the character of the claimant or anyone relaying the claim or relaying the data is critical. It's also why you apply different tests to verify the most basic claims from someone who's repeatedly proven unreliable. In good science or engineering, it's also an excellent opportunity to _teach_ the claimant how to do good testing and to safely analyze their data, rather than generating complex fantasies from a few unreliable data points.
I'm forced to agree with an underlying point: poor tools discourage students from striving further. Modern carpenters don't have to cut their own boards from trees in order to get planks, nor do they have to mine their own ore and make their own nails to learn carpentry. But in modern technology, too often we have to do just that sort of assembly of a complex toolchain to get our tols working. The result is a lengthy and often burdensome apprenticeship learning mechanical skills. Masterpieces are much easier to create when you don't hve to engage in so much drudgery and spend your most inspired, intellectually active youth learning rote mechanical skills that can be replaced by good tools.
In fact, this is why Perl has done so well. Its tools are not perfect, but it is legible and tolerant and powerful enough to let you get some work done quickly and move on to the next project. And often, someone else has already built a similar version of the tool over at CPAN that you can find and work from.
This is one of the places where the story rings false. Given any 30 people involved in full-time spying on dozens of other people, it is _inevitable_ that at least one of them would notify the police of this operation. Not only because the activity is illegal, but because very few people can keep quiet about what their wage paying job is for an extended period, and they would inevitably inform lovers, family, or friends. That then multiplies the number of people who might inform on the operation in a plea bargain.
For anyone who's been involved in handling security of any kind, such as a shared administrative password or simply keeping a corporate merger private before the public announcement, it's simply not feasible: it _will_ leak out with many participants.
"Dues" are not the problem. It's strikes: union employees' dues help support them during strikes, but non-union employees don't collect any money if they strike, and in effect are automatic "scabs" if a strike happens. It helps reduce the impact of strikes, which seriously reduces the power of unions.
There are some benefits to workers. Some unions have, historically, been essentially organized crime centers rife with corruption, and held effective monopolies against businesses that chose not to cooperate with them, or simply didn't have the funds to cover union dues. The teamster's unions are _infamous_ for their corruption, and the Screen Actor's Guild have any number of very strange policies that interfere with small film makers.
I'd like to respectfully disagree about insulting HP for this. When you're trimming a department, you sometimes have contractual obligations that require you to retain _some_ of the department or group, to support existing services. When they all leave en masse, it can put a very large hole in your infrastructure: when someone leaving poaches from their former group, it's usually a contract violation, written into the contract _precisely_ to protect assets a company has invested in and built up over time.
I've been involved, numerous times, in cleaning up after that kind of loss of personnel. The loss of institutional knowledge can be devastating: there may be no one left who knows _why_ things were done certain ways, and it can really endanger ongoing services and other contracts to lose that much of a key department without some kind of plan. And while I can't speak for HP, there are few things as devastating to the surviving remnant, who may believe in what they do or may really need the job to feed their families and keep medical insurance, when the "elite few" depart and leave them holding the undocumented remnants of their work.
And if I ever do a departure interview with one such departing member of a horde who says "there is no documentation, just read the code!" I'm going to warn the staff who organize bids for my company that our hourly rates need to double, and explain why.
No, it's written. And merely _insulting_ someone is neither. The statements would have to be clearly false, and damaging to the author's reputation.
Do note that getting the courts involved can help get the domains yanked or websites de-activated by most reputable registrars. The ex-husband might try to transfer the domains, but that can cost money as well.
He did apologize for it, quite quickly, and agreed that reverting the change was appropriate. He also asked a good question: why can't pulseaudio deal with other error codes, error codes that might be technically correct, though not in current use?
The developer wasn't being nasty, underhanded, manipulative, etc. It's possible to break user land by fixing broken behavior that userland depends on, and it's been an ongoing issue for all kernels. (Take a look at the history of the egcs variant compiler and Linux kernel compilation.)
> Aren't those documents created or edited by LibreOffice by any chance?
Not in my direct experience. MS Word format has _never_ been fully standardized or had a robust API, standards for which features are compatible with which revisions of MS Word. The result has been absolute chaos with old documents, and is part of the reason that governments have tried to switch to an "open" and documented format such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice use. Microsoft finally published an API, referred to as "OOXML", to get by government requirements for documented formats.
But the history of the lobbying to get OOXML passed as an ISO standard was a horrific abuse of a standards process. It should _never_ have passed in that broken state,and Microsoft _does not follow the standard_ they worked so hard to legislate. The result is disastrous and unpredictable loss of document content. And _LibreOffice can often recover content that MS Word cannot_ in such corrupted documents.
I'll add my support for Notepad++. It's a very powerful and much, much lighter weight tool than Word or LibreOffice, suitable for configuration files, source code, HTML, and most scripting languages. It integrates very will with the file browser, and handles multiple documents and multiple applications opening the same document better than either Word or LibreOffice.
Sadly, training students to gain expertise with such a specific toolkit as MS Word in preference to tools like Notepad++ is a serious error and waste of their limited school time. They _will_ spend much of their document creation time on the colors, the formats, the fonts, the indentation, and the inevitable document losses and downtime during forced upgrades of a too-powerful toolkit that encourages appearance over content.
Google documents are intriguing in their features. I'll be curious to see if they're mature enough, in the next few years, to actually use in the workplace. (My colleagues and business partners have been, unfortunately, tied to MS Word formats for business documents.)
There's the prosecution of Phil Zimmerman for publishing PGP, the failed attempt to publish the "SkipJack" algorighm with all keys held for law enforcment use, the new "Trusted Computing" toolkit with all keys held by Microsoft with no legal assurance of their privacy against warrant-free access under the "Patriot Act", there's the Patriot Act isself, and then there is US federal law at http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=9ae4a21068f2bd41d4a5aee843b63ef1&c=ecfr&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title15/15cfrv2_02.tpl#730.
It's frightening reading. Widespread domestic security for electronic documents is being sacrificed to permit government access to communications, both foreign and domestic, with and without court order or knowledge of anyone being monitored. The fiber optic taps in AT&T's core data center planted by the NSA were quite real, quite illegal, and the personnel involved have been given immunity.
Because he's unfortunately typical, and he might be trainable.
Human Resources is not usually a leadership group: they're following practices set forth by the company's management. If they're scheduling events 3 months in advance without an actual date, and setting the date in the last week at their own convenience and not the convenience of the job candidate, that means the problem is a policy one above the pay grade of the individual HR person. A job interview is always a two way process: let this be a strong hint that you'd be merely a cog in a very big machine.
The different nature of the exam than what this candidate expected should not have been a surprise. Concluding the nature of an interview from how far ahead it was scheduled is the sort of extrapolation without data that will waste everyone's time, socially and in programming. Someone who'd been through a few technical interviews would know that such interviews very widely, would do their "due diligence", and find out the nature of the exam in advance. That's why "LinkedIn" is very useful for, both ways: to examine a company through employees whose candid opinions might be helpful, and to get other references about an employee. These references are vital, and can give information that HR or a company brochure would _never_ provide, or might never think to ask for.
One of the best candidates I interviewed had been mishandled by our own HR: poor scheduling and insensitivity to the candidate's needs for confidentiality had almost cost them their current job. (We had VP approval at their current company to interview the candidate, because the department was being closed: but the candidate's supervisor hadn't been told yet. It was a strange situation.) When that candidate arrived, they were very upset. They and I spent almost the whole interview going over how to arrange layers of access to information in _our_ systems, to allow HR to do their jobs but to protect them and us from similar confusion and from possible lawsuits about gender, age, or medical conditions. They came away with the realization that we'd screwed up, but wouldn't repeat the problem, and that we actually _did_ try to treat our employees based on skill, and to treat employees as people. And we saw that they took bad situations as problems to resolve, rather than as personal insults.
We didn't hire them. (They got an internal company transfer, much to their benefit.) But they've worked with us on some projects since then to both our benefit.
There can be many reasons for this, such as empire building (where a manager's pay scale and promotions depend on the number of people they manage). Getting outside review can also sometimes stabilize a project: I, and my colleagues, have sometimes _been_ the consultants brought in to help integrate a new project. There are few projects as doomed to failure as exciting technical innovations that were actually done better years ago, are already available in their existing tools, and they just didn't know how to use them so they've re-invented the wheel.
Can you find out why your manager thinks it needs additional layers of human complexity? Does that manager think your time is too committed and you won't have enough left for all the work? Doing good work on QA and documentation, and making sure you manager knows it's there, might help reduce their need to add layers of consultants and extraneous testing or planning cycles.
You _do_ realize that NAMBLA, the organization, was never convicted of anything? They were effectively sued to death, with numerous prosecutions that were dismissed in court, but drained their limited coffers. And with journalists and the FBI constantly infiltrating their ranks, I assume they knew that anything criminal they did would be reported almost instantly. Their original involvement with gay political groups was effectively ended when they were expelled from those groups.
B4U-ACT is fascinating. They do seem to be encouraging mental treatment of pedophilia as a disorder, recognizing pedophilia as a disorder, and they do not claim that engaging in it physically is proper. Given that prisoners have sometimes died in jail becuase other inmates were told, truthfully or not, that those prisoners were child molesters, I can understand their desire for better education and treatment.
So no, they're not the "same freaks, same message, new management". It's a related issue but very different approach to it.
It means that "social networking" is often expected to be used, not for frank communications, but for company managed advertising. I've actually attended staff meetings where staff were urged to talk up their own company's products and to help drive criticisms of their products to the next page of product reviews. I was not surprised, but saddened: the flaws were very real and could have been used as a great opportunity for the company to address the problems and turn that negative review into a great example of customer support, at a much lower cost in manpower.