I do have a smart speaker, and I use it to control the lights, play music, set timers, check the weather, and sporadically answer the odd question. That probably makes me a heavy user of the device I suppose. But I think the reason why there are no runaway hits is that it is not a format that promotes extended interaction. If I want to play a game or look up non-trivial data I pull out my tablet, since I can read much faster than Alexa can read it to me. And a game that involves my eyes and fingers is going to be more engrossing than something I listen to and the talk to.
I use Alexa when I have my hands full or am busy doing something else. I think to be a runaway hit it would need to be something more engrossing, that you interact with.
Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
Can you enumerate all of the unanticipated side effects? Didn’t think so.
By definition unanticipated side effects can't be enumerated, but that is true with almost any sort of research. What are the unanticipated side effects of the internet and social media? Are they net positive or negative? But do we seriously consider the risks of any new technology or development on a routine basis?
I do admit that invasive species are a real problem, and once they escape into the wild there is often no containing them. And the risks absolutely need to be considered. But if plants can grow 40% more food for the same inputs, you need to consider the benefits as well as the risks. Consider the efforts to create a gene drive to attack mosquito species that carry malaria. Yes, it is a risky thing, but 400K people a year die from malaria. So consider the potential benefits as well as the risks.
The ICE infrastructure didn't just appear overnight, its taken the better part of 70 years to get where we are now, hell in my home state when I was a child paved roads outside of the cities and freeway were a luxury and you pretty much had to have a large truck capable of taking the abuse of dirt roads, much less gas stations all over the place. How do you get all the rural states infrastructure built up to take all the extra power, charging stations, places to put the EVs where the weather isn't gonna kill the batteries, etc without spending trillions of dollars that will never see a ROI?
Pretty sure that the trillions of dollars that went to paving and road construction can be reused. I expect the number of gas stations to drop overall, as most people will do overnight charging at home. Since gas is a low margin commodity at retail, I expect most gas stations make a significant part of their profit as convenience stores. Unless the demand for convenience stores is enough to keep them all going, we will likely see lots of gas stations repurposed into something else.
Refineries and oil pipelines go down, power plants and transmission lines go up. There will be winners and losers, but I don't know why you think the government needs to pay for it all. Power companies should be happy to sell more electricity, and will build out capacity accordingly (likely dealing with renewable/carbon free mandates at the same time).
We might see oil companies trying to ditch polluted sites onto Superfund, as the amount of oil consumed goes down and their profits drop.
Facts are most of these people pay nothing at all. After the EIT is applied. The government is taxing the middle class not young people; well except when Obama is in charge than he makes them pay for their parents healthcare; with insane premiums and coverage most don't actually need.
Approximately 19% of filers use the EITC, and since it is a refundable credit, they may indeed pay negative taxes.
I don't know the specific numbers, but I expect that most people pay more in FICA (social security/medicare) taxes than they do in income taxes. So when you see stats about how much the top n% pay in income taxes, realize that if only income taxes are considered and not total taxes, the outlook is very different.
Regarding insane premiums for coverage most don't need - wouldn't insurance companies price that coverage based on the expected frequency of use? The reason for the coverage mandates in Obamacare is so that the coverage is actually useful, and doesn't exclude things that are going to drive you into bankruptcy. You can craft cheaper plans by refusing to cover things that get expense for significant number of people. You don't make cheaper plans by taking away things people don't use, because those don't cost much to begin with.
I'd say "no public corporation can engage in politics" and make it that simple. The NYT would need to go private, but it could. And would anyone miss Fox or CNN?
So no professionally produced advertisements either, since the ad agencies are mostly public corporations. And no rallies held in a venue owned by a corporation, and no catering of food at campaign events if the caterer is a public corporation. Can a candidate fly on a plane to get to a campaign event?
Wait... What was their budget again? Epic was the only choice? You can't be serious. I could come in, do proper requirements gathering, and come up with a system that was HIPAA compliant, easy to use, and met all the needs of patient and staff, for a whole lot less than that, I assure you.
Perhaps that is true, but the lead time would have been years if not decades. Epic is a monster. It is the biggest EMR out there, and thousands of people work on it. Saying you could recreate it with the budget of a single hospital system implementation project seems... optimistic.
Hence grocery stores for most people...which they get to and from using transit.
I expect that using transit to get to and from a grocery store is only common in high density situations where either you don't have a car, or it is too expensive/inconvenient to park. Where I live people mostly drive to the store and stock up for a week at a time. In Europe or places like NYC, it is much more common to go to the store every day or two, so you don't need to manage 5 or 6 bags of groceries at a time.
That is a cultural shift that is in some ways more difficult than taking transit to work, but one that becomes necessary if you envision not having a car at all, or only renting them by the hour or the day.
Plus, anyone with a lengthy work history--which experienced people tend to hide (to avoid age discrimination) by keeping the resume to 1-2 pages--winds up getting locked out of some positions because they have a.) applicable experience that's too old to put on a chronological resume kept to the short length preferred by HR or b.) experience that they have--but is edited out in the name of brevity--that addresses the so-called "soft" skills that employers are screaming about nowadays but are difficult to describe in the short resumes that recruiters are willing to read. Anything is an improvement over the current situation.
As someone who has over 35 years of experience as a developer/project lead/manager I could put way more than 2 pages on my resume. But as a hiring manager, I expect your resume to get to the point, and I don't want to wade through 6 pages about your experiences with CICS and Fortran-77 when what I want to know is about things relevant to developing RESTful services in Java on Linux systems. Experience from 20 years ago may be relevant, but you get in the situation where a jack of all trades with 3 years of experience in 5 disparate technologies has to compete with somebody who has 4 years of relevant experience.
Similarly, I will cut some slack to someone who appears to have English as a second language, but at about the third spelling/grammar error I see you are headed for the reject pile - if you can't be bothered to make your resume perfect, I question your attention to detail and ability to write good code.
If new cars cost more, more people keep driving old cars. Would you prefer 5% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 20% better emissions, or that 20% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 10% better emissions? If you can get more of the less efficient cars off the road for smaller per car improvement, but bigger net improvement, isn't that better than the virtue of being able to say you forced better standards for less net gain?
Concentrating on the per unit improvement while ignoring the net is shortsighted. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling, but does not actually improve anything. Requiring less can actually achieve more. You need to be open minded enough to take economics in to consideration, not just the all or nothing approach of the green zealots.
Sure, but is there any data that shows that is the likely outcome? How much more will the fuel efficiency standards cost in terms of purchase price? What assumptions about gas prices do you make in calculating the payback? How price sensitive are consumers? If the economy is growing do more people buy cars than during a recession?
If the argument is serious, present the data and let people argue the calculations and assumptions. Otherwise it is just hand waving, like asserting that tax cuts pay for themselves by increasing growth - which if taken to its logical conclusion, suggests that you can maximize government revenue by decreasing the tax rate all the way to zero.
As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
By almost all statistical measures, violent crime in the US has been decreasing for the last 30 years and is close to an all time low. It seems that suburbanites have recently gotten spooked about crime in urban areas, based on nothing more than fear mongering.
But that's $50K a year for half-time work and when you only need to drive to work a few times a month (assuming you're doing long-hauls with overnight stays), you can live well outside of expensive cities.
That makes the pay more attractive.
Long hauls are the most desirable routes, and routes are usually bid according to seniority. A captain on an A-320 flying Detroit to Hong Kong has a very different work life than a first officer on a Bombardier regional jet working for a feeder airline, flying Chicago to Iowa City to Fargo to Duluth.
coming soon, we must increase rates... also more h1b pilots needed....
I know you were being sarcastic, but yes, this will require airlines to increase rates. Pilots aren't a huge part of an airlines labor force, but if airlines are forced to invest in training/apprenticeships to bring new pilots into the system, and to raise pay to make it a more appealing career, that will raise their costs, and they will seek to pass it along to their customers.
Since deregulation, airlines have been a very low margin business, so they don't have lots of ability to absorb the increased costs.
And if foreign pilots want to work with an American carrier, an H1-B would be one of the ways.
A major service website (like the ones listed in TFS) is defined by its basic function. Facebook provides communications between users. Google is a search engine, Outlook is a mail program, YouTube shows videos. Once the major function of the website is defined and accepted, adding new features and functionality will be confusing and offputting to the users.
I don't believe that. Email was well understood and defined, with well understood conventions like local storage and folders. Google innovated with web based and search driven. Phones were well understood until the iPhone turned everything upside down. Facebook has continually grown, adding news, messenger, games, emergency notifications, etc.
2. The two aren't even comparable. She had classified emails on her unsecured server, in addition to Anthony Weiner's laptop.
That's not quite factually true. My recollection is that the vast majority of emails were not classified and those that were classified were classified after they were sent.
My recollection is that something like 11 email chains were determined to have been classified at the time they were sent. Out of 60K messages on the server I am willing to call that inadvertent, since as SoS she worked with classified data all day long. And given the US Government's penchant to classify just about everything, without knowing what those particular emails contained I don't know whether it is significant or not.
One thing I think was lost in the popular reporting is that having her email server hacked was never the real issue. Her us.gov email for unclassified email is for unclassified data. I assume the bulk of that is sent unencrypted, so anyone who has messages pass through their systems can read a copy. And there is certainly no guarantee that the us.gov mail servers have not been penetrated. That is the argument for not sending classified data in the first place - there is no presumption of security.
Technically the issue with the email server is that it violated the law in terms of maintaining records. Goverment mail servers are archived, hers was not. And she deleted data before handing it over. I can't read that as anything but a cynical and knowing attempt to violate the law and maintain her privacy. I can sympathize with her goal, but it wasn't her choice to make.
And there are benefits to staying. As a hiring manager I don't like to see resume's where someone is moving every 12 or 18 months. I expect that it takes you at least a year to fully understand the codebase, the product, and the processes, and if you leave in 18 months from my point of you were just getting good at your job. And 401k vesting is usually on a 3-4 year schedule, so you are leaving money behind if you leave before being fully vested. And vacation goes up - I once had a job where after 20 years I had 32 days per year of vacation. That was one of the things that made that job very hard to leave.
Companies and their management end up being like the difference between my congressperson (he's fine, no reason to replace him), and Congress as a whole (what a bunch of chumps, throw the bums out!).
I may like my manager and respect him, yet be very dissatisfied with the policies of the corporation as a whole, which the managers do have some input in creating.
Particularly coming out of a recession where wages were stagnant, a company might be in a situation where many of their developers are underpaid relative to the market, and they are losing people to 20% raises in a suddenly booming economy. But they literally may not be able to afford giving 20% raises across the board, so they put up with attrition (knowing that the replacements will be more expensive), and hope that by giving 5% annually to the good but not great employees and 8% - 10% to the great employees they can hang on until they catch up to the market. It is a situation that nobody is happy with and we rail about the short sighted company, but it may also be the minimax optimal solution.
Literal cash, as in a suitcase with bundles of $100s?
One of my post-Powerball winning fantasies was to walk into a Bentley dealership in shorts and t-shirt and tell them I wanted a car and was willing to pay cash. When they blew me off or treated me like a problem, pop open my duffle of cash and start burning $10k bundles in their face, and then walk out and climb into a Rolls Royce.
Though I am sure you would still have many other post-Powerball fantasies to act out, that particular one is likely to disappoint you. Rich people frequently don't look rich, and no car salesman is going to risk blowing the deal by assuming that someone who dresses in shorts and t-shirts can't afford a nice car.
Other than a feed of +12V, a signal line from the steering wheel controls, ground, and maybe a data signal from a rear-view camera, why does the "infotainment" system need to talk to the rest of the car at all?
The most pragmatic reason is that wiring harnesses in cars are complex and expensive, and replacing a bunch of point to point wires with a data bus makes the car cheaper and easier to build. And once you have everything connected to a data bus, why not put the UI for many of those items on the thing with the biggest display and most available controls, like the infotainment system.
And my car has lots of settings that you may not think are worthwhile, but that I appreciate. Like to unlock all 4 doors when I touch the door handle, and to fold in the mirrors when I park. Things that may not be everyone's preference, but I like my bells and whistles.
My car has multiple cameras, and when the car is in reverse it shows me the rear view camera - so it needs to know transmission indicators. And it automatically turns off the cameras when I reach a certain forward speed, so it needs to know the speedometer reading. And since it has no physical gauges on the dash, the whole driver display is nothing but an LCD screen, so it needs to know speed, RPM, gas gauge, temperature, cruise control settings, etc.
The problem is that there is no middle ground here. Putting any sort of back door into encryption effectively renders it useless. The cops can say whatever they want but that is an indisputable fact and isn't negotiable even if we wanted to. You can have good encryption or for all practical purposes no encryption. There is literally no middle ground.
Even if we trusted the cops (and history tells us we shouldn't) the cops aren't the only party in play here. If the cops have a back door then so do black hats, criminals, foreign nations, and anyone else. So we get lots of whining by politicians and cops who are either clueless or disingenuous or both.
When you talk about an algorithmic back door I completely agree with you. That is horrifying and we should never do it. But I can imagine a far less threatening scenario that would address the situation that law enforcement mostly talks about, which is the inability to break into a locked phone. Put a hardware access method on the phone that lets the phone be decrypted at the cost of destroying the phone, and while I still think it is not worth doing, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as intentionally weakened software.
If the cops have to get a warrant to break into my phone, need the physical phone to do it, and can't tracelessly root it and return it to me with me being none the wiser, my level of concern goes way down. I mostly worry about indiscriminate use via the Patriot Act of a backdoor.
To paraphrase an old Internet axiom: "on twitter nobody knows you are a dog."
There is an official channel for issuing these warnings. Why would you trust someone on Twitter telling you that the official announcement was wrong?
"Dear, come down to the shelter, a nuke is on the way!"
"No, dear, @DaveIge38 on Twitter says it is a false alarm. I'm staying right he(&%@{{{{{
Fair enough, but with the clock ticking and every minute that goes by adding to the potential panic, why don't you take every option you have to try to get the corrected message out there? If people see 3 or 4 different twitter feeds saying "False alarm, do not panic", you at least have a chance to assuage people's fears. And remember, all this is happening in real time. This is not something they are planning out for the future, they are trying to react RIGHT NOW. In the first few minutes in a crisis atmosphere (because, after all, you just told over a million people that a nuke is inbound), would you have had a better idea?
Term limits - a method for ensuring that right about the time someone is good at their job they are forced to leave it.
There is a reason why we don't have term limits in industry, and that is because we value experience. If you want to find a way to lessen the advantage of incumbency, find a way that doesn't ensure we have perpetual neophytes.
I don't find it odd that he would use Twitter to correct a bad announcement - in situations like that you want to get on as many channels as you can, and lots of people will get Twitter with more immediacy than radio or TV. Nor can I get too worked up about him not knowing his password. I have seldom used accounts where I don't know the password, and would need access to my primary machine to get at my password file.
This seems like the textbook example of a learning experience. A brand new system encountered a failure mode they hadn't anticipated, and they are going through lessons learned to correct for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I do have a smart speaker, and I use it to control the lights, play music, set timers, check the weather, and sporadically answer the odd question. That probably makes me a heavy user of the device I suppose. But I think the reason why there are no runaway hits is that it is not a format that promotes extended interaction. If I want to play a game or look up non-trivial data I pull out my tablet, since I can read much faster than Alexa can read it to me. And a game that involves my eyes and fingers is going to be more engrossing than something I listen to and the talk to.
I use Alexa when I have my hands full or am busy doing something else. I think to be a runaway hit it would need to be something more engrossing, that you interact with.
Have you looked at a map showing the location of release of genetically modified mosquitoes overlaid with Zika Virus breakouts?
A quick google search didn't come up with anything obvious. Got a link?
Able to resist being covered in increasingly caustic pesticides = bad modification.
If they don't harm humans or the environment, is that a bad modification?
Can you enumerate all of the unanticipated side effects? Didn’t think so.
By definition unanticipated side effects can't be enumerated, but that is true with almost any sort of research. What are the unanticipated side effects of the internet and social media? Are they net positive or negative? But do we seriously consider the risks of any new technology or development on a routine basis?
I do admit that invasive species are a real problem, and once they escape into the wild there is often no containing them. And the risks absolutely need to be considered. But if plants can grow 40% more food for the same inputs, you need to consider the benefits as well as the risks. Consider the efforts to create a gene drive to attack mosquito species that carry malaria. Yes, it is a risky thing, but 400K people a year die from malaria. So consider the potential benefits as well as the risks.
The ICE infrastructure didn't just appear overnight, its taken the better part of 70 years to get where we are now, hell in my home state when I was a child paved roads outside of the cities and freeway were a luxury and you pretty much had to have a large truck capable of taking the abuse of dirt roads, much less gas stations all over the place. How do you get all the rural states infrastructure built up to take all the extra power, charging stations, places to put the EVs where the weather isn't gonna kill the batteries, etc without spending trillions of dollars that will never see a ROI?
Pretty sure that the trillions of dollars that went to paving and road construction can be reused. I expect the number of gas stations to drop overall, as most people will do overnight charging at home. Since gas is a low margin commodity at retail, I expect most gas stations make a significant part of their profit as convenience stores. Unless the demand for convenience stores is enough to keep them all going, we will likely see lots of gas stations repurposed into something else.
Refineries and oil pipelines go down, power plants and transmission lines go up. There will be winners and losers, but I don't know why you think the government needs to pay for it all. Power companies should be happy to sell more electricity, and will build out capacity accordingly (likely dealing with renewable/carbon free mandates at the same time).
We might see oil companies trying to ditch polluted sites onto Superfund, as the amount of oil consumed goes down and their profits drop.
Facts are most of these people pay nothing at all. After the EIT is applied. The government is taxing the middle class not young people; well except when Obama is in charge than he makes them pay for their parents healthcare; with insane premiums and coverage most don't actually need.
Approximately 19% of filers use the EITC, and since it is a refundable credit, they may indeed pay negative taxes.
I don't know the specific numbers, but I expect that most people pay more in FICA (social security/medicare) taxes than they do in income taxes. So when you see stats about how much the top n% pay in income taxes, realize that if only income taxes are considered and not total taxes, the outlook is very different.
Regarding insane premiums for coverage most don't need - wouldn't insurance companies price that coverage based on the expected frequency of use? The reason for the coverage mandates in Obamacare is so that the coverage is actually useful, and doesn't exclude things that are going to drive you into bankruptcy. You can craft cheaper plans by refusing to cover things that get expense for significant number of people. You don't make cheaper plans by taking away things people don't use, because those don't cost much to begin with.
I'd say "no public corporation can engage in politics" and make it that simple. The NYT would need to go private, but it could. And would anyone miss Fox or CNN?
So no professionally produced advertisements either, since the ad agencies are mostly public corporations. And no rallies held in a venue owned by a corporation, and no catering of food at campaign events if the caterer is a public corporation. Can a candidate fly on a plane to get to a campaign event?
I think you idea has some problems.
Wait ... What was their budget again? Epic was the only choice? You can't be serious. I could come in, do proper requirements gathering, and come up with a system that was HIPAA compliant, easy to use, and met all the needs of patient and staff, for a whole lot less than that, I assure you.
Perhaps that is true, but the lead time would have been years if not decades. Epic is a monster. It is the biggest EMR out there, and thousands of people work on it. Saying you could recreate it with the budget of a single hospital system implementation project seems... optimistic.
Hence grocery stores for most people ...which they get to and from using transit.
I expect that using transit to get to and from a grocery store is only common in high density situations where either you don't have a car, or it is too expensive/inconvenient to park. Where I live people mostly drive to the store and stock up for a week at a time. In Europe or places like NYC, it is much more common to go to the store every day or two, so you don't need to manage 5 or 6 bags of groceries at a time.
That is a cultural shift that is in some ways more difficult than taking transit to work, but one that becomes necessary if you envision not having a car at all, or only renting them by the hour or the day.
Plus, anyone with a lengthy work history--which experienced people tend to hide (to avoid age discrimination) by keeping the resume to 1-2 pages--winds up getting locked out of some positions because they have a.) applicable experience that's too old to put on a chronological resume kept to the short length preferred by HR or b.) experience that they have--but is edited out in the name of brevity--that addresses the so-called "soft" skills that employers are screaming about nowadays but are difficult to describe in the short resumes that recruiters are willing to read. Anything is an improvement over the current situation.
As someone who has over 35 years of experience as a developer/project lead/manager I could put way more than 2 pages on my resume. But as a hiring manager, I expect your resume to get to the point, and I don't want to wade through 6 pages about your experiences with CICS and Fortran-77 when what I want to know is about things relevant to developing RESTful services in Java on Linux systems. Experience from 20 years ago may be relevant, but you get in the situation where a jack of all trades with 3 years of experience in 5 disparate technologies has to compete with somebody who has 4 years of relevant experience.
Similarly, I will cut some slack to someone who appears to have English as a second language, but at about the third spelling/grammar error I see you are headed for the reject pile - if you can't be bothered to make your resume perfect, I question your attention to detail and ability to write good code.
If new cars cost more, more people keep driving old cars. Would you prefer 5% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 20% better emissions, or that 20% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 10% better emissions? If you can get more of the less efficient cars off the road for smaller per car improvement, but bigger net improvement, isn't that better than the virtue of being able to say you forced better standards for less net gain?
Concentrating on the per unit improvement while ignoring the net is shortsighted. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling, but does not actually improve anything. Requiring less can actually achieve more. You need to be open minded enough to take economics in to consideration, not just the all or nothing approach of the green zealots.
Sure, but is there any data that shows that is the likely outcome? How much more will the fuel efficiency standards cost in terms of purchase price? What assumptions about gas prices do you make in calculating the payback? How price sensitive are consumers? If the economy is growing do more people buy cars than during a recession?
If the argument is serious, present the data and let people argue the calculations and assumptions. Otherwise it is just hand waving, like asserting that tax cuts pay for themselves by increasing growth - which if taken to its logical conclusion, suggests that you can maximize government revenue by decreasing the tax rate all the way to zero.
As the transit system collapses from maintenance issues, and walk/ride options become more dangerous due to crime, that people are turning to alternatives?
By almost all statistical measures, violent crime in the US has been decreasing for the last 30 years and is close to an all time low. It seems that suburbanites have recently gotten spooked about crime in urban areas, based on nothing more than fear mongering.
After I wrote that I realized I meant to say A330 rather than an A320. You are correct.
And also a pedant.
But that's $50K a year for half-time work and when you only need to drive to work a few times a month (assuming you're doing long-hauls with overnight stays), you can live well outside of expensive cities.
That makes the pay more attractive.
Long hauls are the most desirable routes, and routes are usually bid according to seniority. A captain on an A-320 flying Detroit to Hong Kong has a very different work life than a first officer on a Bombardier regional jet working for a feeder airline, flying Chicago to Iowa City to Fargo to Duluth.
coming soon, we must increase rates... also more h1b pilots needed....
I know you were being sarcastic, but yes, this will require airlines to increase rates. Pilots aren't a huge part of an airlines labor force, but if airlines are forced to invest in training/apprenticeships to bring new pilots into the system, and to raise pay to make it a more appealing career, that will raise their costs, and they will seek to pass it along to their customers.
Since deregulation, airlines have been a very low margin business, so they don't have lots of ability to absorb the increased costs.
And if foreign pilots want to work with an American carrier, an H1-B would be one of the ways.
A major service website (like the ones listed in TFS) is defined by its basic function. Facebook provides communications between users. Google is a search engine, Outlook is a mail program, YouTube shows videos. Once the major function of the website is defined and accepted, adding new features and functionality will be confusing and offputting to the users.
I don't believe that. Email was well understood and defined, with well understood conventions like local storage and folders. Google innovated with web based and search driven. Phones were well understood until the iPhone turned everything upside down. Facebook has continually grown, adding news, messenger, games, emergency notifications, etc.
2. The two aren't even comparable. She had classified emails on her unsecured server, in addition to Anthony Weiner's laptop.
That's not quite factually true. My recollection is that the vast majority of emails were not classified and those that were classified were classified after they were sent.
My recollection is that something like 11 email chains were determined to have been classified at the time they were sent. Out of 60K messages on the server I am willing to call that inadvertent, since as SoS she worked with classified data all day long. And given the US Government's penchant to classify just about everything, without knowing what those particular emails contained I don't know whether it is significant or not.
One thing I think was lost in the popular reporting is that having her email server hacked was never the real issue. Her us.gov email for unclassified email is for unclassified data. I assume the bulk of that is sent unencrypted, so anyone who has messages pass through their systems can read a copy. And there is certainly no guarantee that the us.gov mail servers have not been penetrated. That is the argument for not sending classified data in the first place - there is no presumption of security.
Technically the issue with the email server is that it violated the law in terms of maintaining records. Goverment mail servers are archived, hers was not. And she deleted data before handing it over. I can't read that as anything but a cynical and knowing attempt to violate the law and maintain her privacy. I can sympathize with her goal, but it wasn't her choice to make.
And there are benefits to staying. As a hiring manager I don't like to see resume's where someone is moving every 12 or 18 months. I expect that it takes you at least a year to fully understand the codebase, the product, and the processes, and if you leave in 18 months from my point of you were just getting good at your job. And 401k vesting is usually on a 3-4 year schedule, so you are leaving money behind if you leave before being fully vested. And vacation goes up - I once had a job where after 20 years I had 32 days per year of vacation. That was one of the things that made that job very hard to leave.
Companies and their management end up being like the difference between my congressperson (he's fine, no reason to replace him), and Congress as a whole (what a bunch of chumps, throw the bums out!).
I may like my manager and respect him, yet be very dissatisfied with the policies of the corporation as a whole, which the managers do have some input in creating.
Particularly coming out of a recession where wages were stagnant, a company might be in a situation where many of their developers are underpaid relative to the market, and they are losing people to 20% raises in a suddenly booming economy. But they literally may not be able to afford giving 20% raises across the board, so they put up with attrition (knowing that the replacements will be more expensive), and hope that by giving 5% annually to the good but not great employees and 8% - 10% to the great employees they can hang on until they catch up to the market. It is a situation that nobody is happy with and we rail about the short sighted company, but it may also be the minimax optimal solution.
Literal cash, as in a suitcase with bundles of $100s?
One of my post-Powerball winning fantasies was to walk into a Bentley dealership in shorts and t-shirt and tell them I wanted a car and was willing to pay cash. When they blew me off or treated me like a problem, pop open my duffle of cash and start burning $10k bundles in their face, and then walk out and climb into a Rolls Royce.
Though I am sure you would still have many other post-Powerball fantasies to act out, that particular one is likely to disappoint you. Rich people frequently don't look rich, and no car salesman is going to risk blowing the deal by assuming that someone who dresses in shorts and t-shirts can't afford a nice car.
Other than a feed of +12V, a signal line from the steering wheel controls, ground, and maybe a data signal from a rear-view camera, why does the "infotainment" system need to talk to the rest of the car at all?
The most pragmatic reason is that wiring harnesses in cars are complex and expensive, and replacing a bunch of point to point wires with a data bus makes the car cheaper and easier to build. And once you have everything connected to a data bus, why not put the UI for many of those items on the thing with the biggest display and most available controls, like the infotainment system.
And my car has lots of settings that you may not think are worthwhile, but that I appreciate. Like to unlock all 4 doors when I touch the door handle, and to fold in the mirrors when I park. Things that may not be everyone's preference, but I like my bells and whistles.
My car has multiple cameras, and when the car is in reverse it shows me the rear view camera - so it needs to know transmission indicators. And it automatically turns off the cameras when I reach a certain forward speed, so it needs to know the speedometer reading. And since it has no physical gauges on the dash, the whole driver display is nothing but an LCD screen, so it needs to know speed, RPM, gas gauge, temperature, cruise control settings, etc.
Maybe not to your taste, but definitely to mine.
The problem is that there is no middle ground here. Putting any sort of back door into encryption effectively renders it useless. The cops can say whatever they want but that is an indisputable fact and isn't negotiable even if we wanted to. You can have good encryption or for all practical purposes no encryption. There is literally no middle ground.
Even if we trusted the cops (and history tells us we shouldn't) the cops aren't the only party in play here. If the cops have a back door then so do black hats, criminals, foreign nations, and anyone else. So we get lots of whining by politicians and cops who are either clueless or disingenuous or both.
When you talk about an algorithmic back door I completely agree with you. That is horrifying and we should never do it. But I can imagine a far less threatening scenario that would address the situation that law enforcement mostly talks about, which is the inability to break into a locked phone. Put a hardware access method on the phone that lets the phone be decrypted at the cost of destroying the phone, and while I still think it is not worth doing, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as intentionally weakened software.
If the cops have to get a warrant to break into my phone, need the physical phone to do it, and can't tracelessly root it and return it to me with me being none the wiser, my level of concern goes way down. I mostly worry about indiscriminate use via the Patriot Act of a backdoor.
To paraphrase an old Internet axiom: "on twitter nobody knows you are a dog."
There is an official channel for issuing these warnings. Why would you trust someone on Twitter telling you that the official announcement was wrong?
"Dear, come down to the shelter, a nuke is on the way!"
"No, dear, @DaveIge38 on Twitter says it is a false alarm. I'm staying right he(&%@{{{{{
Fair enough, but with the clock ticking and every minute that goes by adding to the potential panic, why don't you take every option you have to try to get the corrected message out there? If people see 3 or 4 different twitter feeds saying "False alarm, do not panic", you at least have a chance to assuage people's fears. And remember, all this is happening in real time. This is not something they are planning out for the future, they are trying to react RIGHT NOW. In the first few minutes in a crisis atmosphere (because, after all, you just told over a million people that a nuke is inbound), would you have had a better idea?
Term limits - a method for ensuring that right about the time someone is good at their job they are forced to leave it.
There is a reason why we don't have term limits in industry, and that is because we value experience. If you want to find a way to lessen the advantage of incumbency, find a way that doesn't ensure we have perpetual neophytes.
Effective != Official
Whether Twitter is an official channel or not is irrelevant. If it is effective, and you are trying to recover from an error, by all means use it.
I don't use Twitter enough for it to be effective for me, and I don't follow the governor of my state, but for many people it would be effective.
I don't find it odd that he would use Twitter to correct a bad announcement - in situations like that you want to get on as many channels as you can, and lots of people will get Twitter with more immediacy than radio or TV. Nor can I get too worked up about him not knowing his password. I have seldom used accounts where I don't know the password, and would need access to my primary machine to get at my password file.
This seems like the textbook example of a learning experience. A brand new system encountered a failure mode they hadn't anticipated, and they are going through lessons learned to correct for the future.