Agile is fundamentally a consultancy methodology, with an effective sales pitch. The true goal is to offload project risk onto the client, especially one who doesn't actually know what they want. The negotiation goes a bit like this:
Our job is to help you figure out what it is that you want. You give us some ideas, you pay us for a month, we go away and build something then bring it back to ask if this what you indeed wanted, we get your feedback and you can keep paying us again for next month. You don't need to do the hard work of actually creating a spec, and you are free to change your mind about what you want at any time and at any stage during the project. We provide the continuous integration guarantee, meaning we will always have a shippable product, and when you eventually run out of money we will declare the project a success and ship you "something". You get to decide when the project is DONE and we get a monthly paycheck with no risk of project failure.
This of course is far better than the waterfall model, where the vendor insists that the client pays them for the privilege of spending several months with expensive architects arguing over a realistic and self-consistent spec, with no short-term visible progress to be reported upwards, with the vendor then having to quote a fixed price for the project, assuming all the risk of project failure, having to deal with un-billable client change requests not in the technical original spec, and then having the client argue that the original spec they spent so long discussing wasn't what they actually wanted after all.
So by selling management the illusion of control, the vendor avoids of the politics of not getting paid.
They had an episode of Star Trek exploring this issue 27 years ago. Lieutenant Reginald Barclay creates a holodeck version of the crew including his erotic fantasy version of Deanna Troi
"The multicolor effects of intricate lines and flame-like streaks on the petals were vivid and spectacular and made the bulbs that produced these even more exotic-looking plants highly sought-after. It is now known that this effect is due to the bulbs being infected with a type of tulip-specific mosaic virus, known as the "Tulip breaking virus", so called because it "breaks" the one petal color into two or more."
The problem is - when the person "asking" is in a position of authority
So no sex for you until you have successfully solved the problem of implementing a communist utopia and eliminated all hierarchies, power structures including your own celebrity authority
As a developer solo-managing a legacy codebase, it is still important to have various rounds of external QA.
The first issue is that the developer can be so far into the code that they can completely miss what is obvious or un-intuitive to a non-technical user. This may also involve legacy bugs or interactions with code they havn't written themselves.
The second issue is that the the spec itself may not have been fully defined, or what you have is the developer's interpretation of the spec, and this may require clarification or feedback once someone has seen the end result.
The third issue is that a developer will focus their attention on the things they consider most important. Sometimes the best way to achieve this is to just give a developer a list of minor bugs/features, which is a great way of focusing attention by clarifying the spec and letting a developer speed though a bunch of quick fixes which have a predefined spec (defining the spec is half the mental effort).
So in general a developer should be capable of doing a first round of internal QA on their own code, but a second pair of eyes is still occasionally needed, as the developer has a very peculiar set of perception filters.
"enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms"
This would either imply one of two things (or both):
1. The Chinese Government wants to install encryption backdoors in its own systems, to prevent employees from keeping secrets from it.
2. The Chinese Government is worried that the US government has installed encryption backdoors in the standard algorithms and wants to enable its employees to keep secrets from the US government
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
If Enemies is a subset of Everyone, then giving Aid and Comfort to Everyone is an act of Treason, at least until the US makes peace with Everyone. Specifically what Snowdon exposed was the difficulty the US Government has in distinguishing between Everyone and Enemy.
"Eddard Stark: What you suggest is treason. Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Only if we lose."
Fair is the compromise between the balance of interests of the various people who create, consume and reuse of creative content.
"Fair" could be defined as anywhere between everything is automatically public domain and fair is giving the content creator absolute power over every tiny aspect about how this work is used until the end of time. Both extremes would affect the possible business models of content creators and the net social utility value that humanity derives from this content.
"Fair use" is the current attempt to legally define where this balance should lie. The real question of course is how do you put a financial figure on net social utility value, when the copyright industry has a vested interest in maximizing and guaranteeing licensing fees.
You mean like this gossip story involving Princess Diana's fertility test pre-embryo's which where stolen by a rogue doctor and implanted into his wife as a surrogate. She is apparently called Sarah, and if it wasn't for the cutoff date on male-first inheritance of the crown, she would technically be in the direct line of succession, after Prince Charles and before Kate Middleton.
“It’s your father’s Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is the weapon of a computer hacker. Not as clumsy or as random as an iphone, but a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For years, the hackers were the guardians of peace and justice in the internet. Before the dark times, before the NSA.”
Firstly, IS did offer to ransom James Foley, for $100 million dollars, and the US refused to negotiate with "terrorists", so there is that old saying "never make an idle threat". The public act of beheading him communicated that they where serious in their threat, which then forced the US to back up its own threat of military action in retaliation for violence towards US citizens.
The second reason was properganda, its a big public statement that not only do they not fear Amercia, they are capable of inflicting damage (a single citizen) upon the worlds great superpower.
"The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it"
On a technical level, the video is now out there on the internet and once out you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Islamic State is a new "empire" currently conducting a war of expansion, much like many of the Western European powers did during the last millennium. The Geneva conventions are in essence a gentleman's agreement between the members of the "nation-state" club as to how to conduct war in a "civilized" manner. Islamic State rejects the fundamental notion that it needs to be bound by the rules and traditions of "western civilization".
In essence what they have done is to publicly execute a hostage for non-payment of ransom, a common practice several centuries ago.
The more political issue is censorship and properganda warfare, who gets to control which information we see. Censorship or adding a non-skippable PSA is all about attempting to control the message, that the little people must not be allowed to think the wrong things, doubly so in a democracy. The war against communism followed a similar pattern of attempting to censor "subversive" ideas, such that Western Civilization isn't the only way to run things.
This also won't work against the "terrorist" Buddhist monks who have decades of training in maintaining a perfectly zen state of calmness even in extreme situations... however their shaven heads and robes might be a dead give away.
"The Chinese foreign ministry has accused the Dalai Lama of "terrorism in disguise" for supporting Tibetans who have set themselves on fire in protest against Beijing's rule." - http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
The alternative hypothesis is that as someone who has chosen to commit suicide by train, would you prefer to watched in your final moments by a train driver, or would you prefer a little privacy
Edward Snowdon understood what would happen if he where to seriously try and push the issue internally.
The global surveillance network was a core NSA policy authorized at the highest levels. This was not simply some rouge agent or rouge department. Previous individuals have attempted to raise concerns internally and failed to achieve any change underlying policy. The NSA has even deliberately lied to congress on the matter.
As a contractor, he has no employment rights. Making noise would likely get his security clearance revoked and his employer finding someone else who doesn't have a moral problem with surveillance. It would also likely get himself added to the NSA watchlist.
As a pragmatist, his decision to publicly release records has successfully created enough political pressure for congress to at least review the NSA's policies. A cowardly little shit who was willing to risk everything on a high risk venture, with a very strong possibility of getting caught, that takes some major balls from someone who knows exactly what the NSA is capable of.
Though in this case, it also highlights a degree of redundancy. No material was actually lost, but there where multiple spreadsheets and a data discrepancy discovered during a audit. This triggered an alarm and an investigation, the system failed safe. Maybe that was a high degree of wasted effort over a false alarm, but it would appear to add an extra layer of security against data manipulation to hide deliberate theft.
US Regulations prohibit selling assets through a foreign owned exchange (are there any major US bitcoin exchanges?). There may also be bureaucratic rules for seized assets to be offered at public auction. There may also be the worry that dumping a large quantities of bitcoin onto the open market may crash the price, and someone would have to be responsible for agreeing a selling strategy (which will be criticized with the benefit of hindsight).
The US government also wishes to keep these coins out of the underground economy (ie the digital pirates). They can't verify the identities or force a conditions of resale agreement on joe public at a bitcoin exchange.
Now assuming such a system where to be widely implemented in software, a more likely scenario would be for the government to impose this address history blacklisted on government registered financial institutions. The government would no longer need to seize the Silk Road bitcoins, but simply discover their anonymous bitcoin address and freeze the the entire forward chain of the proceeds of "illicit crime" (this would be done mostly likely before a trial). Should the bitcoins themselves be recovered, the government can simply remove the address from the blacklist and then auction them back to the market.
There would still be an underground economy that didn't care for the blacklist designation, but if there was a significant amount of blacklisted coins and sufficent market demand for whitelisted coins (ie I can't pay my taxes or my mortgage with blacklisted coins, maybe the major exchanges would become legally obligated to implement the blacklists), then there would effectively become a market rate at bitcoin laundries selling blacklisted coins for whitelisted ones.
Slashdot Mirror
8. There are no real rules about posting
9. There are no real rules about moderation either - enjoy your ban
There are no old, bold pilots
Agile is fundamentally a consultancy methodology, with an effective sales pitch. The true goal is to offload project risk onto the client, especially one who doesn't actually know what they want. The negotiation goes a bit like this:
Our job is to help you figure out what it is that you want. You give us some ideas, you pay us for a month, we go away and build something then bring it back to ask if this what you indeed wanted, we get your feedback and you can keep paying us again for next month. You don't need to do the hard work of actually creating a spec, and you are free to change your mind about what you want at any time and at any stage during the project. We provide the continuous integration guarantee, meaning we will always have a shippable product, and when you eventually run out of money we will declare the project a success and ship you "something". You get to decide when the project is DONE and we get a monthly paycheck with no risk of project failure.
This of course is far better than the waterfall model, where the vendor insists that the client pays them for the privilege of spending several months with expensive architects arguing over a realistic and self-consistent spec, with no short-term visible progress to be reported upwards, with the vendor then having to quote a fixed price for the project, assuming all the risk of project failure, having to deal with un-billable client change requests not in the technical original spec, and then having the client argue that the original spec they spent so long discussing wasn't what they actually wanted after all.
So by selling management the illusion of control, the vendor avoids of the politics of not getting paid.
Bail was already set at $500,000... which may have been slightly outside of his price range
They had an episode of Star Trek exploring this issue 27 years ago. Lieutenant Reginald Barclay creates a holodeck version of the crew including his erotic fantasy version of Deanna Troi
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
It was quite literally a viral bubble:
"The multicolor effects of intricate lines and flame-like streaks on the petals were vivid and spectacular and made the bulbs that produced these even more exotic-looking plants highly sought-after. It is now known that this effect is due to the bulbs being infected with a type of tulip-specific mosaic virus, known as the "Tulip breaking virus", so called because it "breaks" the one petal color into two or more."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem is - when the person "asking" is in a position of authority
So no sex for you until you have successfully solved the problem of implementing a communist utopia and eliminated all hierarchies, power structures including your own celebrity authority
As a developer solo-managing a legacy codebase, it is still important to have various rounds of external QA.
The first issue is that the developer can be so far into the code that they can completely miss what is obvious or un-intuitive to a non-technical user. This may also involve legacy bugs or interactions with code they havn't written themselves.
The second issue is that the the spec itself may not have been fully defined, or what you have is the developer's interpretation of the spec, and this may require clarification or feedback once someone has seen the end result.
The third issue is that a developer will focus their attention on the things they consider most important. Sometimes the best way to achieve this is to just give a developer a list of minor bugs/features, which is a great way of focusing attention by clarifying the spec and letting a developer speed though a bunch of quick fixes which have a predefined spec (defining the spec is half the mental effort).
So in general a developer should be capable of doing a first round of internal QA on their own code, but a second pair of eyes is still occasionally needed, as the developer has a very peculiar set of perception filters.
"enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms"
This would either imply one of two things (or both):
1. The Chinese Government wants to install encryption backdoors in its own systems, to prevent employees from keeping secrets from it.
2. The Chinese Government is worried that the US government has installed encryption backdoors in the standard algorithms and wants to enable its employees to keep secrets from the US government
"enable the government to use its own encryption algorithms"
12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
http://www.eviloverlord.com/li...
Article III, Section 3:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
If Enemies is a subset of Everyone, then giving Aid and Comfort to Everyone is an act of Treason, at least until the US makes peace with Everyone. Specifically what Snowdon exposed was the difficulty the US Government has in distinguishing between Everyone and Enemy.
"Eddard Stark: What you suggest is treason.
Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Only if we lose."
Sex is not optional, the future of the human race depends on it.
Fair is the compromise between the balance of interests of the various people who create, consume and reuse of creative content.
"Fair" could be defined as anywhere between everything is automatically public domain and fair is giving the content creator absolute power over every tiny aspect about how this work is used until the end of time. Both extremes would affect the possible business models of content creators and the net social utility value that humanity derives from this content.
"Fair use" is the current attempt to legally define where this balance should lie. The real question of course is how do you put a financial figure on net social utility value, when the copyright industry has a vested interest in maximizing and guaranteeing licensing fees.
Goatse.cx - social media for those with nothing to hide
You mean like this gossip story involving Princess Diana's fertility test pre-embryo's which where stolen by a rogue doctor and implanted into his wife as a surrogate. She is apparently called Sarah, and if it wasn't for the cutoff date on male-first inheritance of the crown, she would technically be in the direct line of succession, after Prince Charles and before Kate Middleton.
http://metro.co.uk/2015/04/25/...
“It’s your father’s Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is the weapon of a computer hacker. Not as clumsy or as random as an iphone, but a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For years, the hackers were the guardians of peace and justice in the internet. Before the dark times, before the NSA.”
Firstly, IS did offer to ransom James Foley, for $100 million dollars, and the US refused to negotiate with "terrorists", so there is that old saying "never make an idle threat". The public act of beheading him communicated that they where serious in their threat, which then forced the US to back up its own threat of military action in retaliation for violence towards US citizens.
The second reason was properganda, its a big public statement that not only do they not fear Amercia, they are capable of inflicting damage (a single citizen) upon the worlds great superpower.
"The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it"
On a technical level, the video is now out there on the internet and once out you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Islamic State is a new "empire" currently conducting a war of expansion, much like many of the Western European powers did during the last millennium. The Geneva conventions are in essence a gentleman's agreement between the members of the "nation-state" club as to how to conduct war in a "civilized" manner. Islamic State rejects the fundamental notion that it needs to be bound by the rules and traditions of "western civilization".
In essence what they have done is to publicly execute a hostage for non-payment of ransom, a common practice several centuries ago.
The more political issue is censorship and properganda warfare, who gets to control which information we see. Censorship or adding a non-skippable PSA is all about attempting to control the message, that the little people must not be allowed to think the wrong things, doubly so in a democracy. The war against communism followed a similar pattern of attempting to censor "subversive" ideas, such that Western Civilization isn't the only way to run things.
This also won't work against the "terrorist" Buddhist monks who have decades of training in maintaining a perfectly zen state of calmness even in extreme situations... however their shaven heads and robes might be a dead give away.
"The Chinese foreign ministry has accused the Dalai Lama of "terrorism in disguise" for supporting Tibetans who have set themselves on fire in protest against Beijing's rule." - http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
The alternative hypothesis is that as someone who has chosen to commit suicide by train, would you prefer to watched in your final moments by a train driver, or would you prefer a little privacy
Edward Snowdon understood what would happen if he where to seriously try and push the issue internally.
The global surveillance network was a core NSA policy authorized at the highest levels. This was not simply some rouge agent or rouge department. Previous individuals have attempted to raise concerns internally and failed to achieve any change underlying policy. The NSA has even deliberately lied to congress on the matter.
As a contractor, he has no employment rights. Making noise would likely get his security clearance revoked and his employer finding someone else who doesn't have a moral problem with surveillance. It would also likely get himself added to the NSA watchlist.
As a pragmatist, his decision to publicly release records has successfully created enough political pressure for congress to at least review the NSA's policies. A cowardly little shit who was willing to risk everything on a high risk venture, with a very strong possibility of getting caught, that takes some major balls from someone who knows exactly what the NSA is capable of.
Though in this case, it also highlights a degree of redundancy. No material was actually lost, but there where multiple spreadsheets and a data discrepancy discovered during a audit. This triggered an alarm and an investigation, the system failed safe. Maybe that was a high degree of wasted effort over a false alarm, but it would appear to add an extra layer of security against data manipulation to hide deliberate theft.
US Regulations prohibit selling assets through a foreign owned exchange (are there any major US bitcoin exchanges?). There may also be bureaucratic rules for seized assets to be offered at public auction. There may also be the worry that dumping a large quantities of bitcoin onto the open market may crash the price, and someone would have to be responsible for agreeing a selling strategy (which will be criticized with the benefit of hindsight).
The US government also wishes to keep these coins out of the underground economy (ie the digital pirates). They can't verify the identities or force a conditions of resale agreement on joe public at a bitcoin exchange.
Now assuming such a system where to be widely implemented in software, a more likely scenario would be for the government to impose this address history blacklisted on government registered financial institutions. The government would no longer need to seize the Silk Road bitcoins, but simply discover their anonymous bitcoin address and freeze the the entire forward chain of the proceeds of "illicit crime" (this would be done mostly likely before a trial). Should the bitcoins themselves be recovered, the government can simply remove the address from the blacklist and then auction them back to the market.
There would still be an underground economy that didn't care for the blacklist designation, but if there was a significant amount of blacklisted coins and sufficent market demand for whitelisted coins (ie I can't pay my taxes or my mortgage with blacklisted coins, maybe the major exchanges would become legally obligated to implement the blacklists), then there would effectively become a market rate at bitcoin laundries selling blacklisted coins for whitelisted ones.