About 10 people fall off the commuter trains and die every day in Bombay. They tend to ride outside the train cars standing on the window sills (toes going inward) and fingers clinging to the rain gutters while the electric poles carrying the overhead wires whizz by. Get tried, lean a little outward... death by falling from the train. Trains don't stop, relatives have to pay a fine to get the bodies from the morgue. But usually they can bribe their way out of the fine.
http://bombaystreets.com/archives/tag/trainshttp://hubpages.com/hub/trainsinindiasomemodernsomeancientfastandslow
How long before FB bans this extension, (assuming there is some way they can)? 5$ for less than one week.
Assuming the extension is completely on the browser side and they can't identify it, how long before FB changes the API and style sheets to break the screen scraping? 5$ for less than one week.
Every dollar spent by anybody is actually a dollar of revenue to the counter party of the same transaction. You spend a dollar on bread. Your grocer gets a dollar in revenue. Right?
Now think about wasted money. Wasted money is not cash burnt in the fireplace. It is just money spent, without adequate or reasonable return. For the counterparty to that transaction that money is unearned revenue, undeserved profit. When you say government is wasting 300 billion dollars, it represents 300 billion dollars of unearned undeserved income to people. They would fight tooth and nail to keep that breach open. They would not let those loopholes to be closed, the procedures to be mended. The looters are also actively aided and abetted by the congresscritters. That is why it is so difficult to cut down the waste and fraud in the government.
The problem is not exclusive to the government either.
Many large private companies also are encumbered with such bureaucratic process. Many electric utility companies that are semi-monopolies insulated from the market vagaries are worse than government. They would casually spend 25 million dollars to "upgrade" from PeopleSoft 8.1 to PeopleSoft 8.2 or whatever. Actual work will be done by some H1-Bs who get paid about 65K a year, but his body-shopping Indian company would bill someone for 125$ a hour, from there are series of shell companies would keep adding 10% at every stage till it eventually reaches the utility company at some insane 300$ a hour rate. The purpose of the series of shell companies is to hide the kick backs going to the top management teams that "approve" of this project.
I would not begrudge our soldiers in Afghanistan small comforts. But still I was taken aback by the news that Pentagon spends more on airconditioning barracks in Afghanistan than the entire NASA budget. If Pentagon bought some more efficient air conditioners without compromising comfort, may be we could fund a few more of these missions. Quite sad to see the congresscritters make grand statements about government waste and then ram their pet pork projects through defense appropriations.
You seen to have some English comprehension problem. My daughter's gmail account was not upgraded to G+ accidentally by Google. She got an invite from me. Filled in the form. She was queasy about entering her real date of birth and asked me if it was ok. We thought about it and I allowed her to enter it. And the g+ account was rejected. She is over 13. So her gmail account continues without any change. In what way your links show I am making this up? What made you think I alleged Google was violating COPPA? I think none of the companies, FaceBook, Yahoo, Google, MSN would violate COPPA. The fastest way to lose a brandname and goodwill is try to mess to with COPPA.
In the link you provided someone allowed his kid to get a gmail account, clearly violating the rule "no gmail for under 13s". When Google came to know it suspended the under age account. No big deal. That dad is a whiner. He should have paid the damned 9$ a year to some domain registrar and given his son an email account out of his own domain. If you use a free service from google yahoo MSN or FB, be prepared to cut off.
I sent out some invites and my daughter, and some of my nephews were denied entry to Google+ because they are not yet over 18. So Google is not really trying all that hard to woo people into its fold. But all this antics by Facebook makes it look scared. BTW I hope Facebook permits users under 18 and all these kids playing farmville in Facebook are not lying about their age.
Amazon and all the internet companies are beneficiaries of countless amount of research dollars spent by the US Government over the decades without knowing if anything will pay off or not. Countless researchers in State universities contributed code and stuff over all these years to make internet a viable platform. US Federal and state governments spend so much of money enforcing intellectual property rights, even when the one-click patent is such a travesty of the concept of patents. After enjoying all these benefits, Amazon and the internet sales companies are nitpicking over the definitions to maintain a apparent 7% to 10% price diff compared to brick and mortar retailers.
All the complaints about number of jurisdictions and tax laws do not hold water. We could come up with a open XML based publication of tax code by each municipality.
The big companies have become very adept in convincing so many Americans that "All tax is bad, All tax is theft".
The key observation made by the researchers is that, the copper fins that form the heat exchanger collects dust. It is the dust that is reducing the heat exchange efficiency. (The boundary layer stuff is completely wrong. There is a boundary layer on the fan blades too. On the aircraft wings too there is a boundary layer. In fact there is a boundary layer even on the supersonic aircraft wings). But the fan that is blowing the air is completely free of dust. So instead of separating the radiating surfaces as one component and fan as a separate one, if you integrate it and use the fan blades as the radiating surface it would be dust free.
They came up with a helical groove design to maximize the radiating surface while also moving some air to create circulation. The dust free radiating surface heat exchange efficiency was so high, they needed to move very little air. So the final design has large moving surfaces with small grooves in them to move a little air. That is all.
The moving helical groove fan can not be scraping along the top of the IC chip. There is a gap. And if that gap is not well protected from dust, it will get there. May be they can come up with a seal and a fluid coupling? I am not sure.
We are wasting time arguing about it. I am not a lawyer, it is likely you are not one either. Encryption is not new. Encryption of digital storage is new. But criminals and non-criminals have used cyphers and secret keys to encode messages for a long time. In fact the Romans used a form of substitution-key cyphers 2000 years ago. I am sure there is a legal precedent in forcing a defendant to decipher encoded messages on plain sheets of paper. If the judge sees the connection, it will be decided on that precedent. If the judge gets bamboozled, we might get a different ruling contradicting the precedent.
Of course, I don't know what that precedent is, nor do I have the resources or skills to find it.
You seem to think the purpose of the fifth amendment is to allow the guilty to evade justice. Not so buddy. Fifth amendment is also closely related to obstruction of justice. You can not destroy evidence. You can not refuse to hand over evidence. Only thing you can do is to refuse to help the investigators decode and link the evidence. Also you get the right to any exculpatory evidence (evidence of you innocence) in the hands of the prosecution. Seen in totality, requiring the decryption of a hard disk is nothing more than the requirement to open you office safe.
So can a defendant refuse to open the safe in the house when the search warrant is executed? Can the defendant refuse to hand over the key to the bank lockers? The defendant can claim, "Gee! I don't know how that pistol ended up in my locker! You prove I put it there Mr District Attorney". Same way the defendant can say, "Gee! I don't know how the details of the Cayman Islands Bank account and details ended up in my encrypted drive. You prove the link Mr District Attorney". That is all the fifth allows you to say.
Fifth Amendment does not give you the right to destroy evidence. Or the right to refuse to hand over incriminating documents and details. You can refuse to provide clues about where you have hidden or dumped the evidence. You can refuse answer questions about such evidence. But beyond that it definitely does not give you the right to refuse to decrypt a hard disk, if a proper search warrant is presented.
Nope. Requiring the accused to decrypt the hard disk is exactly equal to asking him/her to open an office safe to show its contents when a search warrant is served.
Management usually feels code review is a waste of time. If we could make that programmer produce more new code instead of reviewing (an apparently working) code it is more efficient right?
The benefits of code review or intangible immeasurable benefits in the future, most likely going to benefit whoever is going to be in my chair at the time. So why invest in it? That is another tack taken by managers.
But if bugs are found, we could estimate the resources needed to fix it and expand my empire. That is another tack taken by managers.
Even when the top management insists on code review, the middle managers implement it in the most asinine manner. Comment lines to code line ratio. Length of functions. Number of spaces per tab or braces closing style etc instead of truly insightful code review of algorithms and failure modes and consequences.
Finally in my neck of the woods, (scientific and engineering analysis software development) competent peers are rarely found. Even a top company employing hundreds of developers for circuit simulation, say, would have just two guys in any super super specialty like eye-diagram creation, and the work load, locations, skill sets etc are not likely to permit easy code reviews.
Definitely not true. I am an Indian American. When Americans apologize for mangling my name, I tell them, I mangled many American names too, so were even. Then I go on to explain that India has so many languages and the names have many variations, and Indian constantly adjust the names of other Indian names from other states and regions.
For example, most South Indian names will have an ending in "an" as in Srinivasan or Srinivasalu. North Indians constantly shorten it to Srinivas. Further they would change Srinivas to Shrinivas too. Most Indian names are names of deities or regular feel good words like brilliant, wise, happiness, beauty, etc. So they would translate the word to their own language. Thus Sundaram meaning beauty in Tamil becomes Sundar meaning beauty in Hindi. Some Indian languages do not have separate glyphs for many sounds. For example Tamil has the same glyph which is used for the sounds of "ka", "ga", "gha" and "kha". So most tamils mispronounce the North Indian and English names, substituting ka for ga or gha. Tamil also has restrictions like no word can begin with a double consonant. So they causally stick a vowel somewhere in the first syllabel. School becomes (y)i-school, Pramod becomes Piramod etc.
So name mangling is so common and widespread in India, most of the time it is ignored. But sometimes people joke about it. One comic suggested that "South Indians should start calling the North Indian state of Haryana, Haryan because Hindi newscasters repeatedly mangle the name of the South Indian state of Kerala to Keral".
None of the competitors of Apple have any kind of cash hoard. Not even those who have a monopoly on some kind of OS+document+presentation software due to vendor lock up. They hardly get 15 billion dollars per quarter, as I said, chicken feed. Even if it is something, such competitors play by such strict rules they say, "It is not cricket" and refuse to take any kind of unfair advantage.
It is only the diabolically perverse Steve Jobs and Apple who would dream of sinking 70 b dollars to electronic parts manufacturing. You know the profit margins on that industry. Huge! So huge every year the price of what they make drop by 25%. Just sink in 70 b dollars, sit back, down a pina colada and count the profits year after year.
Also, there are clauses saying that there will be no grace period if you leave the company to join a competitor. My friend was working for company A, he left to join company B which was a partner, not a competitor. But in the mean time, A bought my company company C, and we were competing with B in one market segment. So they took away his vested options. Then after some back and forth, they agreed he is going to a division of B that will not be competing with us. So he got his options back, but still had to exercise them all within 90 days of leaving. So yeah, there are all sorts of fine print in employee stock option plans. All the fine prints come into play when you are no longer the employee.
These are employee stock options, and remain valid only as long as you are an employee. Once you resign or you are fired, you get a grace period to exercise them. Vested stock options means, you can exercise them before the expiry date or within 90 days of resigning from the company, whichever is earlier. I had such options in my company, I stuck with the company, my friends and colleagues left. They were told they had 90 days to exercise. I knew it long back that was the deal. So I did not have to read the fine print. It was common knowledge.
Beware: If all you can do is code there's a great chance your job will end up in India. You have to have broader skills now to be competitive. Instead of taking classes in an area you obviously know well (i.e. coding), why not take more general business classes or in the sciences so you can use your coding skills as a tool to solve critical problems rather than being a coder waiting for a problem to get assigned to you? 99% of the people you will need to work with aren't coders and if you don't have any general skills you won't be able to work with them as effectively.
Good luck,
-c
I agree with your advice but not on the reasoning. There is a good chance your job will end up in India even if it needs broader skills. India has more English speakers than USA, top three largest circulated English newspapers are in India. The top schools there follow USA very closely. The accounting and law of India are derivatives of English law and accounting and shares a lot with USA. You can bet there is no job that is safe from being exported to India, except may be the CEOs and government jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
About 10 people fall off the commuter trains and die every day in Bombay. They tend to ride outside the train cars standing on the window sills (toes going inward) and fingers clinging to the rain gutters while the electric poles carrying the overhead wires whizz by. Get tried, lean a little outward ... death by falling from the train. Trains don't stop, relatives have to pay a fine to get the bodies from the morgue. But usually they can bribe their way out of the fine.
http://bombaystreets.com/archives/tag/trains
http://hubpages.com/hub/trainsinindiasomemodernsomeancientfastandslow
Assuming the extension is completely on the browser side and they can't identify it, how long before FB changes the API and style sheets to break the screen scraping? 5$ for less than one week.
Now think about wasted money. Wasted money is not cash burnt in the fireplace. It is just money spent, without adequate or reasonable return. For the counterparty to that transaction that money is unearned revenue, undeserved profit. When you say government is wasting 300 billion dollars, it represents 300 billion dollars of unearned undeserved income to people. They would fight tooth and nail to keep that breach open. They would not let those loopholes to be closed, the procedures to be mended. The looters are also actively aided and abetted by the congresscritters. That is why it is so difficult to cut down the waste and fraud in the government.
Many large private companies also are encumbered with such bureaucratic process. Many electric utility companies that are semi-monopolies insulated from the market vagaries are worse than government. They would casually spend 25 million dollars to "upgrade" from PeopleSoft 8.1 to PeopleSoft 8.2 or whatever. Actual work will be done by some H1-Bs who get paid about 65K a year, but his body-shopping Indian company would bill someone for 125$ a hour, from there are series of shell companies would keep adding 10% at every stage till it eventually reaches the utility company at some insane 300$ a hour rate. The purpose of the series of shell companies is to hide the kick backs going to the top management teams that "approve" of this project.
That botnet is run by a rogue newspaper called News of The World, and the ring leader is one James Murdoch. Where do I collect my reward?
Sorry to have jumped the gun. Will take back my totally uncalled for comment about reading comprehension. Sorry buddy.
Thanks for the information. Oddly I feel better knowing that Pentagon is not wasting that much. Sorry to have fallen for some marketers' spiel.
I would not begrudge our soldiers in Afghanistan small comforts. But still I was taken aback by the news that Pentagon spends more on airconditioning barracks in Afghanistan than the entire NASA budget. If Pentagon bought some more efficient air conditioners without compromising comfort, may be we could fund a few more of these missions. Quite sad to see the congresscritters make grand statements about government waste and then ram their pet pork projects through defense appropriations.
You're making this up. Do you know how I know?
You seen to have some English comprehension problem. My daughter's gmail account was not upgraded to G+ accidentally by Google. She got an invite from me. Filled in the form. She was queasy about entering her real date of birth and asked me if it was ok. We thought about it and I allowed her to enter it. And the g+ account was rejected. She is over 13. So her gmail account continues without any change. In what way your links show I am making this up? What made you think I alleged Google was violating COPPA? I think none of the companies, FaceBook, Yahoo, Google, MSN would violate COPPA. The fastest way to lose a brandname and goodwill is try to mess to with COPPA.
In the link you provided someone allowed his kid to get a gmail account, clearly violating the rule "no gmail for under 13s". When Google came to know it suspended the under age account. No big deal. That dad is a whiner. He should have paid the damned 9$ a year to some domain registrar and given his son an email account out of his own domain. If you use a free service from google yahoo MSN or FB, be prepared to cut off.
I sent out some invites and my daughter, and some of my nephews were denied entry to Google+ because they are not yet over 18. So Google is not really trying all that hard to woo people into its fold. But all this antics by Facebook makes it look scared. BTW I hope Facebook permits users under 18 and all these kids playing farmville in Facebook are not lying about their age.
All the complaints about number of jurisdictions and tax laws do not hold water. We could come up with a open XML based publication of tax code by each municipality.
The big companies have become very adept in convincing so many Americans that "All tax is bad, All tax is theft".
They came up with a helical groove design to maximize the radiating surface while also moving some air to create circulation. The dust free radiating surface heat exchange efficiency was so high, they needed to move very little air. So the final design has large moving surfaces with small grooves in them to move a little air. That is all.
The moving helical groove fan can not be scraping along the top of the IC chip. There is a gap. And if that gap is not well protected from dust, it will get there. May be they can come up with a seal and a fluid coupling? I am not sure.
Of course, I don't know what that precedent is, nor do I have the resources or skills to find it.
You seem to think the purpose of the fifth amendment is to allow the guilty to evade justice. Not so buddy. Fifth amendment is also closely related to obstruction of justice. You can not destroy evidence. You can not refuse to hand over evidence. Only thing you can do is to refuse to help the investigators decode and link the evidence. Also you get the right to any exculpatory evidence (evidence of you innocence) in the hands of the prosecution. Seen in totality, requiring the decryption of a hard disk is nothing more than the requirement to open you office safe.
So she enters a pass phrase that actually causes the computer to wipe the drive. OOPS! I entered the wrong phrase. Sorry, my bad.
She will be charged with obstruction of justice. Open and shut case for that charge. She ends up in jail anyway.
Fifth Amendment does not give you the right to destroy evidence. Or the right to refuse to hand over incriminating documents and details. You can refuse to provide clues about where you have hidden or dumped the evidence. You can refuse answer questions about such evidence. But beyond that it definitely does not give you the right to refuse to decrypt a hard disk, if a proper search warrant is presented.
Nope. Requiring the accused to decrypt the hard disk is exactly equal to asking him/her to open an office safe to show its contents when a search warrant is served.
The benefits of code review or intangible immeasurable benefits in the future, most likely going to benefit whoever is going to be in my chair at the time. So why invest in it? That is another tack taken by managers.
But if bugs are found, we could estimate the resources needed to fix it and expand my empire. That is another tack taken by managers.
Even when the top management insists on code review, the middle managers implement it in the most asinine manner. Comment lines to code line ratio. Length of functions. Number of spaces per tab or braces closing style etc instead of truly insightful code review of algorithms and failure modes and consequences.
Finally in my neck of the woods, (scientific and engineering analysis software development) competent peers are rarely found. Even a top company employing hundreds of developers for circuit simulation, say, would have just two guys in any super super specialty like eye-diagram creation, and the work load, locations, skill sets etc are not likely to permit easy code reviews.
Nobody likes it when you get their name wrong.
Definitely not true. I am an Indian American. When Americans apologize for mangling my name, I tell them, I mangled many American names too, so were even. Then I go on to explain that India has so many languages and the names have many variations, and Indian constantly adjust the names of other Indian names from other states and regions.
For example, most South Indian names will have an ending in "an" as in Srinivasan or Srinivasalu. North Indians constantly shorten it to Srinivas. Further they would change Srinivas to Shrinivas too. Most Indian names are names of deities or regular feel good words like brilliant, wise, happiness, beauty, etc. So they would translate the word to their own language. Thus Sundaram meaning beauty in Tamil becomes Sundar meaning beauty in Hindi. Some Indian languages do not have separate glyphs for many sounds. For example Tamil has the same glyph which is used for the sounds of "ka", "ga", "gha" and "kha". So most tamils mispronounce the North Indian and English names, substituting ka for ga or gha. Tamil also has restrictions like no word can begin with a double consonant. So they causally stick a vowel somewhere in the first syllabel. School becomes (y)i-school, Pramod becomes Piramod etc.
So name mangling is so common and widespread in India, most of the time it is ignored. But sometimes people joke about it. One comic suggested that "South Indians should start calling the North Indian state of Haryana, Haryan because Hindi newscasters repeatedly mangle the name of the South Indian state of Kerala to Keral".
It is only the diabolically perverse Steve Jobs and Apple who would dream of sinking 70 b dollars to electronic parts manufacturing. You know the profit margins on that industry. Huge! So huge every year the price of what they make drop by 25%. Just sink in 70 b dollars, sit back, down a pina colada and count the profits year after year.
And there are a lot of math out there that's still waiting to get solved. Some of it may even have an impact on our daily life.
I have this truly remarkable solution to all these problems out there waiting to be solved. But, alas, this posting is too small to contain it.
Signed,
Dr Jack Kevorkian
Also, there are clauses saying that there will be no grace period if you leave the company to join a competitor. My friend was working for company A, he left to join company B which was a partner, not a competitor. But in the mean time, A bought my company company C, and we were competing with B in one market segment. So they took away his vested options. Then after some back and forth, they agreed he is going to a division of B that will not be competing with us. So he got his options back, but still had to exercise them all within 90 days of leaving. So yeah, there are all sorts of fine print in employee stock option plans. All the fine prints come into play when you are no longer the employee.
These are employee stock options, and remain valid only as long as you are an employee. Once you resign or you are fired, you get a grace period to exercise them. Vested stock options means, you can exercise them before the expiry date or within 90 days of resigning from the company, whichever is earlier. I had such options in my company, I stuck with the company, my friends and colleagues left. They were told they had 90 days to exercise. I knew it long back that was the deal. So I did not have to read the fine print. It was common knowledge.
Beware: If all you can do is code there's a great chance your job will end up in India. You have to have broader skills now to be competitive. Instead of taking classes in an area you obviously know well (i.e. coding), why not take more general business classes or in the sciences so you can use your coding skills as a tool to solve critical problems rather than being a coder waiting for a problem to get assigned to you? 99% of the people you will need to work with aren't coders and if you don't have any general skills you won't be able to work with them as effectively.
Good luck, -c
I agree with your advice but not on the reasoning. There is a good chance your job will end up in India even if it needs broader skills. India has more English speakers than USA, top three largest circulated English newspapers are in India. The top schools there follow USA very closely. The accounting and law of India are derivatives of English law and accounting and shares a lot with USA. You can bet there is no job that is safe from being exported to India, except may be the CEOs and government jobs.
Increase the food supply exponentially. "increase bandwidth exponentially" is a prescription, not a solution.