> MOST of the critical infrastructure, the really important stuff, is NOT unprotected.

Yes, it has 95% coverage. Unfortunately, it's alike a dike against a flood. One weak spot and the intruders are in. The intruders don't even have to be clever, just persistent.

> Have you ever noticed that companies locate their research divisions away from the day-to-day operations divisions? It is to keep the timeframes separate.

No, it's turf building and budget protection. By segregating the developers from devops, devops can _hide_ their resources and keep them sequestered from developer requests. And putting the systems into a "requests go to managers, and only then to devops" makes the managers vital to allocating resources. It can protect their team from excess pecuniary demands, but far too often it's used to make the manager more important to the process than they should be, and grants them personal power over other groups' projects.

I've been documenting a tragic example of this for the past few weeks. I'm afraid the manager is in for a _big_ surprise when they find out that writing run books is their new highest priority, and their personal approval of run books is no longer expected.

I jump under desks! But I'm a very, very senior technologist, and I spend a lot of my time _teaching_ people how to do these things.

> This sysadmin/scripter/system architect/DBA

And then they stop doing _any_ of the tasks well. They don't show up for planning. they don't document their code, because "it's self documenting" or "documentation is unrelable". They say "Just Google It" when most of what is on Google about the task is _wrong_ and written by people who aren't aware of the subtleties. They refuse to mentor, because it keeps them away from the meetings where they can soak up and interfere in _every single groups's projects_ by citing standards that are only in their head, or worse, are only in the mental image of what other people remember they said once about something else.

One of the great pleasures of my professional life is finding these people and educating them in how _not_ to be a micro-managing block to everyone's work: it involves actually documenting the _working procedures_ for daily tasks so other people can do them. Many of them are afraid of the loss of control or possible errors, but the improvement in speed of daily procedures is enormously satisfying.

No. It's not. The most effective and efficient forms map the face to a uniform shape, almost spherical shape, especially for 3D facial recognition. The resulting consistent transform is *edge* based, not 3d structure shaped. Anything that adds extra edges, or re-arranges them, like makeup that adds eyebrow like dark markings or makes the face strongly asymmetrical consuses the hell out of it.

Oh yes, Tax Act tries to use that to prod you to upgrade from the free version. In the free version, you can't print to a file, you can only print to a printer. This is easily gotten around with a utility like PDFCreator.

PDFCreator can't help with tax websites that won't let you efile unless you pay, but it can get you around ones that try to hold your data hostage and not allow you to save to disk, only to paper.

> C++ (and do a lesser extent C) lose support because of their extremely poor support for utf8.

That's because for most programming, UTF8 is not worthy of support. It's inconsistently used, it arbitrarily increases the of individual. It would be much safer used as only binary strings, not as actual characters which must be parsed and reformatted among different environments. The advent and popularity of UTF8 with its confusing and ill defined management of case and formally POSIX compliant operations such as file naming has effectively slowed system programming by many years.

From the start, the design of C emphasized speed and efficiency over all else. "Trust the programmer" was one of the mottoes. If the programmers are doing something weird, assume they know what they're doing, and maybe print a warning, but allow it. C was, by design, weakly typed, and minimalist, especially when it comes to checking for errors because such checks take time.

Often, we've seen efforts to improve C's safety that were eventually sidelined because they were a performance hit. The iostream library is safer, but much slower than stdio. Which one do people prefer? stdio! C libraries are full of routines that do not do bounds checking, for the sake of performance and simplicity. gets() is an infamous one. The language itself is so easy to to use insecurely. Pointers can be set to point absolutely anywhere, and those places both read and written at will. If the OS, with help from modern CPU memory management facilities, didn't set boundaries and kill programs whenever they stepped over the bounds, there'd be nothing to stop them.

Another idea was adding instructions to dynamic memory allocation to do memory wipes. Before freeing the memory, the computer was instructed to zero it out. This resulted in as much as a 10% performance hit, and was quickly abandoned. Wiping memory has been proposed at the OS level as well. But there are always apps that don't need that because they aren't doing anything sensitive.

That brings up a big problem with the article. Where should responsibility for security lie? With the OS? I think trying improve a language's security is the wrong approach. That's what they sort of tried to do with Java. It's like trying to prevent bank robberies by securing the steering wheels of all potential getaway vehicles. Yes, make languages easier to use and less prone to bugs, but don't specifically target security.

> Actually it can't. That's kind of the point of git.

Unfortunately, many git users keep their SSH keys unencrypted on their local hard drives or on network accessible home directories. This means that a careless git admin may have their SSH keys stolen by quite amateur crackers, and leave the public repositories open to quite malicious changes. I've had precisely such discussions with personnel who insist that they trust the people they work with and they have a firewall, so they're not at risk.

Seems like it is pretty standard to fly economy. Even in the industries the parent poster listed, policies tend to be economy except for international flights and executives.

Thing is...if you fly often for work, you will reach status within a year and be getting upgraded on every flight. The monday-thursday consultants and other heavy business travelers are getting their upgrades for free...the fees are usually being billed to the client, and clients don't like to pay for first-class.

It would, except Comcast's monopoly is government-granted. A municipal government has decided to make Comcast the sole cable provider in the area, and prohibited other cable companies from offering competing service. The solution isn't to bash Comcast for acting like a monopoly (as much as I'd like to). It's to prohibit municipal governments from granting cable and phone monopolies.

I think it should be handled the way electricity and gas are handled - the company that owns the infrastructure cannot sell what is transported through those pipes and lines. They can sell service to other companies which provide the content, but they themselves cannot sell content. e.g. The Gas Company owns the gas lines coming to my house, but I can buy my gas from hundreds of companies which sell gas.

Also note that if there had been competitive cable internet, it would actually be Comcast paying Netflix for better service. If Netflix sucked on Comcast, Comcast's customers would've threatened to jump ship to another cable Internet provider. So to retain customers, Comcast would've been willing to pay Netflix to host their media locally to improve service. The only reason Comcast was able to strongarm Netflix into paying is because they have a monopoly on their customers.

Smart for who? Not for the employee.

Unless flying regularly is clearly stated in your contract (and I mean regularly, not 'you may be asked to travel from time to time'), the company is inconveniencing you over and above your normal duties, and causing actual discomfort in the case of many economy flights. You ask for decent standards or refuse.

I'm astonished to see so many people defend this. For flights of two or three hours, fine. For anything longer - absolutely not.

Cheers,
Ian

Same in the Netherlands, with the addition that the tax office will receive from your banks and employer complete financial data on your wages, taxes withheld, bank balances, mortgage payments, assets, and debts. These days they send you a tax return with all the relevant data already filled in; all you have to do is add any additional income they don't know about (not applicable to most people), or any additional expenses that are tax deductible (medical bills & such). For most people that means a quick check and signature before returning it digitally.

Many people with their own company, freelancers, and people with a lot of liquid assets will hire an accountant. We have such a byzantine set of rules on deductions, financial aids and exemptions that it pays to know the rules and be creative, and a good accountant can find the loopholes for you. With a top income tax of 52% (which already kicks in at 55k euro or so), 21% VAT and ever rising council taxes, I feel no qualms for dodging the system where I can.

Try Tax Act. The free version will nag you to upgrade, but you don't have to, and they no longer put income limits on the efiling.

Limits were always one of the many stupid things the IRS did. The IRS wants everyone to efile, not send in paper, becuase it saves them money. Then they try to charge extra for efiling, which drove people to file paper. Also heard that the chances of being audited are lower for paper filings, another reason not to efile. I didn't know about being forced to go with paper to deal with identity theft, but it figures. We've never had that problem, and we've always gone with whichever way was cheaper. We were not going to pay an additional $15 or whatever the charge was, to efile.

> And yes I think if Texas voted to join Mexico the USA would accep

Not a _chance_. Texas has oil, just like Iraq.