James Nicoll put it best:

You know, it's been years since I actually read that. The basic concept is funny, obviously, but the author took it much further. I'd forgotten such gems as:

Indeed, NAT boxes really should mark all their packets as evil, because NAT is evil.

Oh, I also quite enjoy:

Oh, obviously. If you have a firewall, every host inside the firewall is perfectly safe. BWAHAHA...

I don't care to, because I've not performed a scientific study into your anecdote.

My hypothesis would be on the placebo effect though.

Bah.

I spent 14 years at IBM, and have been around plenty of other big corps as well. IBM, like all big organizations, isn't and cannot ever be monolithic. With so many people working on so many things in so many places, you're guaranteed to get a broad variety. There have been IBM teams successfully using Agile methods for years, and I'm sure there are lots of other projects who will benefit from it, just as there are many that won't, and whose technical leadership had better resist it, or it'll sink them.

Also, IBM lost the suits not long after I joined the company back in 1997, and well before that in the core areas of Software Group and the labs. Most of the company was generally business casual by 2000, and the geekier areas were your typical shorts and ratty t-shirt places. I'm just talking about clothing, obviously, but dress standards, both official and informal, both reflect and influence attitude and behavior. So if you think IBM is "starched shirts", you don't know IBM, at least IBM's development shops.

Take great care in how you do this, though, and you'd better have a solidly-defined architecture before you do it. Conway's Law points out that however you set up your organizational structure, the architecture of the design will follow suit, so if you break the project up along the wrong lines you are dictating a dysfunctional system architecture.

I disagree.

If you use Gmail as your primary e-mail then your Google password is the crown jewel of your online identity, since every other site out there (including your bank) uses e-mail as the password reset channel. Sure it might be nice if the tool were more general-purpose (though that would require changing the hashing strategy, which intentionally uses relatively few bits as a security measure to protect against brute force), but if you can protect only one password, your e-mail password is the one.

For people who use not just Gmail but lots of Google services, it's even more critical. I store lots of important stuff in Drive, have my phone report my exact location, have my whole address book synced, etc., etc. It doesn't concern me to have so many eggs in one basket because I trust Google to maintain good security, but it can only be as good as my authentication. I use 2FA, but there's still value in being careful with such an important password.

My guess? It's because Uber wants external markers for advertising to grow the business, and their drivers dislike the idea enough that Uber doesn't want to be the entity mandating it. So Uber's lobbyists convinced legislators that this was a good additional "regulation", to give Uber what they want while simultaneously appearing to "crack down" on them. I mean, if everything in the bill was already being done by Uber it would be too obvious that it's just for show.

(Don't read the above as criticism of Uber. Smart businesses always try to turn regulatory oversight to their advantage. One of the downsides of having government big enough to tell businesses what to do is that businesses are then motivated to influence government.)

AKA "Wow, the DMV is full of people who look different to me, because of that, I'm going to discriminate against them all".

I think Uber actually already satisfies most of this. They need external markers on the cars (slap some magnetic signs on), and would probably need to do more safety inspections if MA doesn't already require annual inspections of all registered vehicles, and pay a license fee. They already have $1M insurance coverage and obviously have a list of drivers. I think they do background checks, too, though I'm not completely sure.

Frankly, this seems more like a minimal set of regulations to shut up people who are complaining about the unregulated taxi service. Now they technically won't be unregulated, even though the actual changes to their business will be negligible, assuming the license fee is reasonable.

Or to provide more highly-paid jobs for designers of robots to perform the task without human labor.

You should be a little careful with ideas like that... you may end up hurting the people you're trying to help. In many cases, they'd rather have the crappy, exploitive job than starve while watching the machines do what they used to. The machines will come eventually, but taxes like the one you describe will accelerate the process. In general, taxes and other regulatory inhibitors that are intended to fulfill some social goal are viewed by the market as damage, and routed around if at all possible. That doesn't make them useless, but it does mean that you have to step very carefully.

Courting isn't necessary to life, even though it may feel that way. And, actually, diamonds aren't necessary to courting, either. When I got engaged, I was poor and my wife had money, so she bought our rings, both of them. Diamonds are nice enough as long as they are only symbols. If they are more than that, you have a bigger problem.

Except that if you actually go and find sources other than a sensationalist news article, you'll find several scientific studies that show that this is bullshit. Insulin production is triggered by the presence of glucose, and does not occur with the presence of aspartame even in high concentrations.

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.