According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Government_apology_and_pardon (and The Times of London), he will be pardoned tomorrow, Dec 24th, 2013, UK time...

An apology was expressed in 2009 by the British Government.

But, alas, that doesn't make a past wrong right - the only we can do now is to learn from the past mistakes and wrongs and do whatever we can that it doesn't happen again in the future...

Actually there is kind of major difference between Germany and the rest of the EU.

In Germany, basically every company above a certain size (say 7 or 18 employees or so) can or must must have worker's council (the first size-level is for "can" and the second is for "must-have", but I'm not sure about the size anymore as it changes from time to time). This is the starting point.

For most of the industries, there is also one or more specific unions.

Also, for all large corporations, there needs to be a Supervisory Board (similar to Board of Directors in the USA), of which 50% must be filled-in by worker's council members or unions. In larger companies, there can be dedicated worker's council members, who are paid by the employer but do only worker's council work.

Also, in Germany, there is no such thing as an "HR-Department". There is a "Personalabteilung" (Personnel-Department), that actually represents the employer's interest and there is the worker's council that represents the employee's interest. Therefore, there is also no interest-of-conflict within those organizations such as in a hybrid HR-department.

Lastly, membership in a Union is purely voluntary, i.e. you can work for a corporation/company that is member of a Employer's Organization but that doesn't necessarily require you to be member of a Union.

If the Employer (the company) is member of a specific collective-bargaining Employer's Organization, the salaries of all (or nearly all) rank-and-file employees is agreed-upon between the Union and the Employer's Organization. Technically, this also means that once the company leaves the Employer's-Organization, they do not need to abide by the rules of Collective Bargaining, meaning that they can either negotiate directly with the Unions or directly with each employee separately.

Usually, most companies (apart from the small ones) are members of such Employer's Organizations as that makes it really easy doing the yearly salary-negotiation-dance (as I call it). But unless you are a member, you do not need to, but you still can abide by the rules of Collective Bargaining in your industry.

For example: If you are a software company, you can abide by the rules of Collective Bargaining between Verdi (Services Union) and the Services Employer's Organization (or something like that) or you can negotiate directly with the Union or you can negotiate directly with each employee or group-of-employees directly (if you are not a member of such an organization). But if you are member of, let's say, the "Software Engineers' Service Employer Org" (just to make up an org) and they agreed to Collectively Bargain with Verdi, you must implement their agreement or leave the Org.

The employees who become members of Unions must pay a monthly fee to the Union (a small fraction of their salary). In exchange, they have the right to strike and be paid some amount during such a strike by the Union (I don't know all the details). The counter-tool the employers have against striking employees is "Lock Out", i.e. the employers can "strike" as well by locking out employees, in which case the Unions must pay the employees some part of their salaries.

Germany is extremely consensus-driven in this regard and usually you won't see strikes like in France. Since there is worker's council and/or supervisory-board membership, the worker's council-members as well as the employee-representations in the Supervisory Board have an equal interest in keeping the company healthy as well as achieving good terms for employees. The worker's council-members are elected (once a year, or once every two years, I don't know) by the employees, so they have an interest not only to make sure that the company is healthy but also that the employees are happy as well...

Rest of Europe is quite different insofar as they don't have these rules in this detail, and most of them don't have the Supervisory Board-Requirements...

Hope this helps.

As I understand, you can actually create something and immediately put it into Public Domain. You may need to use the right wording (ask a lawyer) such as "non-revocable", "unlimited", "unrestricted", etc., but your lawyer may be able to help.

Also, you could use something like this if you don't want to put it into Public Domain:

Copyight (c) 2013 by "KJDFOIQWEPOSODKFLKWE)(#I$KJLKDSFMNCVK" (GPG-Encrypted)

This could be use for situations where you might consider keeping certain rights (i.e. not putting into Public Domain) for future use. And the text in quotes above could be something like your name encrypted using your public key... (or such).

Just some thoughts...

In fact, an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) need at least 1,500 hours of practical, i.e. non-simulator flying experience before they can become one. A commercial airline pilot (level below ATP), needs at least 250 hours. And that's not to say "... in his lifetime ...", there are even more restrictions.

Yes, they usually do ALSO train in simulators, but the hours required here must be actual plane-flying.
The problem with long-distance flights is though that most of the time there is really nothing to do for pilot once the plane reaches the cruising altitude and auto-pilot is on (even on smaller planes). You have to watch the skies, the instruments, listen to radio - and that's it. Most of the work is done during take-off and landing (approach).

I don't really get it: Software is just another tool and it seems that every OTHER tool-maker in this world works exactly as described above (observe what the user does and how he does and create a tool for him/her to do it even better) and only in software we seem to ignore this insight.

Tool-development is as old as humanity; only because software-dev is such a young industry doesn't mean we should be ignoring tens-of-thousands of years of tool-development techniques.

I know out of 25+-years of experience that (a) the user doesn't know exactly what he/she needs; (b) he/she cannot really articulate his needs; (c) even if they can, they don't actually know what is possible in software so they come up with a crappy request.

Best approach so far for me was this:
1) Ask the user what they need
2) Observe them while they work
3) Come up with a proposal to do the work even better
4) Get input on the proposal: now, this is crucial: during this step, the requirements will change significantly because if I did my job right, I not only showed him how to solve his problems but also what is possible at all. He/she will then start piling on and together we usually come up with a great requirement.

During the development phase, I usually work very, very closely with the users and get a lot of feedback for each and every feature - from functionality to usability - everything. And most of the time, my users were quite happy in the end...

Thanks, that was quite helpful in understanding the manufacturer's perspective as well.

I guess it is less for cost savings reasons (during production) and more about power savings (during operation) and probably also for performance reasons.

Caveat: I'm not a hardware specialist, not to mention a chip specialist, but I assume (from physics perspective) that shorter distances will reduce power consumption for same amount of transistors. Also, if the total die-size required for e.g. 1b transistors goes down from x to x-y, you could keep the die size but increase the transistor numbers.

Smaller chips as well as lower power consumption is a requirement especially in handheld devices, wearable computing, and also for "Internet of Things" (or whatever it is called today).

... where does it end? I had to actually check what the atomic size of Silicon is (111pm), so there are only a few years left (maybe 10-20) to reach the atomic level. Then what? I'm really curios as I'm quite impressed how this development came - actually how quick...

Shakespeare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_language) - my favorite language...

(and yes, this is supposed to be funny)

Out of my nearly three decades of work experience:

I was in a similar situation, i.e. I was an engineer and slowly switched to management/business and see myself as a manager with strong software engineering skills today.

I always recommend people to first learn a technical skill (actually engineering skill), then collect experiences over at least ten years and then learn business, preferably by going through an MBA program.

But, and this is really a BIIIG "but": before entering the MBA program define for yourself absolutely clearly, what your values are (ethical, moral, etc). You must be absolutely clear about these values that you would like to hold dear for quite some time. I suggest to have ethics-based values.

Without the ten-year experience and the ethics-based values, an MBA program (depending, of course, on where you do it) in the end *can* corrupt you, because you start becoming quite cynical during it (my experience is based on many different examples, but suffice to say, that it *can* result in cynicism and then in personal-corruption).

You can meet some quite brilliant people at an MBA-program, but you can also meet all those people who are just there to increase their salaries and to find ways of only making more money for themselves. Your values will help you - and with that, you can also influence the other MBA-participants by actively questioning a lot of what you learn there during the course.

On another note: a lot of those McKinsey, etc, consultants have started consultancy *without* years of experience in actually *doing* the work, because they joined McK right after college. This way they only learn the McK-way, which, IMHO, sucks because it is not oriented towards what you contribute to the society by running a business (the sole purpose) but towards how to make more money for yourself (Google "Up or Out Consultancies").

Good MBAs teach leadership and a lot of practical skills (accounting, book keeping, product, strategy, people management, etc).
Bad MBAs teach how to run up the ladder as fast as possible without considering the (negative) side-effects of your actions. And no, the "Vow to Ethical Behavior" at the end doesn't help at all...

You know, the interesting thing with 300bps (or baud on acoustic couplers) was that when you typed a command and realized that there was a typo somewhere, you started counting the number of characters from current cursor position to the position of the typo. If it made sense, you would just hit "CTRL-X" and start typing the command again instead of using backspace to correct it. Why? Because backspace sent three characters (backspace+space+backspace) and that really cost time (data).

At least that was the case with most BBS's and the BS2000-system (where you couldn't even use backspace at all, instead some weird character had to be sent)... Weird times...

I'm 45 and the first internet access was with a dial-up acoustic coupler with 300 baud (if you don't know what it is, please google or check WikiPedia...)

Man, I could hear the bytes crawling.

As background: I actually hacked into a PDP11 of the Technical University in Berlin and into a BS2000-machine at the Free University in Berlin. From there, I could jump from machine to machine and at one point ended up in Australia. Funny thing is, I still can remember the name of one of the key machines (WRB03) in Germany that we used to jump international... *sigh* good ol' times...

Disclaimer: we were just a bunch of kids playing around and chatting with people around the world - no, we didn't destroy or crack or manipulate anything. We just wanted to talk to people outside of Berlin (West) (this was around 1983/84)

Thanks for the insight. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I have observed working for many big companies in my life: people join, after a while they drink the local kool-aid and then stop being critical.

I usually never criticize my company outside of the company itself. But within the company towards my superiors or peers, I'm quite critical of what we do and how we do it - provided I have an idea of how we could do it better.

I have experienced, many times, that at certain point group-thinking starts becoming a key trait of employees and they stop looking outside - to the "real world", where there are competitors, consumers and others that need to be observed. When people start believing in their own BS, it's, unfortunately, too late. And that's what has happened in many companies I have experienced. In such a situation, trying to change the company is really quite difficult - though not impossible.

From your explanation, your friend was young and inexperienced. I'd suggest to try to re-connect and mentor him to be critical in every company. Only with internal criticism can a company change and become better. If you are really as experienced as you seem to be, take the responsibility to mentor and coach such young people so that they are not lost in big corporations - especially if they are really brilliant people. They should not learn that the way the company works is the right way or the only right way. They should start being a lot more critical and think for themselves, through market research, critical thinking and inquiry.

Just my two cents.

Indeed, if I compare Apple's track record to Microsoft's, it seems a lot better. I have no idea on Android, but anecdotal evidence (read: stuff I read on the Internet), it seems better than Android, too - but I can't judge it as I haven't done an analysis myself.

But "better" doesn't, at least for me, mean "good". Apple could do better. I've seen too many security issues in Safari and some in OS X as well. I don't mean that there are more than Windows or Android, but some times Apple's reaction was not optimal. So, going from, let's say, 100 security vulnerabilities per year to 50 might sound better than going from (e.g., no real numbers) from 300 (e.g. Windows) to 200, or even 150 (though in latter case, both would be 50% reduction). But Apple could do a lot more. They have been doing some great strides but I wish they would do even more.

One thing with security, where Apple has a lot to do, is transparency: sometimes I feel Apple is not being transparent enough on what they do with regards to security. But again, it might be perception bias as I'm a lot closer to Apple and might be criticizing them a lot more than Microsoft or even Android.

TL;DR - Apple could do more just in absolute terms, and be more transparent. Comparing to Microsoft/Android, they seem "better", but not necessarily "good" - in my world only.

Either you are very young or you or just pulling my leg:
ACK - ACKnowledge
NACK - Not ACKnowledged (old school computer stuff, back from the 1960s-1990s)