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Comment So, Sweden disccovers Skype, phones and air travel (Score 3, Insightful) 169

Since clearly, they knew of none of these things years ago when Snowden was first sequestered.

As Snowden has correctly stated, it's a ruse to allow the USA to take him into custody. Apparently Sweden will do its questioning, probably drop the case for lack of evidence and the USA can go twist in the wind.

What this really says is just how the USA's power position in the world has changed. Sweden has read the writing on the wall. They'll respond to pressure from the US state department just as much as they need to, which is now apparently, not much.

Comment Re:HR filters for the best liars... (Score 1) 292

I'm not antisocial. That said, I'm not into finding friends at work, nor am I interested in idle chit chat. I'm busy. My day is frequently intense. Between cranky servers, writing code, meetings and frequent one-off projects, I often don't have *time* to discuss your favorite TV show, your vacation, your children's school problems, your pet's illness or your new car. Really, I just don't. On slow days, I'll cheerfully chat about any of these, but most if the time, you'll find my nose in the nearest grindstone - a method that's kept me steadily employed.

If you think that makes someone a "dick," I foresee many short term jobs in your future.

Comment HR filters for the best liars... (Score 1, Insightful) 292

And not much else. Look, I've walked out of interviews where they asked me goofball, irrelevant questions. As for job description listing requirements like "5 years of Windows 8.1 programming" (no joke), they don't even get a look. I no longer have to work for irrational crazies.

This, by the way, explains your "talent shortage." Want good employees? Fine. CUT THE BULLSHIT! Ask relevant, job-related questions - and nothing else. You don't need to know my community activities, why manhole covers are round, or my favorite band.

Comment Can't we just use Snoopsnitch and crowdsourcing? (Score 4, Interesting) 90

With enough people using SnoopSnitch ( https://play.google.com/store/... ), which detects Stingray cell phone trackers, and a collection site on Facebook or any other social media site (Reddit sounds like a good candidate), the locations of these things could be mapped and published in jig time.

Comment Typical Microsoft human factors fail (Score 1) 564

Hiding the extensions, is quite frankly, a slow motion disaster. Thousands and thousands of people clicking on the wrong file, staring in bafflement as to why they have multiple duplicate filenames. It cost, I'm sure, millions of hours of lost productivity worldwide over the years, all because some 20-something C++ programmer had a brainwave. That guy should have been fired the day after the release.

Moral of the story? STOP HIDING STUFF! I need to know where my folder is. I need to know what the filenames are. I need to know if they're read-write, read-only and what the permissions are. I need the IMPORTANT stuff easily available. What I don't need to know about are the friggin' media extensions, the color, font, size or any other trivial fact about the file.

Comment Or, "Their invention must be right" syndrome. (Score 1) 158

I see that one a lot. The assumption that because the software vendor did it one way, That's. The. Way. It's. Done.

It's nonsense of course. Our testing system was designed for the most common use case. Maybe 50 dialogs with 5 or 6 controls each. Our system has thousands of dialogs, some of which have as many as 50 controls on a dialog (It's old, legacy, badly designed. I know....). To make that system scale, we had to develop our own abstraction system, an API and a different object mapping system.

In the end, it worked quite nicely. Had we just used it as was designed out of the box, we'd have scrapped it by now, or quadrupled our staff running on that maintenance treadmill. Vendors can be pretty bad at scaling or special cases.

Comment 2,900-acre(!) solar farm (Score 0) 191

And thus we demonstrate the kind of ecological problems that can happen as we try and scale solar up to industrial scale levels. That's 2,900 acres of local ecological disruption through lack of sunlight.

While solar has many strong points, and is great for small scale local power, you have to be careful about how you grow it, and where you put it.

Comment Monitor government and corporations continously. (Score 1) 239

With cameras, phone tabs, smart phone monitoring, and computer monitoring.

Seriously. Let's turn it around. Make sure the watchers are watched, from the lowliest policemen to the president of the USA. I'd be in favor of monitoring all corporate transactions too, and banning cash or otherwise untraceable transactions for corporations.

In a democracy, citizens need privacy. As a society, we can't afford to have it for politicians or corporations.

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