Regardless of the circumstances, ordering someone to decrypt a hard drive should be against the 5th amendment. I look at this the same way as any other "evidence is in a very hard place to get" situation.

I don't agree. Ordering someone to decrypt a hard drive is more akin to ordering someone to "We have a warrent! Open up, in the name of the law!", which, if you don't do so, you will find your front door in splinters and yourself on your stomach with cuffs behind your back.

Your example of onerous burden is also misapplied. If you dump a body in a 1000' well, it may not be physically possible for you to retrieve it (though you should be billed for the cost if you're convicted of dumping it there). Regardless, it is not an onerous task to type in a password (the consequences of your conviction may be onerous, but the act of typing in the password is easy and not physically demanding), so the comparison you offer does not apply.

Being required to open your front door and allow your house to be searched, provided a warrant is served, is not a violation of your 5th amendment rights, and neither is being required to decrypt your drive.

Honestly the one thing that screams that the management is a bunch of Douschebags is a BYOD policy.

That depends on the BYOD policy. I work for a company that gives you a choice: company iPhone, or BYOD and they give you a stipend that covers the majority of the cost of most cell phone plans. It's a pretty good deal whichever way you roll.

But then, my employer isn't trying to get people to buy their own laptops or workstations. Any employer doing that is a real douchegab.

Yep certainly had the Agencies cut taken off my agreed salary for three months before (I did complain). No mention of what Language/ALM they work with. Given that I know hundreds of Devs (Some of whom already live in commuting distance) it would be nice to know what skills they are looking for.

huh!?!

I've worked with recruiters for years, in Chicago, New York, and London to name just three places. I've never, ever, had my pay docked because of the recruiter's fee. Never. And every job I've had beyond the first out of college has been through a recruiter (and they've all been excellent jobs, on both sides of the pond).

The employer should always pay the recruiter's fee. You as an employee/candidate should never see the fee, probably won't know what the fee was, and shouldn't necessarily even be aware of the fee (other than in the most hypothetical sense).

Having your salary docked for three months...that's just crazy. The only instance I know of where that's the norm is with talent agents in the media...a journalist I know at a New York radio station pays n% of his salary to his talent agent, but that's an entirely different can of worms. In technical recruiting, that should never happen. If your employer docked you, I'd say your employer is more than a little suspect and I'd get your CV/resume out. If your recruiter is collecting from you, then you've been suckered into the wrong kind of recruiter.

As long as it uses systemd, FCwhatever is dead to me.

When my company had to come up with a solution to have all of our developers to develop in an environment that absolutely mimicked the production server we used a combination of VMWare to run a version of the Ubuntu. Puppet made creating all of this really easy. It gave us the ability to completely blow away a machine and reconstitute in very little time.

We did the exact same thing for developing proprietary trading software, using KVM on Gentoo with Salt Stack. There are numerous free options for achieving massive virtualization...paying for a VMWare license (which you'll have to do if your environment gets serious at all) is a complete waste of money. Want Enterprise resiliency, vm migration, etc., add a clustered filesystem and Opennebula/Openstack to the mix.

The only reason not to do this would be a lack of in-house expertise, in which case, be prepared to pay well over the market for commercial solutions in perpetuity, and be beholden to their support staff and contracts. Good luck with that.

What do you think LibreOffice should do to make its brand more recognizable?

I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years, and love it (having written two, and typeset three, books with it), but the name is a hindrence. When I speak to my wife and use the term LibreOffice her eyes glaze over, whereas Open Office has a natural name people understand.

Free Office would have been better than LibreOffice, or any of a dozen other names I can think of (Community Office, OpenSource Office, New Office, World Office, even abbbreviating it to L-Office ...anything like that would lead to far better name recognition).

That said, LibreOffice is great, and I wouldn't necessarily spend too much energy trying to get agreement to change the name at this late date (well, maybe the abbreviated "L-Office"). You've all done fine work...now the word needs to get out.

I also find the stats suspicious...Gentoo folks like me are probably counted in the stat as downloads occur on an emerge, but how many copies of Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, RHEL, etc. have shipped with LibreOffice and aren't counted?

Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features?

That may be, but the gap is widening. I have an iphone5 from my employer, and still prefer my private Android phone, despite it being 2 1/2 years old, chronically out of space, terrible battery life, and basically being end-of-life. The user interface is better, the features richer and more powerful, and the overall experience superior. Oh, and of course, the screen is bigger. And Siri--please, Jeannie works just as well (better in some cases, not quite so well in a few others, but overall, at least equivalent in overall performance).

Apple has mindshare because of group think and fashion-accessory/status symbol mindsets, not because of technical or aesthetic qualities. And its mindshare is shrinking, despite all of the media-bias. Android is outselling Apple 2/1 worldwide, and that gap is growing too, and not in Apples favor.

Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.

While I agree that awarding President Obama the Nobel peace prize before he had been in office long enough to accomplish anything was a bit emberrassing (for all parties, I suspect), that has nothing to do with what he was saying. He was saying in effect, that some right-wing wingnut with "socialism is slavery" as their signature line dismissing Paul Krugman as a political hack and only an economist as a 'distant second' is misinformation at best, and given the track record of the American right in recent years, probably closer to an outright lie. Krugman may be politically active, but having won the nobel prize for economics, he is most certainly an economist of note, whose opinions are worth considering whether or not we personally agree with them.

And by the way, as one who lived many years in countries with socialized medicine, as well as in the United States, I would say the system in America, where your health is tied directly to your employment status, is much closer to slavery than any of western European "socialist" systems, but I digress.

*50 Shades fans excluded, because they are a brain damaged lot.

Absolutely true! Not just the 50 shades reference, which is spot on, but the overall sentiment. The best reviews are done by the average public, though I would argue that said public should include authors of the Genre (perhaps marked with an icon as such). SciFi authors tend to be SciFi fans--I certainly am, and once my book comes out (shameless plug: Autonomy) next month, I won't be able to rate any of the hundreds of books I've read and enjoyed, which is a pity, because a fan of the genre, whether or not they write themself, is better suited to critiquing or reviewing a book in the genre than some random sampling of the broader populace.

It is supposed to mean it has height, width, depth and time.

By that definition, every "3D" movie we watch is actually "4D" (and I shudder to think how soon we'll probably see that marketing tripe in the wild).

What's next? 5-D, because we shower the audience with water when it rains on screen too? Absolute bullshit. It's a 3d moving image.

Maybe this case will make that happen. Would that be so bad?

This case will not make that happen. This is pure protectionism under the guise of patent law and court arbitration. It's no coincidence that Apple is being found guilty of violating Samsung patents in Korea, and in a travesty of justice, Samsung is being found guilty of violating Apples sacred monopoly on rectangles with rounded corners in the United States.

Welcome to protectionism 21st Century style, and another nail in the coffin of innovation.

sickening

Are governments allowed to assess a tax (or fee) outside of their own territory?

Yes.

Long Answer:

The US routinely assess taxes on its citizens everywhere in the world (it is one of the only, if not the only, country to do this to its citizens). When I lived in the UK I had to file returns in both countries. Had I lived in Hong Kong or Switzerland, I would have had to pay the difference between their tax rate and the higher US tax rate to Uncle Sam.

As far a fees go, just about anyone who has applied for any kind of visa will be able to attest that governments routinely charge fees outside of their borders. Visit any US consolate abroad to apply for an immigration visa to the US, or any other country's consulate abroad for the same purpose.

So yes, governments can and do assess taxes AND fees outside of their borders. I think it would be perfectly fine for the BBC to sell their service to viewers abroad...except they probably made the mistake of buying some of their content from other studios, and are prevented from doing so by the usual "splinter the market" contractual clauses that stem from the same outdated mindset that has given us region encoded DVDs and Blurays.

It is creepy, and a good reason not to register as a member of either party...no matter how much you may want to vote in the primaries.

Reality is not a wave function. It's a useful model, but it's absurd to think of it as real and physical.

The cat isn't really both alive and dead. It's either still alive or it died. It certainly knows.

Reality is reality and models are models.

Except that now we are finding the cat is both dead and alive. The question is, which universe do you inhabit? The only way for you to find out is to measure the result, collapse the probability, and determine which reality you inhabit. Your copy (the one you're so desparate to believe doesn't exist, perhaps because s/he threatens your sense of uniqueness, or free will, or whatever), if s/he opens the box and looks, will find s/he inhabits a universe with a different outcome.

As for self determination and uniqueness, this need not really trouble people. In an infinite set of universes, any outcome will be statistical in nature. Like predicting which atom will decay during the half-life of a radioactive material, no prediction can be made as to a particular state (or decision) you or I, as individuals in an indivual timeline, will make. We are still perfectly free to make decisions, and perfectly responisble for their outcomes, regardless of whether the decision we make matches that of 90% of our duplicates, or 0.0001%.

We may not be unique, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. (Of course, we may not, but that doesn't follow from quantum physics, repetition in an infinite set, or any of the other variations of parallelism that appear more and more to be a fundamental property of our reality).

So people just need to chill, and see where the math and science actually take us. If it turns out we do inhabit a single, unqiue universe, then we get our uniqueness back and those bothered by parallelism are in luck (though it will be a short lived relief, geologically speaking, and ultimately fatal, astrophysically speaking). If it turns out otherwise, then so what? We still live our lives, with or without determinism. Whether we debate that in the context of a single unique timeline, or multiple, perhaps infinite timelines, doesn't really matter.

The only real loser is religion, whic presupposes just the one timeline. But then, religion has a long history of losing out to science and changing its teachings accordingly (like cockroaches, the memes don't die, they just adapt), so even that is unlikely to change if or when the multi-world hypothesis is proven.

So even the most dogmatic mind need not be threatened by either outcome...except perhaps for someone like the character in Star Trek, who is driven mad at the thought of another person in another universe just like them and spends eternity trying to hunt down and kill his duplicate. In which case, if reality is other than what they desire, tough shit.