Obviously I've worked for some far shabbier employers than you :D

But now you know, and armed with new knowledge you can avoid such in the future. I wouldn't have known the first time I used a recruiter either...I just had better luck than you. This is a real case where knowledge (in this case, of empoyer and recruiter codes of conduct and norms) is power.

Details are scarce on how they are advertising.

Slashdot

I'm sure they will just add a loophole after the first person files a law suit. It will be assumed to be secure once its shipped to a huge government data warehouse built for storing personally identifiable information. Then only the NSA, FBI, Chinese, and Russians will have it.

And Humana, who will no doubt only use it for the good of their insured (or applying to be insured) patients.

clues:

- training in iPhone photography
- firing of the photography staff
- iPhone as a replacement for fancy, expensive DSLRs

It's real, there was quite a bit of time dedicated to this story on Chicago Tonight a few days ago. The big joke is the Chicago Sun Times itself...once a respectable newspaper, now transforming itself into little more than an amateur blog. And using iPhones with their subpar optics...in the hands of people who know nothing about photography...the paper will be carrying Facebook quality pictures, or as another mentioned, the same pic as every other outlet via AP/UPI.

Whatever bozo made this decision should be fired...his/her 6-figure salary will probably pay for 2 or 3 decent photographers, and they'll get a whole lot more value out of those photographers than they will the moron who made this decision. But then, I don't think the Chicago Sun Times is long for this world anyway (an end hastened by such collasal mismanagement).

What we're watching is the final deathrows of a dying paper, in an industry on life support.

It's only normal and expected. I would help authorities catch the assholes who don't pay their taxes.

Agreed. Or put another way:

Dear Tax Dodger,

Fuck you. Pony up.

Most Sincerely,

The rest of us who pay our taxes honestly.

umm... because China is fairly big and the larger cities are pretty far away from where these ICBMs will be launched?

umm...hopefully that's "would be launched," not "will be launched." I'm no fan of the chinese political establishment, but in many ways (culturally, work-ethic wise, secular society, desire for stability) we and China should be natural allies, if they could just get past their control-freak authoritarianism and we could get past our emperial belligerence.

Is it not possible that some things are over-regulated, while others are under-regulated.

Possible, but not bloody likely in today's "I'm a congressman, please buy me!" environment.

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.