I totally understand what they're doing and that's fine if they want to operate in that way. Its people just need to realize this and use the name and prestige its name on their resume brings when they hop to a smaller but potentially more enjoyable organization.

The IT world is certainly competitive; however, ALL companies should see the internal benefits to training employees and working to ensure they do not leave. Companies with the mindset you laid out above are doing themselves a double disservice by not training their employees and leveraging the benefits and immediate returns provided by investments in their human capital. In some fields and with some resources, professional development is seen as a bigger happiness motivator and retention tool than more salary.

What you have outlined above is a company which is not interested in its people and only its immediate bottom line and one where it's clear its people should move on regardless of payscale and internal short-term opportunity provided.

As someone who has repeatedly attended and presented at conferences in my field, I make it a point during negotiations for any new job to ensure these are funded fully but only if I am presenting; otherwise, I opt to share in the costs associated in attending with my employer.

Each and every company I have worked at in the past (and current) has a budget for training and professional development of its employees, some more than others; however, by making a case that I am giving back to a community of like-minded professionals and putting our name and brand out there during presentations, I have found this is an easy sell for companies for which I want to work.

I work extensively w/SAS and utilize a lot of the conference (SAS Global Forum/SUGI prior) materials in my day to day both for myself and our entire organization. By making it clear to my employers that I want to give back by presenting, I have opened organization's view on how the sharing of information benefits the business while benefiting the entire industry.

Make your determination and desires known when you sign on and, if that is not an option, make it clear to your management that you want to do the same thing. While I have received a variety of different types of pushback over the years for this view, they have all relented and ended up changing their world view when the benefits are presented as they are.

Conferences are not inexpensive (SAS Global Forum is usually around $3000 - $3500 for a single person encompassing travel, conference registration, lodging, meals, etc) but the ROI can be HUGE beyond that depending on the knowledge transfers that occur, the networking opportunities, and the new business development which I have seen from these conferences.

While I did not attend SASGF 2014 this year, it was solely due to my available time to develop a presentation topic, not because my company would not send me (this was my first missed attendance since I became involved in the SAS world) and I look forward to contributing to and learning from others in the future.

Best of luck.

"Send in the drones!" Why not fight drones with drones?

I feel like a way better attack vector would be a computer controlled kite. Between a string reaching all the way to the ground almost invisible to see, and a bunch of long streaming tails from the kite to foul rotors - you could do pretty well, if you can find the drone.

I would think though it would be more effective to hire goons to hang around anywhere open and with a line of sight to the area over the filming. Kind of a different take on the XKCD $5 wrench encryption cracking strategy.

Apple double-pinky swearing that they'll never, unh-uh, not ever unlock your iPhone

That's not what they said - they said the've altered it so they CANNOT unlock your iPhone, even if they want to.

Given how the technology works, that is a quite reasonable assertion. iOS devices have had full device encryption for some time, without that key you have nothing.

All this "canary" bullshit begs the question why, if Apple really cared one little bit about their customers, don't they just come out and say what they have to say.

That just shows a misunderstanding of what companies are legally ALLOWED to say. Once you get the order you CANNOT talk about it, thus the device of the canary.

They really think you're stupid.

No, the rest of us that understand encryption think you are.

Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae

1) the technical aspects are not really photography - they are details of a tool. They are not composition nor lighting nor mood nor concept.

2) The iPhone with iOS8, and version of Android for a while I think let you control all of those aspects in advanced camera apps (well focal length you had to add adaptor lenses, but lots of people do use those).

Flickr already missed the boat on being the social media image sharping app of choice.

They are not the social media sharing app of choice.

They ARE the primary choice for sharing images from people who are photographers, and also happen to primarily use smartphones. Yes, even over sites like 500px... Flickr has far more volume.

One of the things I think when I look at something like that is, the $10k difference is illustrating how much more people make that care enough about computer science/programming to take the time to explore many languages - not so much that they are all getting COBOL jobs, they are just more competent.

The six has a flat back, Mr. Always Corrected.

Type-casting -oh my lord type casting- is so astoundingly bad in Swift

What don't you like about it?

I like it because it precludes a lot of stuff from going wrong unless you are very explicit in telling swift how you would like to be shot in the foot.

Whoever wrote that article doesn't understand Swift well, or Apple for that matter:

Swift is designed to support a world built bottom up in Objective-C. It's meant to play well with the bazillion lines of existing Objective-C, not supplant it.

This is totally wrong. Apple could not be more clear that Swift is built to supplant Objective-C. It will take a while to re-write the frameworks but they are encouraging everyone now to write new stuff in Swift, and as rapidly as possible making the bridge over to the Objective-C frameworks as Swift friendly as possible.

I think Apple will not open Swift at the moment because they want to have a small core group directing where the language goes, at least at first... and then it will open up more from there. But that also supports the notion that swift is not an auxiliary language, but the primary path going forward.

If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap

Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.

Gosh, I wonder what you are getting if it's not at all what you thought. I wonder what you are getting from an agency intertwined with the cable companies, when you ask them to provide regulation from same companies... Perhaps utterly the opposite of what you wanted?

When people read the summary of this story, I'm sure a lot will be like "blah blah blah blah MAGNETS GOOD FOR HEALTH AND CURE EBOLA blah blah blah.

This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to.

That's how it worked for everyone that didn't enable auto-downloads of purchases (which is not enabled by default).

I *wanted* the album, and it took me two days to figure out how to get it. It did not appear for me anywhere automatically...

I can't believe people get worked up over being given music for free. Hey guess what, all sorts of free crappy music is in whatever music streaming service you favor also. Why not complain about that?