I disagree that "no internet" is more censorship. The problem with censorship is that it distorts the appearance of reality. If you can read FOX news, but not MSNBC, then the TEA party look like rational people. If you censor news stories about drone strikes, then bloggers talking about children killed by drone strikes look like conspiracy nuts.

Maybe. As long as you don't violate their TOS. Same with wikipedia, as long as the content doesn't violate their community standards. They're still talking about a small number of organizations, and it's quite clear that those organizations are subject to political manipulation. Even Google had to cave to China, and it's a little fuzzy whether there's any facebook there.

If you can't use an information stream, you'll find one that works. If you have an information stream, you don't know it's distorted.

Are you crazy? There's only a million words in English and only a million six digit numbers, so the combination of real word + number has only a trillion possibilities. 2^40 possibilities, which will fall rapidly to a dictionary attack. It's as "strong" as 6 random, typeable characters.

The point of TFA is that while "12 characters, including three different character classes" sounds like 2^84, the reality is that people meet those conditions by using a real word with the first letter capitalized and a number. (rarely the reverse: Number-word)

You can push back: you can refuse to implement the stupid request or you can pack up and go home. If they're asking you to implement some new feature with no additional time or revenue, they are essentially asking for you to pay for that development out of your own pocket. Maybe your passion to develop great games is strong enough that you're willing to pay for the privilege to work on such a game. The publisher is probably counting on you to have invested so much of yourself in the project that you will. Once you've signed your project over to a publisher, you have to be willing to walk away.

Yeah, and hurricane Sandy was just a bit of rain. In my experience, nothing is more ubiquitous in software than bad design. Bad design is the difference between Photoshop and Gimp. Or between upstart and systemd. In special purpose software, like that tied to instrumentation or a proprietary database, there seems to be very little motivation to test or develop a good UI, but the users suffer through because they're tied to the underlying system. EMR are currently competing on the features of their backend, making presentations to administrators, and I don't expect the doc's get much consideration in that conversation.

They have done this. They problem is that have not said anything about the user interface. The result seems to be that the User Interface looks a lot like a military, hierarchical table designating every detail of an examination and diagnosis. Like:
Reflex, sensory, tactile, digit, left hand, index finger;
Reflex, sensory, tactile, digit, left hand, middle finger;
...
Each of those a mouse click and a display update, and you've got 10 digits.

The good news is that you now have explicit confirmation that feeling in each of those fingers was verified. The bad news is that you've taken a procedure that was "poke 10 fingers" and turned it into "poke 10 fingers, click 60 mouse buttons."

I'd like to think this is a natural consequence of coders living at the interface between bureaucrats and physicians, and I'd like to think that a few iterations of software will allow some of those details to be aggregated, but there's a huge difference between the old-style chart notation "Reflexes normal," and the medicare requirement that reflex testing can only be compensated if it documents a litany of specific tests.

Advances in switching technology reduced their costs of doing business. They allowed AT&T to replace armies of switchboard operators with inexpensive electronics. Their foray into wireless communication was Mobile Telephone Service. Real cell phone service was first introduced by NTT, in Japan, 4 years before the US. Some argue that slow adoption of cellular in the US was actually due to FCC regulation of the spectrum, but commercial cell service only became available after AT&T was broken up, and it was offered by one of the regional Baby Bells, not by AT&T.

I do prefer one pack of bureaucrats over the other. I prefer the bureaucrats who have to declare any gift more valuable than a cup of coffee to the bureaucrats allowed to accept campaign contributions. I prefer the bureaucrats subject to Inspector General auditing over those with "arm's length," private corporations (PACs) acting for their benefit. I prefer the bureaucrats who are subject to ethics laws over those who write ethics laws.

Many of the H1-b's would stay if they could. Most of the foreign students come here hoping that a US education visa will be a stepping stone to a work visa, will be a stepping stone to a green card. Unfortunately, xenophobia and the pressure to preserve jobs for current citizens have put very restrictive limits on the availability of long-term visas and green cards. H1b was developed as a compromise - get some of the foreign talent, but protect US workers by forcing the foreigners to leave. Ironic, isn't it, that the plan to protect US workers is now being blamed for the loss of domestic jobs.

Then you're not paying attention. Sure, all the politicians say they're committed to improving education, but they've been saying that for 200 years. It's the verbal equivalent of shaking hands.

Meanwhile, when the dollars hit the budget, it turns out that tax cuts, health care, and defense/police/security are much higher priorities. 20 years ago, the cost of educating a student in a state university was largely born by the state. Today, it's largely born by the student. You can look up your own state's numbers: here in Georgia, over the past 10 years, we've gone from 60% state funding to 38%. The per-student cost has gone up 3%/year, just like inflation, but the student's share has gone up 10%/year. The loss of state funding has encouraged these schools to more aggressively recruit foreign students and their uncapped tuition.

Curiously, because all of our politicians are wealthy, this makes the education they can provide for their own children just a little more valuable.

If you know you're "negotiating," you ask for more than you want based on the expectation that you'll meet in the middle, somewhere close to what you actually want. Some people love that - witness open air markets in most of the world where the price of everything is negotiable.

One imagines, if Reddit is really not going to negotiate on salary offers, that they will have to raise their 'opening' offer to something close to what prospective employees actually want. You can look at this as penalizing the people willing to go to the mat over that last $10/month, but it ought to benefit most people. After all, if "most people" were decent negotiators, don't you think car dealers would have abandoned negotiations by now?

Breaking an insecure internet lock is not like throwing a brick through the window. A thief who knows how to break the internet lock can sit quietly at home and search the net for easy locks, rather like going up to your door and trying the handle, except he can do thousands of doors from his bedroom. Or drive down the street looking for the right broadcast./response. To someone who knows how to break the security, broken security is more like a bright neon "Rob Me" sign than a fragile glass window. You think it's secure because you don't know how to read the sign.

You're upset that Oliver's "fake news" program didn't contain enough news and analysis?

By all means, be upset that 60 minutes can't give the NSA any more than 10 minutes of fawning. Question why Frontline's 2-hour report on US surveillance didn't stir up a public outcry. Why much of the reporting is from outside the US. But be upset that a comedian show reduced government surveillance to the absurd simplification of dick pics? That's what they're supposed to do.

Five of the 11 convicted were "testing administrators" or "resource officers." Two more were principal/assistant principal. Thinking about it, these are probably the people who stood to gain the most by inflating the overall performance of the school. Individual teacher merit pay doesn't seem like a huge enticement: would you really risk your career for a couple thousand dollars? Being labeled a success at turning around failing schools or districts...well, it got Hall named "National Superintendent of the Year." The administrators are the ones being judged on the aggregate test scores; they're the ones with power over individual teachers; it's not surprising that a top-down conspiracy would develop.

Federal judges are appointed to life terms in order to reduce the temptation to cheat. It turns out that all people are susceptible to pressure; almost all people will do things they "know" to be wrong if given enough enticement or peer pressure. If you give teachers a system of merit pay, some of them will game the system. If you impose a set of penalties, they will game the system. Pile those rewards/penalties on a system where teachers in districts with engaged and active parents get better resources, and you're just begging for trouble. "Social promotion" is as old as formal education. NCLB was supposed to be an administrative block to it, but it turns out teachers find a way around.

I find it very interesting that, 2 days before these verdicts, the GA legislature repealed the requirement that students pass a standardized test (CRCT) as a condition of graduation. And made it retroactive, so all those students, going back 10 years, who passed all their classes but were denied diploma for failing a section of the CRCT can now get their diplomas. ie: The state has legislated in the same social promotion that APS parents are up in arms over and that drove NCLB.

The only guilty verdicts, aside from RICO, were for "making false statements," and only half of the defendants were guilty even of that. The two (3?) people charged with theft were found not guilty. No one was even charged with fraud. This makes it all seem like an organization dedicated to the criminal enterprise of denying its own existence.

I get that it's technically not a crime to change the answers on someone else's test, putting the prosecutors in a bind to impose penalties, but RICO seems really blown out of all proportion. Maybe it would have made more sense if they'd been able to try Dr. Hall before her death. Maybe she's the one who really committed/benefitted from the immoral but not illegal actions of her henchmen, but we didn't get to see that.