This. We work in IT, not in HR.

If your company is finding itself asking this question, and hasn't got a policy in place ... it's your HR and your management who have dropped the ball.

After a user rates Firefox, an "engagement" page may open in the background, with links to social media pages and a donation page

So basically Firefox is going to nag and annoy their users.

Good luck with that.

I understand what you're saying, and generally I agree.

But as often as not it is HR who is the ones enforcing the policy of "get him out the door now".

But many many places treat departing employees as liabilities to be removed as quickly as possible.

It can most certainly be the case that HR is the ones who are treating you like a pariah, and acting like dicks. So, good luck with changing that.

Well, it may be poorly worded, but I have seen several places which have the blanket policy of not keeping people around for their last two weeks.

They're not quite so confrontational about it, at least not directly ... but the assumption is "you've resigned, we no longer care or trust you".

Some employers treat giving your notice as your last day, even if that means they pay you for that time and don't see you.

You know, when a multi-billion dollar company who spends more on R&D than pretty much everyone else hasn't the slightest idea of what they want to build a product for, and no clear picture for it ... that's pathetic

If one of the largest corporations is stumbling around like drunken monkeys and finding success through sheer accident, the the CEO is a grossly overpaid idiot who could be replaces with a bunch of drunken monkeys.

And yet I'm sure Ballmer or whoever it was got paid massive amounts of money to have no better track record than a drunken monkey.

Sorry, I'm not asking for prescience, I'm asking for some measure of competence.

This aint it.

And, as usual, without having the slightest idea of what to do with the technology other than try to get market share.

So I'm forced to conclude most of the successes Microsoft has had in the last decade or more have largely been accidental instead of strategic, and that Microsoft just stumbles around in the dark until something works.

And then they spend years trying to understand why it worked in the first place and how to replicate it.

It's official, Microsoft is the Inspector Clouseau of the tech world.

That's pretty sad.

Well, having seen the videos of dolphins herding fish into a swirling snack-bar using their sonar, and have seen the explanation of them changing their sonar output.

They have a huge chunk of their brain dedicated to doing this stuff, and I thought they could even stun fish with it.

I'm not saying I could do it, but I got the impression this is stuff we've already know they can do.

Hasn't this been known for some time?

I've seen footage of hunting dolphins and whales herding fish into "sonar corrals" and then eating them, and I though I'd heard that the dolphins et al can focus their sonar to fight off things like sharks.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought it had been established for a very long time that these things have really fine control over their sonar and can do all sorts of stuff with them.

Is this actually something new? Or am I just reading this wrong?

Surely if I know dolphins et al can focus their sonar it's common knowledge.

Well,, Microsoft is talking about open sourcing aspects of .NET.

Apparently they can't decide what that actually means.

There's definitely something there.

It means, as usual, Microsoft is trying to get people to use their technology while holding a threat over them. If they're not open sourcing in any meaningful sense of the word, they should be honest about it.

This arms race will go for the users. The reason being that there's too much money in play to allow the opposite.

I'm inclined to think the opposite.

All of the companies who want to sell us products care only about that. They don't give a damn about the security of those products.

Until consumers wise up and insist on security, or corporations carry some liability for failing to do that, then corporations will just push stuff out the door with half assed security.

It can't just be a war on hacker. It has to also be a war on products with utterly crap security which never gets fixed. Because this Internet of Stuff is shaping up to be some of the biggest security holes imaginable.

Most consumer products do terrible stuff like transmitting passwords in the clear. Chasing down hackers who exploit incompetently/lazily written products can never overcome that.

Our biggest challenges with security are asshole governments who want to undermine security so they can spy on us, and incompetent companies who sell us insecure products because they just want to push some bauble out the door.

As long as we have these two problems, the malware folks will always win, because we will not have the tools required to keep them out.

If spying governments and inept corporations are the weak links, we're pretty much screwed.

So the next time some asshole in a spy agency says we shouldn't have encryption so they can spy on us, that person should be told in no uncertain terms to piss up a rope.

What makes an ad agency reliable to you?

One in which all of the employees are encased in carbonite, and whose computers and records have all been nuked from orbit.

Anything less and you have to assume they're still unreliable.

And what solutions do you recommend for individual blog authors to implement "host your own ads"?

Not Our Fucking Problem.

Sorry, but I will continue assuming all ads are crap I don't wish to see, served by companies who don't give a crap about my privacy or security and whom I therefore do not trust.

The revenue of web sites interests me not even a little.

Go to a subscription model and see if you can stay in business. Or accept that some fraction of users do not wish to see your advertising, and don't trust the companies serving them.

No kidding ... attempting to force your way into something guarded by armed military personnel and then discovering they're not afraid of you isn't terrorism.

It's a frickin' Darwin award.

I consider that only one of them is dead to be either extraordinary luck, or surprising restraint on behalf of the soldiers.

You know, I'm a pretty heavy user of tinfoil with an inherent distrust of government.

But even I don't need to look at this as an abuse of power by the government.

The rights of US military personnel to shoot your stupid self for trying to ram through a gated checkpoint with big giant signs saying "we can and will stop you, by force if necessary" has been established for an incredibly long time.

Most of the last century, I should think. Probably MUCH longer.

Sorry, but this falls entirely in the domain of "if you didn't see this one coming you're an idiot".

yes but they shouldn't be, protecting secrets shouldn't be more important than protecting citizens.

There comes a point where what you are doing is telegraphing that you are no ordinary citizen doing ordinary things.

Approaching that gate with the big barricade, armed guards, and the huge sign which says "this isn't your usual place, and it isn't under the usual rules ... keep the hell out", and then deciding you're ramming it anyway? Well, as I said, that's a special kind of stupid.

It isn't like these guys went trigger happy and went after someone who was doing nothing at all. Trying to drive through a military check point on a military base sends a specific enough signal that I think to expect to NOT get shot in that context makes you an idiot.

Ramming gates on a military base isn't something you can reasonably expect to fall under the domain of things you can do without Really Fucking Bad Consequences.

I'm among the first to complain about government over-reach. But fucking with armed military personnel under strict orders to keep everybody out? Definitely not that.