To be fair, at the CEO level of a major company it's impossible to deal with individuals. I've worked for many years with project portfolio management tools and on that level it looks more like a knapsack problem where you have say 100 developers and doing project A consumes 30, project B consumes 40 and project C consumes 50. Except it turns out B and C is both eating the same pool of 20 that know one particular technology or they touch the same systems or users and you don't want two major overhauls colliding. And one project has a much better ROI short term, but the other is strategically important or one is high risk and the other low risk and so on. When you're at this level you're looking at whether you have the capacity and right mix of staff, not how well each individual is suited to their position.

You must understand that as a CEO you're dealing with layers of indirection, perhaps you can make some changes to HR policy that may over time help improve the composition of your workforce, but on the normal management timescale you're stuck with what you've got. And every company tends to have the employees that are favored by that system, rock the boat too much and you get issues with employee dissatisfaction, turnover and a management chain that resist you so mostly they focus on getting the business side right, what products and services should we be delivering. It's up to middle management to pick the aces and go to bat for why these people deserve such a big paycheck compared to others who also call themselves developers. But I will tell you one thing, the CEO might not know what's going on but he does care when the 100 man hours he was going to spend turned into 200, even if the rate was lower.

Obligatory Far Side

I think something got lost in translation. If it was compromised 2+ years ago, why didn't the developer pull this stunt back then? If he knew, he sure waited a very long time and NSLs don't expire. If he didn't know, how did he find it since development was essentially dead and how did the NSA know their backdoor was about to get exposed? The more logical explanation is that he's being forced now in 2014 to burn the 2012 version which was too good for NSA to let live. I think the people abandoning TrueCrypt now are led by the nose by NSA, not the other way around.

No, the point of a kill switch is to destroy the resale value. Same as an IMEI ban, once reported stolen nobody should* give you service

* not actually implemented worldwide, yet

The NSA's "kill switch" is to take a NSL to your carrier and tell them to kill your service or the whole tower or region for that matter. And if you're really bringing out the big guns there's jammers and missiles, those towers light up like beacons. And whatever exploits they have for the carrier's systems. Besides, I suppose in some WWIII-prelude knocking out the enemy's communications systems and throwing them into disarray may be useful, but I imagine 99.99% of the time they're interested in signals intelligence. Temporarily stopping me from making phone calls until I get on the Internet via fiber/cable/DSL and Skype doesn't seem like a significant objective. Turning the $500 phone that pickpocket or mugger ran off with into a brick on the other hand would have a quite significant effect on petty crime. Unless you observed my PIN and stole the card or force me to withdraw money at gun/knife point the smartphone is clearly the most valuable thing I carry around daily.

Because it's pretty hard to criticize/discuss/improve someone's risk management without at the same time assigning part of the blame to them. I mean if I was entirely without fault that means I did nothing wrong which means I don't have to change my ways, yet here you are arguing I should take greater precautions which means I did do something stupid which means it's partly my own fault right? It's pretty hard to say that you could and should avoid danger, yet it doesn't matter if you sought and exposed yourself to danger instead.

If we forget all about rapists and imagine I was struck by lightning, you'd probably say it was a freak accident. If you heard I went to the highest vantage point nearby with my kite during a thunderstorm, you'd probably call me pretty damn stupid and say I did a great job of bringing lightning down on myself. Are you really not going to ridicule me if I fall for a 419 scam with a Nigerian prince? That one involves being exploited by another person too, are you sure you won't put any responsibility on my shoulders?

I know I'd blame myself if I left my laptop visible in the car and it got broken into, not because it broken into as such - that happens - but because I made it so much more likely it was my car getting broken into. It doesn't mean I deserved it, it's still 100% the thief's fault for stealing it but somehow my inner statistician is screaming something about conditional probability. And I don't choose the risk factors, the thief decides that a visible laptop makes it interesting. The rapists decide if mini skirts is a risk factor, not the potential victims.

No, it's not just but it's about not becoming the victim in an unjust world. And even if the perpetrator is caught and punished so justice is served it doesn't restore my health or life or trauma that another person is now in prison. I don't want any shit like that to happen to me nor anyone I care about, so I don't think I can help sending out mixed messages saying both "it's not your fault" yet "try harder not to become a victim". If you got a means that doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, I'd love to hear it.

I got a UHD @ 60Hz single stream transport here in the Samsung U28D590D. There's not much video content yet except for a few porn sites, but for stills it's brilliant. Software support for increasing font size is mediocre in many apps, but they're usually functional just ugly. I wish there was some way to just tell Windows to draw a window at 200% size instead. Gaming is cool though my graphics card is choking on the resolution when it gets heavy, I guess it needs an upgrade now that it's pushing 4x the pixels. Overall I'm happy, yes I'm an early adopter but the bleeding edge is more like a paper cut.

It's not there because it is important, the trivia is there because it's not in dispute and backed up by third party references. Isn't plain facts regardless of seriousness the perfect kind of information to put on Wikipedia? It's far more structured and cohesive than using Google, it rarely shows up unless it's what you're looking for and it's not like the encyclopedia is going to run out of pages or balloon the printing costs. And most importantly, it wouldn't help. Nobody who wants to write about Pokemon characters or GoT plot summaries is going to get into an edit war with paid shills on serious topics, they'd just be over at some fan site instead.

Wingdings is to fonts what VBA/Access is to application development, so I can't say I feel terribly sad about that.

Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.

Before they gimped it to match UTF-16 it had ~2^31 combinations, now it has ~2^16. And you could have extended UTF-8 to a full ~2^42 by just continuing the scheme to fill the entire first byte, so space is really of little concern. They probably just don't want to coordinate a million different people who want to add a smiley or their imaginary fantasy language to the standard.

Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfectly legitimate to promote it as free Internet service for the buyer.

You know, in reality we'd probably have a bit more than half a dozen soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. UFO Defense was a lot more about tedium and logistics than actual strategy, okay the soldiers need bullets for their guns but I need to restock them between each mission or they'll forget to bring ammo? That's not the kind of micromanagement I'd like to be doing between researching alien tech, building new and unique equipment and facilities while staving off an alien invasion. I consider the chances in the new X-Com basically to say that for any reasonable engagement, the soldiers will have bullets because practically they'll either kill the enemy or be killed before they run out. The reload time also makes you cut down on the spray-and-pray tactics. Standard issue is maybe 2-3 grenades, I agree it's an oversimplification but it also means you get to pick the pros and cons not just throw whichever grenade is best all the time.

I've been up and down a lot of kilos and quite frankly the more overweight you are, the harder it is to lose weight. While keeping your weight is all about diet, losing weight through under-nourishing yourself is extremely frustrating and slow, with the body constantly nagging you with hunger and being fatigued from lack of the nutrients it can't get from fat. So that's the supply side, on the consumption side it's not much better. When my BMI was closing on 40 my endurance was next to nothing, I'd be exhausted and get pains from wobbling around long before I could burn any significant amount of calories.

Of course I had to stop the overeating that brought me there in the first place, but to go beyond that and get a real deficit going so I could lose weight working out was essential. When you don't work out the body is storing it as fat as quickly as possible to make you hungry again, but when you exercise regularly the body seems to keep more energy around in stand-by. That makes a huge difference in reducing your calorie intake without any herculean feat of will power. Plus carrying that weight becomes so much easier with a little muscle, it won't make you slim but it will make life much easier all the same.

Well, unless you count psychological problems as medical problems like for example depression/bipolar causing binge eating and such. For most it's simply a problem of diet and exercise, but for it's a side effect of a more serious underlying condition.