"There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security."

Why should I have any conflict of interest with my customers? I make software of type X that I enjoy making and am good at. My customers who want this type of software buy it from me or subscribed to some SaaS arrangement. Where is the conflict of interest? We have largely the same interest. I want to produce this software and keep them as my customers by satisfying their needs and desires for this type of software.

Why should my users control what I produced? I understand it far better than they do after all. Not to mention that I created it and should get some say in its continued existence, form and evolution. If the users could produce and control this software then they wouldn't need to buy it from me in the first place. They would just have done it themselves.

Governments telling producers what to put in their products is indeed a very large problem. But it is not solved by claiming the producer has no rights and that once a product is offered at all then the consumers should have control over it in contradistinction to its producers.

...you deserve what you get, and any liability for a resulting "security breach" should be on you-- not on someone who can find a copy of a user's manual online.

Like previous commenters have said, these kids are damn lucky they're in Canada. In the US they'd have been fucking crucified.

DRM and other content whoring practices limiting the effect of the computer age on us all LOVE streaming. You never own the bits. There is no danger you will rip that DVD. You may be able to rip the box if your are clever enough with whatever encryption protocols are on the stream. And if they don't want you to have anything you have bought they just remove it from the cloud or remove your permission to see it. I love streaming in some ways, don't get me wrong. But I think it has a dark side.

I have actually had hiring managers try to claim they want people with no more than 5 years experience because that codes for how up to date their skills are. No, it doesn't. Some colleges teach little but Java for instance. If the first job or two after was mandating and existing Java stack then it is guaranteed the developer is no more up to date than a more seasoned developer that has seen more environments and has had to learn many more new things. With greater breadth learning new languages and APIs is easier, not harder. You understand more general patterns and abstractions that can be applied to the next thing to learn.

And yes, after a couple of decades proving myself (multiple times) in the trenches of Silly Con Valley I am not going to work as cheaply as a person without as much experience.

But the managers read the latest buzz feed and thing it looks easy and as long as they get a young person who hasn't learned better they will get their project done in super record time with said latest buzz. After a while you have seen that pattern repeat over and over again. With silver hair you have deflected a lot of silver bullets until you no longer expect them to be efficacious.

It very much depends on what it is you are learning. There is no way you are going to be a reasonably proficient scala programmer in less than 3 months. Frankly I find that until I work with a language full time for a year I certainly cannot claim to be expert in it. Also there is time needed to learn the new gig software stack and its history which is non-zero. It usually takes 1-2 months depending on body of code to have some idea what one is talking about. People that say they can do it faster almost never can. They cut and paste what the find on google and hope the hell it doesn't blow up too badly.

Examine these charts and point to where there is any real evidence of weather extremes due to climate change or anything else.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/ref...

It has been widely acknowledged for some time that we are NOT experiencing abnormally extreme weather of any kind. Not from climate change or otherwise.

You are in your forties? When I was 45 I joined the most interesting start up and did some of the best work of my career. They were much smaller too, only a bit over 40 people in total. I was probably the oldest there at the time. It was absolutely not a problem. 40s is nothing. It is very common is the valley. Including many start ups started by people in their 40s and 50s. Why on earth would you even worry about it. Be yourself, kick butt, take names.

First, are we talking inflation adjusted dollars? Second, a large part of the problem is the continued ever since the 70s anti-nuclear power hysteria. This has greatly inflated costs, danger estimates, required procedures and so on. It is also why we have no spend fuel repository although we no several ways to create a quite good one. And it is also why all forms of breeder reactors, even those not good for making weapon grade materials, were killed. That move means there is around 20x more "nuclear waste" than there would otherwise be as 95% of it would have been used in a breeder. Lastly it is why we can't build any more modern designs that are much safer and more efficient. Even though nuclear with the antiquated designs has a three orders of magnitude better safety record in terms of number of deaths per TwH generated than coal and two orders of magnitude better than oil and gas.

So don't let this railroad you to the wrong conclusion.

It is data about a person, in many cases it is literally the documents, calls, emails, tweets, IMs of people to people. That clearly belongs to the persons themselves, not to some company that wrote an app used to interact with that data or the companies providing the pipes for it to travel across. So that it is an American company really has nothing to do with it if we see it from the logical point of view of who the data belongs to. If it belongs to a European then it is government by European law. People are also confused about cloud storage and data center storage of information. Storage is not ownership.

Screw the French and their stupid tax system. I would rather see the money use usefully by Google.

I believe in the internet of things. I believe that the world can become much smarter and planning can be done much better and resources used in ways they will be most effective far easier if better information from the ground is available. The only reason I worry about such information is because of certain bad players, especially government ones, that tend to great abuse it and criminalize whatever they wish. Accelerating change makes vast information flows from everywhere pretty nigh inevitable. What we need is to so limit government especially as to not put ourselves in deep jeopardy from it. And yes we also need rational laws to keep business and others from abusing it as well.

I met him back in the 70s. He said that CP/M was something he hacked up one weekend out of frustration with other things available at the time or rather the dearth of much of anything. He wasn't at all impressed by having done so. He wondered why people thought it was a big deal.

So sorry to hear that we lost him and so very young.