"Unlimited upward potential", right... There's only so much advertising budget to go around; companies will shift some of it from traditional media to social / online ads. The actual upward potential comes from serving the long tail: small firms that cannot afford to pay traditional media ads, or larger firms that are willing to spend more on advertising if it turns out to be more effective. Or an advertisment arms race. But even that only goes so far.

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.

As the joke goes: Merkel was mad about her phone being tapped, then our prime minister Rutte (in NL) got mad about his phone not being tapped, as if he's not important enough...

What I find interesting is that she's mad about her phone being tapped (and others are mad about it too, I heard they're launching an official investigation now). So tapping phones of all other Germans, from fry cook to captain of industry, apparently doesn't merit any outrage. I'd argue that it's the other way around: if there's any phone that the US has any business listening in on, it's hers.

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.

That's a fair point. However, to what extent do these issues exist because the iOS simulator is a simulator rather than an emulator? An emulator might have broken OpenGL support, same as the simulator. And for performance-related stuff I'd prefer a real device over either.

By the way, the author of that article does not IMHO make a strong point for simulators. He seems to have a lot of problems with the Android development environment, some related to performance and reliability but many related to usability, and the reason the emulator has these problems is not the fact that it's an emulator. An equally crappy simulator isn't going to solve those problems.

Virtually nothing? I'd say that the simulator covers about 95% of my testing and diagnosis needs. I only have to resort to running on a physical device when I have to test stuff related to the on-board sensors, camera, or push notifications. So far I've found 1 case where the simulator did not behave as expected. If it works on the simulator, chances are it'll work on the device. If it doesn't work on the simulator, in almost all cases you will be able to use the simulator to diagnose and fix the issue. I should note that I do not do game development; I've no experience in writing apps with high performance 2d/3d graphics.

With that said, I always test release candidates on various types of real devices.

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.