You seem to misunderstand the purpose and nature of these certificates. While it is fun as a joke, that isn't what it is for.

These certificates never have been meant to protect against either government agencies or against employers. It has always been known by security geeks that any intermediate actor in the chain can eavesdrop and can intercept the connection. That is not what they protect against. They protect by revealing the links in the chain.

SSL is intentionally vulnerable for those implementing a MitM attack, and many businesses and schools implement this. Quite a few major networking products have simplified MitM down to the point of simply hitting a checkbox. One of the biggest corporate reasons for this is to enable caching.

SSL is absolutely vulnerable to being (eventually) deciphered by anyone who eavesdrops, and is vulnerable to being modified by any person holding a matching cert for any point on the certificate's security chain. There are many accounts that major governments already have copies of those critical points.

So what does it offer? The most immediate benefits are replay prevention and an integrity guarantee. Imagine if an attacker recorded a session of you logging into your bank and transferring funds. Without replay protection, and with no other replay protections by the bank, an attacker could replay the transaction over and over and over again, draining your bank account. Since both client and server theoretically offer unique session keys for each session they cannot be replayed. The integrity guarantee is also important, meaning that once your connection is established, those monitoring your connection cannot modify it without it being detected. The integrity guarantee is fairly weak and easily subject to MitM exploits unless properly configured with EV certificates or using two-way TLS and requiring mutual authentication. Basically you can detect all the links in the chain, but if one of those links is already compromised that isn't the protocol's fault. If someone inside your trust chain is intercepting and re-encoding your messages, the protocol won't stop it; all it will show is the person is a link in the authentication chain.

It also offers moderate degree of protection for authentication that the host you are connecting to matches who they claim to be; that is, with a TLS or SSL connection to example.com, if you know the certificate, then you have an authentication chain that the site matches. Just like the integrity guarantee, the protocol shows you all the links and nothing more. You still need to watch out for weak links. If one of the links in the certificate chain includes your corporate proxy or school's servers then you should assume that link in the chain is compromised, which is the most common MitM attack.

The protection most people think of -- the protection from eavesdropping -- is only a very weak protection and not guaranteed by the protocol. The encryption adds a cost to any eavesdroppers not part of the security chain, but for most of the encryption protocols that protection is minimally overcome with a large budget.

Yes, two things.

The first thing is that you are using your own definitions and not the ones applied by labor law. There are six guidelines by Department of Labor. (Integral to business, permanency of relationship, worker's investment in equipment and facilities, nature and degree of control by principal, worker's opportunity of profit/loss, and skill/training necessary. While your brief lists are interesting, they don't match what the government actually uses.

The second thing you are missing is the definition of contractors. This is about the legally defined "independent contractor" or 1099'er, that are one type of contractor who is effectively a person operating as a business. There are other types of jobs that people refer to as contractors, such as short term employment (w2 with a time limit), or cases where employees of one company are brought in to work with another company's employees. Their decision is only about the 1099 style of contracting, which Uber uses.

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Going through each of the government requirements as they apply to Uber and your Ebay seller example:

Integral test. Uber's core business is connecting people for rides and moving funds between accounts. Drivers provide rides using the service, but they aren't integral to the business of connecting people (although they are necessary to implement the task). Ebay sellers similarly use the service, but aren't integral in providing the service. MOSTLY NEUTRAL, slight bias toward employee.

Permanency test. Some Uber drivers meet this, others don't. Those who infrequently pick up riders, those who are on for an hour or two during the day, they're not really permanent. The ones who have used Uber to replace their income, or drive for many hours each day, they're much more permanent. Most ebay sellers are extremely transitory, having items up for under a week, or using it as a store front for goods that are constantly rotated. WEAK FAIL, some people biased towards employee, others biased toward 1099'er, so maybe some people should be reclassified.

Investment test. Uber has some investment through insurance and their guarantees, but leaves most of the cost to the individual. They've got a weak investment. Ebay has nothing invested in the sellers. WEAK FAIL, the long list of guarantees and insurance they offer to their drivers pushes toward employee.

Nature and degree of control test. Uber has a high amount of control, coordinating all the details of rides,establishing fares, and causing the drivers to be redistributed based on their algorithms, and requirements about the cleanliness and maintenance of the vehicle, but they also have weak control in other areas by not dictating work hours and a few other details. Ebay has zero control. STRONG FAIL, Uber's heavy control over what drivers do pushes strongly toward employee.

Opportunity of P/L test. Uber sets the fare cost, and takes a cut, the driver gets no options. There is no opportunity for additional profit or loss. Nothing they do personally can modify their results, get more business, get better rates, or otherwise modify the opportunity of profit and loss. For the ebay example, Ebay sellers can operate under whatever terms they choose, including running full brick-and-mortar stores, which many sellers start and operate as. STRONG FAIL, these "independent contractor" Uber drivers cannot operate as a business independently.

Level of skill/business acumen test. Uber drivers are hired for being able to drive. They cannot really market themselves independently, take good advantage of business insights, leverage their own personal strengths, modify their business based on any personal skills or talents. Nothing they do personally can modify their products or results. Strong contrast with Ebay where sellers have a large degree of control over what they do and how they do it, what they sell, how it is presented, and other factors of skill and business acumen. STRONG FAIL, these "independent contractors" cannot operate independently, leverage skills, or add any effective flair.

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When it comes to tax status and employment status, I'm pretty sure the commission got this one right, or at least, right for the common case. It may not fit very well for those who only run the app a few hours each month, those small percentage of drivers might be better classified as 1099 independent contractors. But those driving more than around ten hours each week probably fit better under the employee definition, and those driving more than twenty per week strongly fit the definitions of employee.

That's an unfortunately common misunderstanding.

There are a lot of things bunched into the "contractor" name in recent years:
A. Working for a company under a 1099 tax reporting system, the person operates under their own business independent of the company. This is a real "independent contractor".
B. Working for a company under a W2 tax reporting system, the regular employee loses their job at the end of the temporary employment. This is a temporary worker or contingent employment.
C. Working for a company under a W2 tax reporting system, but that company is closely working with another company and the individual is assigned to work under their purview. This has many different names.

The guidelines they are supposed to use, which Microsoft and many others have gotten in trouble with, is when they bring in people in group A -- independent contractors under the 1099 tax system -- and treat them as though they are group B or C -- regular employees under the W2 tax system whose employment contract may or may not have a built-in termination date. This is mostly about tax differences, since the government generally gets less revenue from option A.

Many companies will bring in people through contracting companies like Deloitte or SAP. That is case C. These people are employed by one company as regular employees, and the two businesses have a working agreement. The individual is a regular worker and needs to have all the regular labor laws followed. This arrangement can happen for many years. Giving non-technical examples, you may have a car rental company with a single worker at an auto repair facility, or have building security hired through one company where the individuals report to work at the facility yet are hired, paid, and given other benefits by another business.

To confuse things, many times the companies involved in option C will hire their workers under option B. The workers are brought in from a separate company like Deloitte (option C), and those workers are hired by Deloitte as W2 workers with a temporary employment agreement (option B).

Unfortunately for workers, big companies often confuse the rules for them, calling them all "contractors" and dumping them under the same rules. Workers who were hired under option A must be able to work for additional groups. Companies get in trouble with option A when they keep the person too long since they stop looking like independent contractors and start looking like regular employees. When companies lay off lots of "contractors", usually they are laying off people under option B or C, but then refuse to hire them again because that is a rule for those under option A.

Wow. Thanks /.'s Timothy for your editing work.

After all the years we're used to your frequent grammar issues.

But incorrect markup with raw URLs like that, that's an impressive low.

I'm another who has been both in and out of the industry several times.

I only agree with one of your problems:

I do absolutely agree that a crunch is entirely the failure of management. Of the published games I've been on, only one suffered from a moderate crunch. Everyone, including the management people involved, were able to identify the management problem of having more features than we could meet within the date. Unfortunately for the studio it was with a well-established global brand and few features could be cut without major financial penalties, and budget constraints meant the date was difficult to move. That particular studio was in a downward spiral. For the studio management it was a choice between the bad contract or laying off the entire team, about half of the company. They were responsible enough to make it clear to the team that those were the options, even going so far as to putting it to a private vote, either voting for half the studio to be laid off or to work on the tough project and keep their jobs. Most of the team decided to keep their jobs (while sending out resumes). Ultimately about half the team quit upon finding a different employer.

Your other issues are not industry wide. The FPS map design issue is just that, FPS maps, and FPS makes up a tiny portion of the industry by numbers; take it up with the level designers if it bothers you, or talk to the designers about changing the mechanics required. Of the 14 titles I've finished and the roughly 30 other ideas I've helped scope and prototype, only one was an FPS, and ultimately we didn't go that route. For the payment complaint, the freemium model doesn't have much to do with the developers directly, more to the design and business ends. If you can help identify a better model for your game that integrates well, go for it. Freemium can work well especially in mobile where people are expecting free-to-play for almost everything, but it isn't the only model. And the comment about cost of content depends entirely on the product, many types of games can be built without relying on expansive (and expensive) 3D worlds with realm after realm of costly hand-made content.

I'd say pay and respect are the two biggest issues. Too many studios fail to treat their developers with respect, they disrespect them by failing to do their job of properly managing the products, they disrespect their time and wage by not scoping projects and requiring overtime, they disrespect by not communicating what they know. Many studios are good, some are terrible. I've found both tend to be good at the small companies of 10-30 people; it obviously varies by company and requires identifying the bad places, but the ones I've worked at tend to be great places to work that can pay quite well and generally avoid overtime. The trick is finding them while they're small, sifting the good ones from the bad ones, and then realizing when it is time to move on before they transition from well respected craftspeople that are nicely compensated into corporate drones with seasonal layoffs. In my region I do take about a 10% pay cut by working in games and enjoy the extra money when I work in business software, but even at the lower wage it is still a solid six-digit wage that puts my family well above the middle class.

And as for your list, most of those games stopped being Indie years ago. There are many indie games festivals with great new products if you are looking for innovation.

Reading the article, it looks very much like the promises of VRML back in 1994.

No, not all homes are equal, nor are school tuition rates. There are a relatively small number of multi-million dollar mansions, but apartments and inexpensive homes are plentiful.

The article is more like someone complaining that a Ferrari is expensive and refusing to consider the thousands of other lower-cost options.

Too many people look at costs of a single school. There are a huge number of schools, Wikipedia saying 4,726 in the US. The median cost of schooling across all schools is $5,832 per year, which is quite reasonable. Half of them cost $5,853 per yer or less. Yet the mean is $23,874 per year. Assuming you are comfortable with statistics, those two numbers mean the bulk of schools are inexpensive, and a small number of hugely expensive schools cause the average cost to skew quite high. As a parallel, it is like a middle-class neighborhood with a small number of billionaires who moved in; those few high-value individuals will dramatically shift the average wealth in a neighborhood to so the "average wealth" means everyone is a millionaire even though nearly everyone is middle class. The median cost of higher education is reasonable. Just be smart and pick a school you can afford.

Locally, my kids can go to one of several good junior colleges nearby which all cost about $1500 per semester, then move on to one of the several state universities that cost around $3500-$4000 per semester. So about $25,000 total for the four years of education. I note that for my region at least, Wikipedia lists 11 inexpensive 2-year colleges and seven state universities, all within commuting distance. Or my kids can go to one of the local private for-profit schools the whole time. One popular private school charges just shy of $20,000 per semester. That is, one semester of the expensive (but heavily marketed and popular) for-profit private school is the same rate as a full four year degree elsewhere.

I look at the author of the article, Lee Siegel, that Wikipedia says attended Columbia University. That school is a private ivy-league school currently and charges $51,008 per year. We could get two students all the way through their bachelors degrees with the funding for a single year at that school. And he went there for probably seven years. So he probably was committed to roughly $350,000 in costs when he could have chosen a similar education at one tenth the cost or less.

So really, this is is not so much a complaint about the cost of schooling generally. He is complaining that everyone should have a Ferrari they cannot afford, even though for most people one tenth or less the cost, getting a Prius or Accord or Corolla is both affordable and adequate.

We've got the same thing, but at the state level.

Some former state AG's are charged with various money crimes. They include things like accepting large gifts that are mostly fairly weak (e.g. going on a houseboat vacation with long-time business-owner friends and not reporting it as a potential gift).

They repeated what happened when the police kicked down their door. The former AG was out of town, but police raided with guns drawn. His 17 year old daughter was in the shower at the time of the raid. From the news story: He said they ordered her out of the room with her hands in the air. Four agents wearing body armor pointed guns at her, including one who had a laser sight trained on her chest, he said. "How do you give back innocence to a 17-year-old? She's tiny. She's no threat," Shurtleff said. Eventually they gave her a towel before dragging the whole family onto the front lawn.

On the one hand, it is completely outrageous. On the other hand, this is the guy (and family) who helped champion that abusive police policy, and he participated in many raids that were identical to the one against him. It is such a rich irony that the guy's life is being destroyed by the same tools he used to destroy the lives of so many others.

In former AG Shurtleff's case, it is a dramatic irony worthy of a classic Greek tragedy. During his rise in political power he wanted these tools. For his three terms as the AG further built up the monster of aggressive police practices, and he dismissed and ignored claims by citizens about the abusive practices. But then very soon after leaving office, after he lost his political power, the terrible beast he created turns to attack him, and suddenly he cries to those now in power with the same words he dismissed when he was the beastmaster.

Dennis Hastert is in a similar situation. He spend many years of his career in politics writing laws and helping the government go after other politicians in the oversight committee, and even helped co-sponsor laws that destroyed personal privacy, despite warnings by privacy groups. He isn't charged with the crimes that actually or potentially harmed the child. He is charged for something that (when he was in power) he helped create. Not harming a child, not endangering another's welfare, but with trying to have a little privacy -- the same thing he helped destroy.

But those planes are circling Mall of America, for and the article says they only "trick pinpointed devices", like the roughly 11,000 and roughly 100,000 shoppers.

I mean, probably maybe one of them is a terrorist, especially since organizations like PETA, Greenpeace, and other environmental activists have all been classified as terrorist organizations by the government. Anti-war organizations have also repeatedly been lumped under the terrorist umbrella.

So probably someone in the crowd of a tenth of a million people probably has some degree of support to those organizations, so they all need to be recorded. Just in case.

A few seconds on Google can find very detailed answers to that question.

Essentially the relationship is critically altered.

The company that keeps you around knows you are a flight risk, often using the time to train your replacement and lay you off --and you won't have the job in hand that you did the first time. OR the company will give you the counter-offer by giving you the raise or promotion they should have given you earlier, and they won't give you anything for the next several promotion cycles no matter what you deserve.

And perhaps most critically, the fundamental reasons you wanted to leave are still there, unless the ONLY reason you wanted to leave was because of pay, and not because of any other dissatisfaction. A number I've read multiple times is that only about 10% of people who accept counteroffers remain at the company a year later. Most are laid off.

Simple enough, they are the hybrid offspring of lottery tickets crossed with artwork.

* Usually they're not worth the paper the offer is printed on.

* Occasionally they'll be worth a few bucks, enough for a nice dinner or entertaining night.

* In rare cases they'll be worth a notable amount of money.

* In extremely rare cases both the lottery aspect and the fine art aspect will conspire. The company succeeds in the lottery of business, and you will have kept them long enough for them to achieve some value and not sold them for a nice dinner or entertaining night. These extremely rare and extremely lucky individuals discover unexpectedly they can buy a mansion and retire early.

That gets right back to how to negotiate for a better salary.

Many HR drones are taught their side of salary negotiation. Tactics like asking you right up front about your previous pay rates and what you expect to be paid for the new job -- all of that done BEFORE you have even discussed what the new job is to be. Before you have talked with them about the duties and responsibilities. Before you have decided if the company is a good fit for you, and before the interviewers have determined if you can be a good fit for them.

Most people are terrible at salary negotiation. Based on various studies with some degree of variance, overall they suggest about 55% of men do not negotiate their wages, and about 70% of women do not negotiate their wages. That is NO NEGOTIATION AT ALL. HR departments have learned that most people will accept whatever low-ball initial offer is made, and companies take advantage of that fact. Of those that do negotiate, most of them do a poor job of it, using the lowball offer as the starting point for negotiating.

Get yourself some salary negotiation books before changing jobs. Ask for more, and use it to negotiate rather than demand.

As someone who has done more negotiation than I'd like with a roughly 3-year layoff cycle in my industry, I've had more practice that I want at this. In one job that I took, there was the initial lowball offer, which I laughed off and said "No, really, we both know that is a low-ball value, try again". Their second offer was a bit better but still below prevailing wages. So then, using negotiation tactics, I reiterated all the things I had done, all the benefits they were likely to see from me, and suggested a much higher value, about 3.5x their initial lowball. After a few more back-and-forths, and we settled on a good wage. Later in leadership when I was in a position to see everyone's salary, I could see how many of the people in the company -- notably most of the non-confrontational people and mediocre performers -- had wages similar to the initial lowball offers. Most of those who were assertive or high producers tended to have much higher wages. I don't understand how they are related, but they are clearly correlated.

Learn to negotiate. It is an important life skill. It applies directly to salary negotiation, but also to many other facets like getting the good projects and pushing back on corporate demands, including for software development learning to negotiate features from a bad list of requirements to a good set of easily producible items.

It is trickier than that. The normal legal term is "mens rea", a Latin term for "guilty mind", which is more commonly called "intent". There is a spectrum within the law for things that require intent to be considered criminal all the way through strict liability that do not care about intent.

Many laws, especially older criminal laws, either directly or indirectly address intent. Some laws require the prosecutors show bad intent. Others will modify penalties based on intent. Still others do not take intent into account. Sadly many new laws have been written that should have considered intent, but do not.

For example, selling alcohol to minors has strict liability. It doesn't matter what your intent was. It doesn't matter if you didn't know the law. If cops are doing a sting on the store and someone sells alcohol to a minor, they are liable.

Sadly criminal law is all over the map when it comes to rules about intent. Sometimes two seemingly identical situations can result in one case being dismissed for lack of showing intent, the other can have no intent considered. One currently popular example is officers saying "I feared for my safety and the safety of others", which seems to be the magic incantation to get out of major crimes including murder, where on the other hand "the girl told me she was 18 and even showed me her driver's license with the age" will see no mercy as statutory rape generally has strict liability rules.

I know it isn't a personal checkbook, but that does not mean money can be printed with impunity.

While in the short term it pays the bill, it does so by deflating the currency, reducing international purchasing power, harming businesses that rely on international trade (which is almost everyone these days), triggering money market changes. In practice countries who attempt that type of manipulation for significant values quickly approach currency collapse. Short term it may seem like a strategy, but long term even a small amount of that destabilizes governments. Small adjustments cause nasty ripple effects through global currency markets and exchange rates, and anything more than tiny adjustments leads to a death spiral. It can take decades to fully recover.

When the US played that game nineteen months ago, not only were global currency markets disrupted and the US buying power significantly decreased by far more money than the debts adjusted, it also resulted in the nation's credit ratings dropping and the rates paid on short-term money increased.

If the congress critters and federal reserve attempt it again this decade we probably would see an even larger drop in global parity. So while they COULD authorize and generate some "trillion dollar coins" to resolve it, the results would be disastrous for both the national and the global economy.

Debts and budgets are not contradictory. You can have debt AND have a balanced budget.

Organizations, businesses, individuals, even governments do it. They take on debt, get loans or bonds or other money, and have a budget to pay the principle and interest in a certain period of time. Many states even have balanced budget provisions in their state constitutions and routinely get some debt for capital funds to build new schools, zoos, parks, and more; then they make payments and after a few years fulfill the debt obligations. They have debt and a balanced budget.

What groups cannot do is survive in the long term with a budget deficit. When your expenses exceed your income for enough time, eventually your resources will dwindle and fail. That applies to individuals, to businesses, and to governments.

Deficit spending works for a while when you have money in the bank, and it works when you have other resources available to offset the money. You can have debt but still afford to make payments on the loan. But in the long term eventually the groups will reach the critical point where they cannot afford the debt payments, and the US is rapidly reaching the critical tipping point.