Improvements along the same way we see many improvements in software. Things are certainly different and a few changes are enjoyable, but some changes leave me longing for the original.

On the projects I've worked on over the years, I had the pleasure of working with one that created a lot of little items. (My contribution was 48 unique creations over 21 months, as a team bringing in roughly $16M and bringing in nice bonuses to everyone.) Our designers had a wonderful philosophy:

1. Write the requirements as the final outcomes. These are along the idea of a sprint's acceptance criteria defining the what, not the how.

2. Write the end user documentation with complete screen mockups. For us, everything could be done in no more two mouse clicks. Take time to ensure everything is consistent and uniform and easy. These were reviewed by the ten people on the team, our QA group, and about fifteen people on completely unrelated projects who had no experience working with our systems.

These two items, the "what" of the requirements and the end user documentation, were typically fought over and revised many times over the course of one or two weeks.

Only after we had firmly established what precisely the tasks were and how exactly the user accomplished them did we start into main development. Once we knew the "what" and we knew the UI steps to trigger them, building the parts in the middle was a simple matter; The initial tests and acceptance criteria can be built directly from the design doc, and with a bit of TDD the new components could be created and tested easily while the next round was designed.

I miss that group. It was rather frustrating to have the entire profitable team get dismantled because a newly-hired CEO wanted to shake up some parts of business and make complicated what was once easy with mega-apps rather than pluggable pieces.

I also misread at first and needed a double take. If it was 1024 killbots I'd be rather worried.

If they're Futurama killbots we can just throw wave after wave of soliders and police into them until they exceed their kill limit safeties.

If they were more like Terminator killbots, the world would be screwed.

But since they're kilobots rather than killbots, having a kilo of kilobots sounds like fun.

Like most things in real life, there is nuance to that case.

The companies DO provide insurance. $1M in coverage, but it is only in effect from the time the ride is accepted to the time the passengers exit. That situation was an edge case, an auto/pedestrian collision right at the border of that time, immediately before the passenger was in the car. They denied coverage because the event happened immediately before coverage took effect. Much like having an insurance policy that takes effect October 1st and having damage reported September 29th, the collision happened immediately prior to the policy becoming active. Tragic, but unfortunately it happens sometimes. Rather importantly, they have since extended the time of coverage so if it happened today it would be covered. So when another tragedy like that inevitably happens the full $1M insurance will be in effect.

Both Uber and Lyft have added additional insurance which is in effect any time the driver marks themselves online as 'available'. The insurance rules can be summed up pretty easily:

* Logged out / unavailable: Your own insurance covers you, nothing from company as you aren't on the clock.
* Available but between jobs: Company provides $50K in supplemental insurance, after your insurance pays as the primary.
* From "ride accepted" to "ride finished and passengers is away from vehicle": Company provides $1M as primary insurance, personal insurance is secondary.

I assume it is similar for all their locations, but it may be different in Germany where they were banned.

The California proposal is to increase the insurance coverage for the "Available but between jobs" segment from $50K to $750K, which would cost quite a lot more for the company and is dramatically more than what traditional taxis must have for collision and liability. I would only agree with the bill if it affected all transportation companies, not just the newcomers.

That isn't how employee referrals work.

For the existing employee, you get a copy of their resume and contact information and give it to the boss with the opening. You tell them "I got this from a friend [or friend of a friend], I have no idea how good he is, but we are offering a $500 referral bonus. He looks good on paper and they are very interested in working at this company." The referring employee does not need to forswear their firstborn child against the referral being the perfect worker.

All it says is "this person is particularly interested in the job. I think they should pass or bypass the first two HR filters since it looks like they are qualified."

It seems you missed an important part of my post:

I did not state nor imply that you should not apply through the web sites. Instead I recommended that you maximize your efforts on the most effective path.

Once that most effective path is exhausted, spend your time on the next-most effective path. Once that path is exhausted, work your way down through the various less-effective job hunting methods.

While 40% of workers coming from direct referrals, 35% come through web sites. That is still a large number, but your application is less than one-tenth as likely to get the job. That doesn't mean "don't apply", instead it means "apply through the most effective method". One of those two methods is an order of magnitude more successful, so take it.

As for not having a social network, that is a fairly rare thing. You probably have family members (unless you are perhaps an unadopted orphan with no siblings, and unmarried and childless). You probably have one or two friends or at least acquaintances. If nothing else you have a weak social network that includes several thousand active /. users.

While a direct friend is best they may not work at the target company. You probably have a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend at every corporation in the world. Find that chain and you instantly boost your odds by an order of magnitude.

It is well established (through most of history) that direct contacts and personal networks are the most likely way to get jobs. A few seconds on Google pulls up many research studies and sites that maintain real statistics (rather than just made-up numbers) on the topic. Like this one among many.

That one linked to is interesting because of the various charts. For those companies they track, direct referrals are only 6.9% of the applicants but represent 39.9% of those actually hired. Job boards and web sites account for 74.9% of the job applicants and 35.8% of the hires. This means that while it is still important to apply through the web because they pull many workers through there, it is far more effective to get an employee referral. In other words, one hour of working your social network looking for a referral is equivalent to roughly 12 hours of submitting web-based job applications.

The Internet is great for research and finding people in the organization, great for learning about openings. But when it comes to actually applying for a job, spend your time farming your social network to find someone who knows someone at the company rather than just applying through their site.

It is nothing to be too concerned about, it is part of the normal life cycle.

Like happens to all languages before it, Java has slowly changed from a lean and sexy system into an overweight, middle-aged, sometimes nagging system that is not really much to look at. While it is great to have around, cooks great meals, and keeps the house clean, it is not attractive any more.

Nothing to be ashamed of.

Systems get older. Usually they get less attractive as they age and stop attracting people.

Java was once that lean and sexy system when compared to its contemporaries. I was there when C++ was lean and sexy compared to predecessors. I remember hearing stories about C being lean and sexy compared to needing to rewrite the program for every system.

Lots of new languages are popping up that are new and sexy. Dart and Go and Boo languages are all cute (and are mature enough that people don't look away and mumble 'tsk tsk'). Apple's new Swift language looks cute but is still a bit too young. While I have a lot of code in Java, I'm not married to the language and can use them as they appeal to me.

Now for my rambling "get off my lawn" story. Stop reading here if you don't want to listen to grandpa babble about his old conquests and drift into a drooling sleep.

I first started playing with C++ around 1985. It was so easy to create systems compared to the C systems I was also working on. I could modify behavior really easy with inheritance. I didn't need to specify my structure on every single function, just use the fancy new member functions that passed it automatically with the this pointer. Function names were much simpler, instead of the format NounVerbNoun they could be reduced to VerbNoun or just Verb. So much less typing. I didn't need to maintain tables of function pointers inside every object. I didn't need to follow every allocation with a series of intialization statements, but throw them into a constructor. I didn't need to search the entire code base and make hundreds of changes when adding something to a structure, I could just modify a single file. It was wonderful. But over time people kept adding new requirements and best practices; when you do this you also need to do five other things. Build times radically increased as features like templates were added (they were not there originally) and then huge swaths of code was automatically generated at runtime, or hundreds or even thousands of potential types were evaluated as potentially deduced types. It slowly changed from young and sexy to old and ugly.

I first started programming with Java back in the 1.1 days, around 1996. It was so easy compared to the C++ systems I was also working on. I could create a good looking graphical program that I could run from a web page in a matter of minutes, or hours at most. My first real project at the time was a distributed image processing tool, with back-end clients running on 12 machines and a coordinating server, and the whole project took less than a week. If I needed to build a similar tool in C++ at the time it would have taken five or ten times the effort. Being able to simply rely on java.net.* rather than trying to find a networking library, relying on java.awt.Image classes to process the work, and otherwise having everything instantly available made development very easy. I could dynamically build images and pass them over the web with a trivial amount of human effort.

Today I could still do that, but it would upset people. I would be asked things like "Why doesn't it use Maven to build it? Why don't I use more advanced image processing packages? Why are these talking directly with network libraries rather than using a comprehensive REST-based system? Why is there no comprehensive unit testing?" All the little additions have crept in to the process making it just as time consuming --- if not more --- than C++ was at the time I picked up Java. That makes it no longer lean and sexy, more of an overbearing source of frustration.

Finishing up my ramblings, Java has become annoying to use. There are lean, sexy, young alternatives. Java could re-invent itself to appeal to a new crowd, but I don't think it will.

Yes, the posted on their skype.com blog that old versions would be discontinued in the ambiguous future date. It applied to all platforms. A few tech news sites picked up on it, but nothing major.

A post on their company blog is vastly different from notifying customers (especially corporate customers) that their paid service is going to become inaccessible.

People pay for the service, and shutting out older clients should have much more notification.

A proper response would be to sending out an email to ALL active accounts and their billing addresses notifying them of all the versions that were being discontinued due to the change. This would allow businesses (where software is sometimes tightly controlled) adequate notice to update all the machines and conference rooms. It would also allow users (who are now stranded) an opportunity to report that there are no viable upgrade paths, and a chance to use the balance of their accounts.

Instead it has become a PR nightmare.

The people who broke the law are not elected officials, they are employees. It is very difficult to hold those people accountable.

Lying in an FOIA request is potentially a federal crime. But 5 USC 552 provides a very long list of exemptions from the law, and it is federal prosecutors that need to decide to prosecute.

So the first thing you'd need to do is convince the federal prosecutors to go after the problem, which is very unlikely since they're part of the same Good-Ol'-Boys Network. Then you need to break through the qualified immunity enjoyed by all government workers and government agencies. Once the federal prosecutors fight through the process of appeals to gain permission to sue, the next step is to prove intent since that's what the law requires. The police can easily slip out of it through the gigantic loopholes like saying it might have an impact on current or future police investigations, or claiming it was one of the various legal oversights.

So in summary, they'd need to:
1. Anger a federal prosecutor enough to interest them
2. Convince their boss who controls the money (usually an elected person) to sue another branch of government (breaching the Good Ole' Boy's Club)
3. Fight through the courts, usually all the way to the state's supreme court, that qualified immunity doesn't apply
4. Convince the court that the individual should be personally liable, otherwise it is just a budgetary transfer from department to department
5. Prove it was either malicious or that the negligence was at criminal levels, otherwise it doesn't trigger any penalties
6. Reasonably counter all the objections that the person broke the law, knew or should have known they broke the law, and didn't fit the long list of exemptions
7. Get a conviction from a jury, since this is criminal law. Or just pressure the person into submission with a plea deal, which is the typical response once you hit #5 above.

Yeah, that will happen. </sarcasm>

These are not people you can vote out of office. You might be able to find a way to vote out a city mayor; in some places people like the police chief are elected rather than hired, but otherwise they're just regular government employees who enjoy things like tenure, golden handcuffs, and all kinds of legal immunities.

First, contact elected officials, both your own and those in a position over the bill's progress. I wrote to six of them today when I read the story. I also contacted several of the committee members including Bob Goodlatte who is the committee chairman. Yes, one person is unlikely to get much change, but enough people contacting his office can induce change.

Second, encourage those around you contact their representitives, and encourage them to directly contact those in the committee who can get things changed. Just like I did up there in that first paragraph. Post the links on facebook and other social media (also already done this today). Encourage people to send a message, ANY MESSAGE, that references the bill to their legislator's office.

One or two messages won't do it. When it gets to be enough messages that the staffers notice, or even better enough that it overwhelms their office staff.

What would I have you do? Make a noise. Any noise you can. This reply is the first one that would be considered "preaching to the crowd", but is about my 15th communication about it today. That is what you can do. Make it clear to the legislators that it is important to you, raise the layperson's awareness of the issue, and help encourage others to contact the right offices. Even if it is nothing more than writing your own messages and then calling on the Internet Trolls that you know to send them messages, that is still something. Do what you can to get your voice heard, since it needs to be heard over the corporate money.

The biggest problem with iProvo, which the residents didn't usually see, was the lawsuits.

Back when I lived there from 1999-2003, the mayor was pushing iProvo quite a lot. Many businesses and apartments signed up. The city started their rollout by providing hubs to the various city buildings, the historic library, and they even ran lines to the major traffic control cameras. They hooked up quite a few businesses along the main roads, like the main street plaza was covered from the overpass on the west to the roundabout on the east. University Ave, Freedom Blvd, and 500 West were installed from Orem on the North down to the mall and the Novell campus on the south. They got quite a lot of core infrastructure in place during those years. ...

... Then they were sued by basically everybody who had an interested in providing Internet services. As a result of the lawsuits they rolled back to just giving fiber to the city's buildings, to their own infrastructure like traffic cameras, and to some existing contracts. If you attended the city council meetings or watched their broadcasts (yeah, I know, who does that, except I remember it was on channel 17 at the time...) you could have listened to reports on how many million they were spending fighting off Qwest (now CenturyLink), Comcast, and the rest. They provided erratic service largely because the money was frequently redirected to the courts. Existing companies REALLY did not want municipal fiber, and they fought it hard.

While the mega-corps know they can stomp on a small city like Provo very easily, they were quickly outmatched when Google came in. They stopped the decade-long hemorrhaging of money to lawsuits, so the service became much better.

Utopia has also been heavily plagued by lawsuits and governmental contracts cancelled mid-deployment. Even the US government (under RUS) contracted out some services and then abandoned it, leaving the fiber network on the hook for over $11M (the lawsuit is still ongoing). People complain and suggest Utopia is mismanaged, and while they have had a few management missteps, their biggest problem has been the many millions of dollars spent trying to fight legal battles against incumbents.

Even today if you look a bit North up the Wasatch front corridor, Centerville is right now the hotbed of the issue. Comcast and CenturyLink are funding a bunch of signs for anyone who wants them. They're discussing putting municipal fiber in as a tax, complaining that residents shouldn't have to pay because they already have Internet providers. ... conveniently overlooking the fact that the very small tax will provide everybody in the city a minimum fiber to the home connection with 5 megabit if you don't pay for any plan, and 150 megabit or faster if you do pay for a plan, and the plans are far cheaper than either Comcast or CenturyLink.

Municipal fiber is the future, just like municipal sewer, municipal water, municipal trash, and other city-managed services. The incumbent companies are fighting with all their power and disinformation campaigns to keep their high profit system in place. Just like your Comcast salesmen knocking at the door trying to convince you fast and unlimited is bad, slow and bottlenecked is good, disinformation is really all they can rely on these days.

That is all very correct.

Note that first off, this is a warrant rather than a subpoena. This was covered in depth when the magistrate ruled on it. If they are looking for specific information and the company can review it and provide the information then a subpoena is the correct tool. The police stated in both reviews that they are searching for a broad range of documents and that they want their own discretion to review all of them associated with the email address. You wrote "This is not seizing evidence it is compelling an entity to produce it". If they could have just seized a US server, they would have gladly stormed the office and taken the entire box, as is the custom with a warrant. In this case they could not seize a specific computer and they could not justify attempting to seize all of Microsoft's mail servers. A subpoena would normally be the correct implement, but that is not what the police are using. They want a huge amount of stuff rather than specific stuff, which is why they are using a warrant.

Next, you are correct about things being in your control. Microsoft Corporation is a US based company. Microsoft Ireland is a different company. It is more along the lines of an umbrella company. Much like you have Viacom as the big NASDAQ traded company, then you have Viacom International, Paramount Pictures, BET Networks, and the rest. You don't sue Viacom (the parent) when you want documents from Paramount Pictures. Viacom owns Paramount but they don't control Paramount's documents. Similarly the police are going against Microsoft Corporation in Seattle when they should have been suing Microsoft's Irish subsidiary. The US based corporation owns the Irish subsidiary, but they don't control the documents of the subsidiary.

So as has been written, they are using the wrong tool, on the wrong company, in the wrong country. There is a proper way to do things, and this is not it. Microsoft is going to win this one in the long term. The judge may understand some aspects of law, but he clearly doesn't understand corporate organization and ownership.

There are quite a few games from their back catalog of acquired games I would love to play again. Remember that EA has bought a long list of companies and products.

It is terribly unlikely that most of the games will be brought back (which is a shame) but potential is there. They added a few to Good Old Games but most of them have problems or require dosbox or have multiplayer disabled.

My short list:

* Wing Commander series, including Privateer (some already on GoG, but buggy on some systems)
* Ultima series (already on GoG but buggy on some systems)
* Populus series, with LAN multiplayer
* Old Dune and old C&C games that allowed LAN multiplayer
* The Neverhood

My long list would include a considerable number of games that are not on GoG and have not been updated to run on newer platforms. For that cost and a catalog including updates or even patched current versions of those games, it would be worth it to me.

I fear it will just be games that have the full version still available at a reduced cost, and become more of a games preview service. But hey, maybe they will get this one right.