Agreed.

Looking over the USDOJ stats, it seems Rohypnol is a regional problem with relatively low use count. In many places it is listed as "the least accessible date-rape drug", in other regions it is a suspected factor in hundreds of rape cases. The numbers show it going from about 1000 suspected cases nationally in 1997 to it's modern level of being suspected use in 1.5% of rape cases, a few thousand cases per year. Consider: how many hundreds of thousands of dates where a drink is consumed are there every year? Millions of drinks? Hundreds of millions of drinks? On a per-drink basis the number of uses is a very small percentage. Since it is small as a percentage that suggests going after bigger percentages for the bigger reductions.

While any number bigger than 0 is a problem, as a statistic these two drugs are not used in a high percentage of rapes, and date rapes themselves are relatively rare. I'm not trying to trivialize it. As the parent post suggests, a very rare problem does not lend itself to a TSA-like drug test where millions of drinks are tested for something detectable only a few thousand times annually at a maximum. My rough estimate is around 100M drinks across the nation over the course of a year, roughly 3000 testable contaminated drinks, so 0.0003% of date drinks, or one in every 30,000. That's a lot of useless fingernail-dips.

I suppose if you do go that route, of the new products this one that continuously monitors your drink by the cup and straw changing color seems much better than nail polish you need to dip frequently. It is both passive and continuous. Someone could slip the drug in after you dunk your fingernail, but the sensor on the container or the straw is 'always on'.

Let's try again...

Trying to reward "being smart" is ineffectual at best. Similarly it is ineffectual to reward basketball players just for being tall, or reward a junior player simply for being young, or reward a senior player simply for being senior.

Rewarding effort and completion are effective at teaching students that those (rather than the grades or being first place) are important. If being first place is the only thing that matters then means are unimportant: break the opponent's equipment, or even put your opponent in the hospital, to reach the goal of being first. If grades are more important than learning, cheat from your neighbor or hack the grade book so you can get the rewarded grade.

When the rewards focus only on the final scores you get children who value the wrong things. Once their life of cheating in school is done, it transitions to the real world into lying, cheating, and stealing to get other outcomes without putting in effort or completing work. Or, if they use those patterns in management to try to encourage others they will be confused about why those same patterns fail to produce positive results.

Real world example:

At one place I worked several years ago there was a team of 6 salespeople. Management wanted to get the most sales out of them, so they created a reward. They made a big poster and charted sales, the highest sales would get a paid trip to a fabulous resort plus some spending money. Most of the salesfolk instantly gave up. In the first week there was a clear leader: The senior salesperson was about quadruple everyone else. By the end of the first month the senior person polished off another deal; they were at over $200K three were between $50K and $20K, and the two intern-type grunts were around $5k each. The reason was obvious to several of us, the senior salesperson worked with management to build and sign the corporate contracts, the three medium-tier people had a collection of established regular customers, and the entry level noobs were stuck with cold calls. After three months the senior salesperson acted all thankful and grateful for the challenge, the attitude of 'better luck next time' to those who obviously never had a chance. When I talked with the mangers about it they were confused about why the interns were upset and why the more experienced workers weren't putting in an effort to win. They couldn't understand it because their own value system only valued the end goal and competition rather than effort, cooperation, and completion. Their challenge rewarded tenure rather than growth. Sales were down significantly over those months. The end result was less money for the business, reduced morale, and one of the salesfolk quitting over it.

A far better system would have been to set an ambitious combined sales goal, and all those who helped cross some boundaries get the reward. The tenured staff then has an incentive to help the beginners succeed, and everyone has an incentive to increase total sales. Instead of rewarding the natural and immutable situation of tenure, they could have rewarded effort and completion of sales. Everyone whose efforts contribute to the completion of the goal gets the rewards. These systems tend to work well as incentives. For example, "If we meet X we'll have a team party", or "everyone who meets goal X will get two days off." Those who have crossed the threshold typically then help their peers to also cross the threshold.

Rewarding "You sure are smart", or "You sure are tall", or "you sure have tenure" is just plain stupid. It might feel good to the person giving the reward and the person getting the reward, but to outsiders it is usually painfully obvious that the system is broken.

Those are part of it, but really the report is just that Khan discovered something well-known in education.

Really, it is well known for everybody involved in motivation.

You get more of whatever you recognize.

Any school teacher can explain how when you point out the bad behavior, "Johnny, sit back down", you have rewarded the child. It may not be what most people think of as recognition, but it serves to reinforce the behavior.

When you recognize a child "You are smart", or "You are so fast", or other attributes that they cannot control, it can have many negative effects. One negative effect is the child can become complacent. They may think to themselves, I'm already good enough, I don't need to do any more. When that happens the child will quickly stop succeeding. Another negative effect is the child can become fearful. They may think to themselves, I don't know what I did to become smart, what if I'm not smart enough tomorrow? What if I lose it? I've seen this happen to several children who quickly break down.

Instead, educators are taught to reward effort when they see it. Publicly praise how Johnny has worked hard on the project. Comment about how it looks like Jenny spent many hours researching the detail. When you are uncertain, praise anyway, "It must have taken some effort to prepare all of this, good job."

Those families that encourage learning tend to also reward and encourage effort. There may be a few of the "you're so smart" complements, but there will also be statements like "Good job figuring those details out", "That looks complicated, it must have taken effort to understand", "You studied a lot", etc. Generally the focus is (and should be) on rewarding the effort and the completion of tasks rather than rewarding the natural state.

Rounding it out, for kids in sports you complement "Good job working hard at practice today" to reward the effort rather than "Good job at being so tall" which is something they cannot control.

This is one of those funny cases were people accidentally out themselves as not securing their phone.

The phones legally must display it in most countries, but only if the phone is locked or password protected. If there is no password required to get in, just a "swipe to unlock" rather than a security system, the button does not appear.

Lack of emergency call button == unsecured smart phone.

(Or a fairly old phone, or a hacked phone that breaks the law in many nations.)

Precedent is only part of the story.

A settlement comes with the clause that they do not admit to any guilt. If the courts get involved, and a guilty verdict comes down, it also comes down with the "under color of law" modifier. That comes with a year in prison at the lowest tier. If there was bodily injury if weapons were used or threat of weapons was used, it jumps to a ten year prison term. The third tier, which triggers if the acts result in death, threat of death, or if they include kidnapping (which false arrests can qualify under), attempt to kidnap, sexual abuse or its attempt, the punishment can grow to life in prison.

It doesn't matter what their original violation was, those are additional bonus punishments of up to a year, a decade, or life in jail.

They will fight in the courts right up until the court decides they are no longer immune. The moment the immunity is broken they will do anything to take a non-guilt settlement.

LEOs (both as individuals and as departments) will do all they can to avoid an actual guilty verdict when their own acts are done under color of law. They will try to get any other deal or settlement they can rather then spend time in the prisons they helped create.

Yes, countries spy on other countries. All of their hands are dirty to some extent.

The difference is the method and extent of targeting. As a wartime example, it is the difference between a sniper rifle vs Agent Orange.

There are various 'socially acceptable' levels of international espionage. Military groups are going to spy on other military groups, sure. Installing listening devices inside embassies, I understand that. Under international law it is well regarded that those INDIVIDUALS who engage in an activity against another party can be subject to similar activities by other nations. That is, government spying on government is okay. Government spying on citizenry is NOT okay.

The Geneva Convention implemented and now all nations are bound to treat non-combatant civilians as 'protected persons'. While they might be affected by actions, they are unlawful targets and violators are considered international war criminals. Those same protections should apply even during times of peace and apply to espionage, but unfortunately they don't.

"Ethical espionage" is not a contradiction in terms. Just as in traditional warfare the common citizenry are protected and are illegal targets, so to should they be off limits to espionage. The "Just War" doctrine, which currently includes details like only attacking war-related targets, ethical treatment of prisoners, post-war reconstruction and recovery for the citizens, should apply just as well to espionage.

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.