Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.

Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.

Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.

My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.

When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.

I switched to charter from AT&T, about a year ago. I haven't yet had to deal with their customer service and the internet service has been good.

AT&T made me sad though as I was customer of theirs for over ten years and while their customer service people were good, they weren't empowered to do much of anything. The service had gotten pretty bad and I was at the point that I had to replace the DSL modem at my cost just to see if that was the issue. They couldn't/wouldn't send me a new one even though the modem I had was the original they sold me over a decade ago. Instead they wanted me to gamble on buying a DSL modem and hope it was compatible with their system. Screw that I switched to cable, got a better connection, lower bill, and new equipment.

Maybe Charter will tank in the near future but so far it's been great.

And Google does not provide quality search results it provides popular search results.
And Slashdot shows an anti-religious bias again.

You get the same quality of results if you search for "have aliens landed on earth".

I have four daughters. I've pushed and pushed and prodded and supported their every Engineering and Computer Science interest, and it has led to nothing. It's been very frustrating. I had two daughters attempt to join the Robotics club at the local high school. They get straight A's, and have excelled in other sciences, but computer science has been a real turn off. The school wins a lot. They're probably the top in the state, and there is a fair smattering of girls in the class. What we found was that the teams were already full of "experts" and there was very little teamwork and at the time no adults were really considering lower level interests because it's all centered around competition. It just wasn't going to be fun unless you'd already been playing with legos since you were six, or had shoe-horned your way into the team by some kind of assertiveness that wasn't within my girl's level of interest. There was no one to encourage people who had NO experience at all, or who just wanted to have fun with it. Ironically, I find this same issue in the Computer Science based work-force--so often the team revolves around the star programmer(s) (sometimes called developers) and everyone else plays support to them. The developers are so busy and focused on the competition and rewards that they don't train or support general expertise. I still hold out hope that my girls will at least take a few CS classes and see if they can stomach the egos and the know-it-alls, and the folks who tell you "Oh this is SO EASY!" and hand you a 5 million line open source project with no documentation and tell you to make it better...

For C++ there is no standard answer, because every C++ shop uses a different subset of the language. There are probably a few things that all of them have in common, but it's unreasonable to expect that any entry level C++ programmer can be productive without support from senior programmers while they learn the local ropes. Even experienced C++ programmers will need a little time to get up to speed on the local style guidelines.

C++ doesn't have an extensive set of standard libraries, either, which means that every shop has its own set. So senior programmers have to expect that new people are going to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on those.

Finally, I think the question is fundamentally bad, because it implies a misguided expectation of immediate productivity. That's a common expectation (hope?) throughout much of the industry, but unless you're hiring contractors for six-month jobs, its stupid. What matters in the longer run isn't what your new hires know coming in the door, it's how well they learn, and think. Because whatever they know coming in is invariably inadequate in both short and long term. One of the things I found very refreshing when I joined Google is that they don't much care what you know in terms of languages, libraries and tool sets. It's assumed that capable people will learn what they need to when they need to learn it, and that any new project involves some ramp-up time before people are productive. On the other hand, given a little time to get up to speed capable people will become very productive. Much more so than the less capable person who happened to know the right set of things when hired.

Even the small payload becomes a big logistical challenge when you're looking at doing it globally, for large numbers of devices and want to make it fast (means having data centers in all regions), and make it reliable (means having redundancy, at multiple levels). Oh, and the "all the data is encrypted" bit may expose regulatory problems, too.

What specifically are you looking for? As an alternative, are there some ways that Android could be improved to alleviate whatever concerns you have? If your concerns are non-technical and primarily about insufficient ecosystem diversity (i.e. insufficient fragmentation), then there's probably not much to do. If your concerns are related to technical problems with Android, or privacy concerns about its relationship with Google, there may well be.

I'm an engineer on Google's Android Security team, and I'm actively looking for things that we can do to address security and privacy concerns. One of the ideas I've been kicking around is a "pre-encryption network tap"... basically, what if you could turn on a mode that logs a copy of everything your device transmits and receives? Most of that data is (and should be!) encrypted, but since most apps and all system services use the framework implementations (yes, plural... sigh) of SSL/TLS it should be possible to hook in and grab the plaintext. My goal here is to enable users to examine what their device is sending, and to whom, because I think right now it's too hard to tell, and because specifically I think there are a lot of erroneous assumptions that Google is receiving a lot of data from Android devices without user permission.

The downside, of course, is that adding such a hook into the system makes it a prime target for various sorts of attacks. So I don't think we would want to do that, not as stated, anyway. Though there may be some variant of the idea that isn't too risky.

Anyway, given a system like that, it should be possible to build an alternative ecosystem of apps and services that run on Android and don't use Google's infrastructure, and that would be much easier than building an entirely new platform. You'd still need to address the problems I mentioned at the top, but at least those could be the bulk of the challenge rather than just another piece of it.

As another alternative, I think if Google became more transparent about how it manages user data and what it does with it, many peoples' concerns would be addressed. But although I make that argument regularly, I don't have the same degree of influence there as I do over platform technology.

Or if you have other concerns, what are they, and do you have any ideas about how the platform could address them?

Not as much as you might think and it is not as "reliable" as it once was.

He can do what he wants with his money. I was making an assumption that his goal was to improve education. It is a suggestion that I think would help him get closer to that goal.

As to throwing money at inner city schools? That depends on the school. If they are lacking funds for music and the arts then yes it could help.

It is an interesting idea but I fear it will work with a group of students that would do well anyway.
I really would rather see him dump money into an inner city school or even offering scholarships or loan forgiveness for teachers.
Most of the problems with education seem to be cultural and economic. Areas with successful parents tend to have successful students. The parents are involved and push the kids to do well. I just do not think that a "new way" of teaching will solve the root problem in the educational system in the US.
If the parents don't care only the small number of self motivated students will do well.

My opinion is that Google needs to move out of the SF area if you want more diversity. One of the reasons that you get mostly males that are mostly white and asian is that SF is not all that diverse when it comes to race.
If you want more African American people to apply then I suggest Atlanta and the Washington DC area.
If you want more Hispanic people to apply Texas"Dallas and Houston", Southern California, and South Florida are prime areas.
I work in South Florida and we have a very diverse work force. You will not find a lot of people of color in the SF area since it has very little in the way African American or Hispanic history and culture. The Spanish influence has long ago been pushed back.
BTW it will take time no matter what. Trying to fix the issue of women not going into the STEM fields will take a long time and if Google really wants this to happen they have got to work harder on quality of life for people with kids. Places to work with good schools, short commutes, and reasonable home prices will also help a lot with diversity and quality of life.
Trying to get everyone to love SF is not going to work. While it is a nice place to visit I see it as a hellish place to live and I bet a lot of other people feel the same.

"That's BS. The prevalence of girls/women in theater disproves it."
Umm you do know that acting is all about relating right?

As a software engineer that also took drama I have to say that is one of the oddest things I have seen on Slashdot in a while.
Aka perform has more than one meaning.

Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. For Mozilla to build that they'd have to find some way to pay for it. Given that people are generally not willing to pay monthly fees for that sort of service, advertising is the obvious option. But to make the advertising effective, it needs to be targeted, so...

How would this be attractive to OEMs? Google already offers an extremely well-developed open ecosystem. Amazon wanted to have their own walled garden, but you're assuming there are OEMs that don't want to do that, but want to have a different ecosystem, and want it enough to be willing to accept smaller sales numbers. What would make them want to do that?

It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.