FWIW, I'm not a member of the community. I play Wesnoth off and on for a few weeks every couple of years. I also like the random element and don't much care about characterization, world-building, lore or storytelling. Not that I don't like those things, just that Wesnoth is more of an occasional light diversion for me, so those things don't mean much.

Sure, it does, which is why managers convert such things into spot bonuses -- which are generally several thousand dollars.

The downside of rewarding primarily with peer bonuses is that it might create a culture of doing good stuff for peers in order to collect peer bonuses rather than doing good stuff for peers because it's abstractly good to do good stuff for peers. I don't know how real it was or was not, but I have heard that some obnoxious Googlers with special skills or access or knowledge made a habit of demanding multiple peer bonuses before being willing to do some task for some other team that needed it. The "one bonus per" rule pretty much eliminates that because -- to people as well-compensated as Googlers -- a single $125 bonus isn't worth the overhead of negotiating; it's much more effective to just be "nice" and do stuff for people who need it, gathering the occasional peer bonus and lots of kudos, as well as building the network of people who will offer support at promotion time and/or help you out when you need it.

The effect is the same: it incents employees with special skills or access or knowledge to help their peers, but makes it more of a "gift economy" where everyone tries to be helpful to others in expectation of eventual good karma coming back to them, rather than one of barter and bargaining in which people jealously protect their advantages.

"One front-line manager" != "management". The latter implies higher levels of company leadership.

Personally I've been using Ceph for the last few years myself. It has to be one of the best DFS's I've ever used. It includes security, speed, easy to expand by adding additional nodes. The free part was great. I found it looking through the repos one day. You can even tie it into other projects such as Hadoop (at least I recall reading it had a plug in a couple years ago).

Great product!

Copyrightable by whom? The state? That would be a new and disturbing precident.

Well if things said about the law are used by lawmakers and judges to interpret the laws then yes, they should not be copyrightable. If a Harvard law textbook was being used by lawyers and judges to prosecute the law, then that textbook's copyright should be null and void also. Otherwise the law cannot apply equally to all.

Not only that but TrueCrypt was designed to do secret volumes within volumes, so if someone coerces your password from you they only get the outer, more innocuous volume. The inner volume containing the real private data is still locked and you can't even prove it's there.

Shutting down nuclear and reducing carbon?
At best you can get one of the two.
Frankly if France really wanted to decrease carbon it should increase nuclear and using their hydro for peaking along with some solar and wind.

Spot bonuses are generally much larger than $125. The spot bonuses I've received have been several thousand dollars each. Peer bonuses are $125. And Googlers don't pay for meals :-)

(I do pay for my meals, but that's because I work remotely. So I don't get all the on-campus perks... but I also don't have the insane cost of living.)

It's orthogonal to that narrative. It could be that Erica's manager decided not to give her the bonuses because she's a woman, or because she's black, and the other manager decided to give her colleague the bonuses because he's a man, or white (assuming he is -- I don't know, but it's probable given the demographics). Or not. Given the vast array of possible reasons for the two managers to choose differently, I don't see any reason to assume it's because they're bigots. My wild guess is that her manager was annoyed by the spreadsheet and the other guy's manager thought it was cool, so her manager found reasons in the rules to reject her bonuses until beaten down by the volume, and the other manager approved them all.

Seems far more likely than sexism or racism to me. But I could be wrong. We don't know, and never will.

Management didn't "freak". The spreadsheet in question is alive and well, and Google employees continue adding their information to it (I did). If management really wanted gone, it would be taken down. Erica Baker's manager wasn't happy about it, and she was invited to talk to her manager about it. It may or may not have bothered someone above her manager; Erica doesn't know and neither do we.

Her manager also chose to interpret the peer bonus rules such that the bonuses peers sent her forward weren't given to her. That's at least partly correct on her manager's part. The peer bonus rules say that any given action/effort can only be rewarded once. If the manager feels that it was a really valuable contribution the manager can choose to discard the peer bonus ($125) and instead award a larger spot bonus (amount variable), but only one peer bonus per act.

What is a little bit weird was that Erica said peer bonuses were rejected before one was approved, so the rejections before the approval weren't due to the one PB per action rule. Also weird is that Erica said her colleague got multiple bonuses for the spreadsheet. That shouldn't normally happen.

You're presumptuously assuming that I don't understand that there are exceptions.

The approach I recommend will, however, work for the vast majority of employees, assuming the necessary apps exist or can be built (or front-ended... ick, but it sometimes is the best option). Then, with the majority use cases out of they way, the security team can turn their attention to dealing with the special cases -- isolating them, locking them down to the degree possible and monitoring what can't be locked down. Or, in really special cases, training the users and making them responsible for their own security. That last tends to be the best option with developers.

" Even if we point SETI-type radio telescopes at it and monitor it for signals, they will have spent 1400 years getting to us and there is no guarantee that whatever civilization was there is still there."
"Interesting discovery, but I can't muster up much excitement about this one."
Really? You are an idiot.
The discovery of life in another solar system would be a HUGE discovery. Finding a technologically advanced civilisation would change everything. There is no telling what we could find out if we could read the data from the signals over time. However just knowing that we are not the only life in the Universe would be huge.
Sorry sparky this is science not Star Wars.

Firewalls are not a solution. They're a small piece of a solution, but that's all. Firewalls segment networks, which is good because it reduces the scope of the attacks that have to be considered, but any good security design should assume that attackers will be able to get onto any network that has users.

Even better, move all applications to the web, so everything runs on central servers which are much easier to manage and secure than a fleet of personal computers. Give users Chromebooks or another thin client configuration and don't let them install software.

IDS is good, but primarily for reducing the duration of an intrusion and trying to estimate the scope of the damage. IDS almost never reacts quickly enough to stop an intrusion.

Preventing the installation of viruses is far better than removing them.

If the users can't install and run what they download, then it doesn't matter what they download.

Totally. Most enterprise password policies are ridiculous. High-entropy passwords are neither necessary nor sufficient for securing systems. Multi-factor auth is more secure, and makes it possible to set reasonable password policies. Say, eight characters, alphanumeric, maybe require one non-alphanumeric symbol. Annual rotation is good, unless there is some reason to believe the password may have been compromised. Users can deal with that.

Three-factor authentication is great, and not actually all that difficult. One factor is the password. Another is some sort of one-time password generator or, even better, a USB dongle that requires user activation (OTPs can be phished -- a user you can social engineer into giving you their password will also give you an OTP, in fact it's even easier to phish an OTP than a normal password). The third is a client-side digital certificate installed on the machine after verification that it complies with corporate security policies. Use Puppet or similar to not only keep the machine up to date, but identify if it gets out of date and if it does, revoke the certificate.

Another crucial key to successful security is single sign-on. I can remember one moderately good password easily. Require me to know several and I'll have to write them down or reuse the same one everywhere. If I reuse the password we have none of the security benefits of multiple passwords and all of the password management headaches. So users should have one, strongly-secured, account that crosses all company systems. This is another benefit of web apps over local applications: You can secure all of your web apps behind a single set of authentication credentials by deploying them behind a reverse proxy server. That server handles authentication and provides a signed, time-limited user ID token to the systems it fronts.

Yes I would have to agree that the S100 was on the way out by then.