Whether or not you think Israel is struggling for peace, the neighborhood sure as HELL is not struggling for peace. Israel has nothing to do with the internal conflicts in Lebanon; it has nothing to do with the Syrian civil war; it has nothing to do with the Arab Spring and the suppression of it in Egypt; it has nothing to do with Iraq's invation of Kuwait, or the ISIS incursions at the moment.

That.

At work, we've found a simple solution: Let each group figure out what seating arrangements work for it. There are software development groups here that really like open plans; my own group hates it, so we have tall cubes. It's up to the engineers in the group to figure out what works.

If your wife might be going into labor right now and you're out having a beer with a friend, the Google Glass you're wearing is not the first indication you're a douchebag.

Hopefully, nothing will keep people interested in developing for Silverlight, given that Silverlight is dead. This isn't the beginning of the end -- the beginning of the end was when Microsoft announced that Silverlight 5, released three years ago, was going to be the last version of Silverlight released. I'm not saying "Silverlight is dead" as hyperbole -- it's officially a discontinued product.

References:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.c...

http://social.msdn.microsoft.c...

It will continue to be supported by Microsoft until 2021, but nothing new's happening with it.

Actually, my 2011 Hyundai Elantra with the Limited package has rear-seat warmers. And that car retails for something like $22K.

Other people have already commented on the relatively horrifying moral considerations, and some have noted that college students will figure out other ways to get their access. There's one thing that I haven't seen addressed yet: The sites you really care about, the ones that are very very popular, simply don't care about a hostage population of 35,000 students. You see news of Netflix signing deals with Comcast, and some of your management people think they could get Netflix to give them some money as well ... well, they won't. And I can't imagine Chegg (or, HA, Amazon) doing so either. It A) doesn't materially benefit them; and B) starts a horrifying precedent that they'll negotiate with ANYONE.

That's what I thought at first too -- not so much between DCs (or regions, really -- Netflix is located in the AWS cloud), but rather between the CDN cache boxes (OpenConnect Appliances) located in various ISPs. Right now, they all have to download their data from central locations, but P2P would allow OCAs to chat to each other directly.

However, if you look at the job posting, it mentions part of the job duties being "liaise with internal client and toolkit teams to integrate P2P as an additional delivery mechanism" which seems like it's pretty squarely about enabling P2P on the client level.

You misunderstand the concept of a "protected class."

Employment law indicates that discrimination or harassment based on protected classifications is illegal. A protected classification is something like "gender," but not "being a woman." So if you discriminate against someone because she's a woman, that's illegal because you're discriminating based on a protected class (gender); and if you discriminate against someone because he's a man, that's ALSO illegal because you yet again are discriminating based on a protected class (gender).

Same thing about race, national origin, and a few other classifications (military service, in a few states sexual orientation, etc).

That doesn't mean, however, that you can't have a charity that focuses on one gender or race, or an organization focused on one gender (e.g. girl scouts or boy scouts); it also doesn't mean that an entity seeking to donate money must donate money equally to all genders -- protected classifications are an area in employment law, not every facet of life.

I won't pretend to give you a generalized answer, but rather answer it for myself and my household:

(Context: I work at Netflix, which may make a difference so it's worth noting. That said, I'm back-end cloud systems, with nothing to do with consumer devices).

I consume my media from several sources, including iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go.

I could get a SmartTV that lets me access them, but IME, smart TV manufacturers move pretty slowly; I also think of my TV as just a large display, and imbuing it with more smarts makes it more painful and expensive to upgrade to something else. By focusing on modularity -- this TV is just a bunch of HDMI ports with a big screen -- it lets me optimize the TV for display, and use another device for content access.

Which is why I prefer the AppleTV rather than a SmartTV.

(We could have another conversation about AppleTV vs Roku or the Fire TV, but that's outside the scope of this particular comment thread).

Hi, I work at Netflix, you may have heard of us.

dev, test, build, and prod run on Amazon (leaving aside the actual streaming, which comes from cache boxes closer to the customer). We've been pretty public about the process, and some of the issues.

Typically, the way these patents are written, the pattern is "a system and a method to do FOO; here's one possible, but not exclusive or reference, implementation of our idea: BAR" where BAR (e.g. the win95 and modem stuff above) is meant to be an illustration of how an idea like this would work, rather than detailing the specific requirements for the idea to work. In other words, the fact they're using Windows 95 and modem is likely, largely, irrelevant to the actual meat of their claim.

I'm impressed that they didn't just build one one atom thick LED, but three of them. Was it to prove they could reproduce it?

Why in heavens' name would I care whether or not someone I'm going to hire is playing Weed Farmer or -- let's just cut to the heart of it -- even an illegal drug user?

I've known enough people who've taken illegal drugs (pot, X, whatever) who were phenomenally good at their job that I fail to see how it's any relevant to me what they do in their off-hours. You could argue that there's a morality component (if I'm being honest I'm not crazy about hiring someone who beats their spouse non-consensually, for example) to hiring decisions, but even then, what's the morality of smoking pot? Why would I care?

I'm a hiring manager at a tech company. We generally think that looking at a candidate's FB profile is a social faux pas. LInkedIn? Sure. Facebook? That's their business. I'm not friends with my direct reports on FB, I don't expect them to friend me, and whatever they do there is their business.

Maybe it's time to find a better class of potential employers?

If it's government-protected currency, it's government-regulated currency. Bitcoin owners have been crowing for a while that Bitcoin's raison d'etre was to be independent of governments, and I'd say that I'm pretty comfortable with the JP government going "you don't want to play in the financial industry sandbox? You don't get to come in when your sandbox is wet."