IBM discovered back in the 1960's that they were taking great engineers and promoting them to become terrible managers. So they came up with a two track promotion policy so that great engineers could be promoted to manage and vice president class positions with similar pay and benefits but remaining engineers. Most larger technology companies follow this model.

In the past year or two the IRS has manged to organize their data mining capabilities into a "useful" automatic auditing tool. The IRS is cross checking tax returns with "third party information". Bank records and soon credit card transactions.

The program was supposed to catch the wealthy tax cheats hiding their money and collect hundreds of billions of tax revenue. It turns out that what these robo-audits do best is catching poor people who try to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit and have some un-reported income on the side, only collecting a couple of billion.

People are complaining about what the NSA could do with the data they collect. This article is about what the CFPB might do. I am more concerned about what the IRS is actually doing with their data mining. Catching the people who have the most to loose and the least chance of hiding their tracks. The working poor.

The IRS data mining is an actual example of how data mining by the government can backfire. Rather than catching wealthy tax cheats hiding their millions, it caches poor people.

Rather than focusing on "maybes" and "what ifs" of the NSA and the CFPB. Shouldn't we be more concerned about what the IRS is currently doing? Effectively targeting the working poor.

BTW, do you have an eBay business that earns you a couple of thou a year? Expect to pay income tax on it in the next couple of years.

Is anyone else bothered that PayPal allows automatic renewal without my entering my PayPal password?

Is there any way to block this type of automatic payment from my PayPal account?

When I did the same thing for a house I had stripped down to bare studs it was a year or two before cat 5 wiring became the norm. So the house has a lot of cat 3 wiring in the walls, but no cat5. What I discovered and wish I had used is flexible non-metallic conduit. In 100ft rolls is it about 35-40 cents a foot. Run it to every location you might want Ethernet or cable. Run a cat 5 cable there as well. This allows you to run other types of wire as needed pulling it with an electrical fish tape. Check that the installers do not kink the flexible conduit. The other thing you might think about is running Ethernet to more locations than you think you need. Where you aren't going to use it immediately just leave it in the wall and install a blank outlet cover.

Have you thought of in the wall wiring for speakers? This takes some forethought because you have to figure out where the A/V system will be and where the speakers will be.

If you are going to install an alarm system, have an alarm company design the wiring for it.

A final suggestion. Just before they are going to install insulation and button up the walls, go around with a camera and systematically photograph the studs, wiring and plumbing. In a couple of years when you are wanting to screw into a stud or figure out where the plumbing is, you have photos. Be systematic in the sequence so you can figure out which room and where you are later.

This whole drone delivery thing is a publicity stunt.

First off it takes a skilled operator to fly a drone. A friend of mine has learned to fly a 1/20th scale helicopter. He does it well. But he has spent a lot of time learning and he still has mishaps. With drones your delivery driver has to be a reasonably competent pilot. And don't tell me "computer control". It will be a long time before we see self flying drones.

Second, as pointed out, a drone out of control can kill. With a truck out of control you slam on the brakes and it generally stops. With a drone out of control if you slam on the breaks, i.e. turn it off, it falls from the sky. To do anything safe with a drone you have to regain control to land it safely.

Just imagine if in your car or truck when you started to loose control you could not just slam on the breaks but had to regain control before you could stop safely.

Third, legal liability. When the drone falls from the sky or crashes into something, who is going pay for damages? If it kills someone who will pay for the law suite?

And the last thing is power. If the drones are battery powered how far will the get on a charge. My guess is that it would be measured in 10ths of miles not 10s of miles. My friend who flies helicopters gets 10 to 15 minutes on a charge with no payload. Drones that can fly farther are gas powered and are really small airplanes which need runways to land and take off.

I love to read about drones and drones delivering packages. They are great. But I also love to read about stunners and phasers, transporters and faster then light interstellar travel. But I read about them in science fiction not in business plans.

Drone delivery in the foreseeable future is just a publicity stunt, AFAIAC.

According to Theranos' web site the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto has one. Looking at their price list, the tests are very affordable for people without insurance

Every router's configuration was only loaded into system memory, not NVRAM. The ASCII files the routers were configured from were all encrypted. Terry was very careful to make sure that no one could play with his toys.
There was no way to "root" or hack into the routers. Cisco's best could not do it and they tried.
He ended his temper tantrum by requiring then Mayor Newsom to come down to the jail so Terry could give him the passwords in person.

Over a very long time.

I suspect the fine is so large that he can't profit from a book/movie deal. But that is just my guess.

Press the eject button on your PC again.

If I was a young double E student I would focus on analog electronics. Designing analog electronics is a dieing art. And it is art as much as electronics. Simulation only goes so far. Then you need to know the tricks of design and layout.

The old school analog electronics engineers are retiring and there is not a new crop of young engineers to take their place. While more and more things are going digital we will always need analog electronics to interface with the real world.

Analog electronics will become a specialized niche that will command big bucks. Kind of like COBOL programming. Neither of which are very glamorous but both of which are all around us.

There was a project for a 3-way dam to keep the fresh water separate from the salt water. The project died an early death in the environmental backlash of the mid 60's.

This is a horrible idea. I will totally change the ecology of the SF bay. It will probably kill most of the salmon going into central California via the Sacramento/San Joaquin rivers. And how much energy with the pumping plants need?

If software innovations do not have patent protection, then they still have trade secret protection. This is a good thing because it takes care of the non-obvious problem that many current patents fail. If an innovation is truly an innovation, then it should be hard to implement. As long as the innovation is non-obvious it will be hard to implement and trade secret protection will give companies the protection they need for their innovation.

I read these posts and most of them point out the core of the problem. In my field, sysadmin, and in the dev field the workplaces are hostile to women. In appropriate behavior and comments. Lewd comments and jokes. An attitude of if you can't stand the heat, get out of the shop.

I have worked with many women sysadmins. Most have moved onto other things. It is not that they can take the heat. Hell, they can dish it out with the best of them. They just get tired of the oppressive environment and leave.

This is sad because I for one enjoy working with women. They bring a positive attitude and quite often a sunny disposition to the workplace. A can-do, lets work together for a common solution attitude.

I feel exasperated because many men will blow me off saying it is the woman's problem. Which is exactly the problem.

And I don't expect any mod points because it seems that you only get mod points if you agree with the Slashdot point of view. In some ways almost as bad as Fox News. Just with more liberal set of filters.

Truth is that most of the opposition is dumb. Fix the bugs that are easiest to exploit or are most likely to be exploited, then work on the rest. No it does not fix all the vulnerabilities, but it does tend minimize your risk footprint.

It would be silly to be slogging through the vulnerability list working on hard to fix obscure problems while simple to fix easy to exploits just sat in the queue.

And I don't think the talk said don't fix vulnerabilities. I think it brought up the point that in real environments not all vulnerabilities are fixed and that vulnerability statistical profiling is useful in prioritizing the order of fixes.

Because the crackers have not put their full attention to it. Bind used to be able to sneer at sendmail. But now we are seeing problems with bind. If the target it tempting enough or is the ultimate pinnacle of a secure popular server application, the crackers will devise completely new strategies to compromise the program. Not a new example of a known flaw, but something completely new. Sendmail saw this over and over again. I don't think postfix has gotten the same honor since most servers do not listen to port 25 like sendmail did back before people trimmed the services running on a server.

If djbdns becomes ubiquitous like bind, then vulnerabilities will be found in the code. The crackers may need to come up with a completely new strategy, but they will.