I have no idea where that came from, but it sure rolled off the keyboard easily enough. I'd actually intended to mention the PaleMoon fork of Firefox.

I think they probably do. At least, that's the reason I've always felt explained the Chromification of Firefox. That dumbing-down and relative takeover of the project direction by "UX designers" and "social media engineers" was allowed because the powers at the top felt that it was the only way they could try and recover some of the userbase lost to Chrome.

What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.

And Firefox succeeded! Development on IE was revitalized by Microsoft, Google released Chrome, and work was renewed on web standards (a whole 'nuther can of worms there, but a separate topic). How did Firefox accomplish this? By being fast, lean, developer-friendly, power-user friendly, absurdly extensible, and with simple and clear design goals.

If Mozilla had simply stuck to these principles, Firefox user share would still have gone down -- it was a certainty due to the additional options for reasonable browsers, mobile usage, Google bundling Chrome with everything they can get their hands on, etc. However, I think it would have gone down less, and maybe even a lot less if they'd remained the browser they were rather than turning into the little puppy following Chrome around.

People who left Firefox for Chrome because they liked Chrome's design better would still have left. But with ChromiFox, people who don't like Chrome are leaving too, because if you're stuck with either Chrome or Chrome Light, you may as well go for the real deal. Sure, there are projects like Ice Weasel and LucidFox which attempt to bring some of that back, but they're relatively niche and don't have the visibility or word-of-mouth needed to take off.

In short: Mozilla abandoned their primary design goals and principles, the same ones that made Firefox great, and the result is user loss, stagnation and, probably, eventual obscurity. As someone who used Firebird, this make me very sad.

Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?

And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.

There's only one way to punish Amazon for taking this activity outside of the US. We must find a way, since they have a business presence in the US, to add a larger regulatory and tax burden onto them until they submit, and return this activity, which we won't let them do anyway, to US soil. At which point of course we will not reduce that new tax or regulatory burden, but that'll show 'em anyway.

Way to go, Executive Branch.

Yes, and there are also key close-out tasks to cap off open projects to deliver to the next guy, or to transfer knowledge and move off responsibilities gracefully. Cutting off is a great strategy where the user is not unique, and a devastating one where he is training his replacement or in charge of things that rarely require attention; most often, it's somewhere in-between, and some careful decisions are required.

Malware isn't as targeted as an individual, although I've seen financial records damaged and personal e-mails disseminated by malware. My stint at various companies, contractors, government positions, and private sector jobs has given me a lot of exposure to shit that goes wrong. Even when I had little technical power, I slowly identified ways to leverage the small access I needed, and to gain higher access; access control is idyllic, and information often leaks around a lot due to the need for certain things to be available.

I used to administrate IDS systems and approve firewall requests. In this capacity, I had no ability to do any real damage: every system I interfaced with was handled by an agent, either to install my hardware, to set my network routes, to configure the firewalls, to route span traffic to me, or to shut off ports when I discovered dangerous behavior on the network. I could damage our IDS, but nothing else. By contrast, those administrators each had a massive amount of power: they could sniff network traffic, route it for man-in-the-middle attacks, leak any information they wanted; even I was able to regularly extract administrative network passwords from our traffic, since our IDS ran decryption through our internal certificates and showed me raw attack traffic. I couldn't see your personal gmail account, but I could see the plaintext of your ssh connection to a CISCO switch.

I do work in network security; most mundanes who dabble figure that security is this rock-hard wall of protection, or it's wrong. They often forget the definition of information security, which includes confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility; it is the accessibility that people most forget, demanding confidentiality and integrity while refusing to sacrifice either where accessibility is impacted unacceptably. In my example with the IDS, the IDS must decrypt traffic to search for attacks which may compromise confidentiality or integrity, yet it also reveals passwords to a small group of people who may themselves compromise confidentiality or integrity by using these passwords; this is why HMAC was invented, but it is not always available within a protocol suite.

Oh, they can read and listen fine enough; but they don't always have social tact or good English grammar. Improving these things is incidental to employing good project management: it often happens when you take a direct approach to stakeholder communication and project planning, but it's not strictly a prerequisite. Even then, much of that only entails improving the clarity and completeness of communication; while there are structural and informational improvements, grammatical improvements don't necessarily come along.

Consider for a moment an e-mail that claims there are problems, that things aren't working, and that people want things too much. Such an e-mail can communicate the situation in all its completeness as I've just done, with little to no information on the specifics, with fragments of one thought jumbled with fragments of another as the text races back and forth between different issues. Such an e-mail would be much better if it first grouped together each part of the problem and relayed these groups sequentially, and second included a complete explanation for each part of the problem. Even then, the e-mail may be one giant paragraph, loads of run-on sentences, fragments of thoughts, and so forth.

As a project manager, you might learn to interpret this, and then produce a better-formed document to pass on to the other stakeholders; you'll continue to receive hackneyed garbage from your engineers, who still communicate like brain-damaged gradeschoolers, and just deal with it.

In the same way, these people may not deal elegantly at all with human beings; I myself am a very logical, fact-driven person, and have such a problem. In my case, I prefer to look at a problem and produce a solution; however, responding to problems often entails pointing out some painful, annoying things that people are still sore over, in the process highlighting all of their recent personal failures and generally shoving these things back in their faces while showing them how much better and more intelligent you are than they. I've found it more effective to separate out the case study and describe a solution, theoretical risks, and justification from the broad field of my work, allowing them to make the implications themselves and offering to provide the case studies if they need some specific concerns to raise to upper management. After rolling the ideas around and discussing them, the sting of failure is anesthetized, and they're far less hurt by the reminder now that they feel some control over the situation.

Of course, either approach I've described here is technically correct: I follow the same analytic process and deliver the same results regardless. I've learned to apply some consideration of complex human interactions when delivering those results, which is a whole different concern from my hard technical skills. I have said many times that there are no super brains: genius is technique, and I was born with the same capacity as everyone around me; this, too, is technique, and anyone can learn, as I have to only a small degree yet, to interact better with people just as well as they can learn grammar, computer programming, or quantum physics. As I've also come to understand lately, such skills are critical for success in the workplace.

People with STEM degrees tend to be more affluent, thus more articulate, than poor, inner-city negroes who nobody likes anyway. They can pass an interview at Burger King better than a fourth-generation-welfare black kid. If we fixed our school systems--if we adjusted schools in our poorest cities to attend to the needs of the poverty-stricken minorities they service--such individuals would grow up poor and without a college education, but articulate, sociable, and on the same footing as middle-class engineers when they walk into the local WalMart looking for a job.

Speaking, writing, organizing your office memos, dealing skillfully with people. These are called soft skills, and are humanities. Humanities include linguistics, social sciences, communications studies, and even law. A lawyer goes to a specialized school and then apprentices for years in nearly a decade of study entirely in humanities; diplomats, politicians, and business executives make a critical study of humanities to learn to negotiate and to speak in public; teachers go to college to study humanities, learning how to interact with children and parents. These are all studies in humanities.

Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.

We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.

But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.

Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.

I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the results and minimizes the contextual information that can be gleaned from the stripped-down information. That was a deliberate choice made by her. She chose to have her staff do more work, and to make far more work for the many third parties requiring the records. Just icing on the cake, to go with not having provided the records on the fly, during her tenure and at departure, as required by the FRA and NARA.

Because if you admitted that the odds of her having corresponded, even once, with another agency or external party in the course of doing her job were 100%, then you have to explain why you think that the complete absence of any of that in the FOIA requests doesn't impact your narrative about how she must have been BCC'ing all along to remain compliant. State has her correspondence with internal staff, but nothing external. She generated and received tens of thousands of emails, and you think that by sheer coincidence, flaky archiving at State accidentally lost ALL of the external stuff she faithfully CC'd, while happening to retain the stuff she sent internally? You can't actually believe that happened, which means you're spinning.

Everything organized has some method of organization. People talk about schemaless documents, but they arrange them into related collections which carry some common features.

Yeah I work with technical people. 99% of them are moronic, drooling fuckups who somehow secured themselves a job without being able to construct a clear sentence. Somehow, they're able to do complex things in databases and write architecturally demanding software, even though they communicate like brain-damaged teenagers high on some unholy concoction of mind-altering substances.

I thought this would be a similar economic argument: 74% of STEM majors don't work in STEM fields, but instead in services (fast food), retail, social services (trashmen) or as aids running papers back and forth. I've made such arguments to illustrate why we need to dismantle the government's activities in post-K-12 education and leave workforce building up to the market, using this STEM market glut as a prime example.

They made a more humanizing argument which I can't disagree with. Both arguments are quite valid: the ability to deal with people, to write well, to communicate, to create, these are also important job skills.

The solution developed on top of MySQL started about 11 years prior to our switching from MongoDB. It never worked. It changed hands to a new rockstar developer who, over 14 more months, rewrote the code in 1/3 as many lines and got it semi-working, but it was academic: it could perform the task, but it was slow and clunky and impossible to maintain as a code base. When I installed MongoDB, they spent a month looking at it, and had a working prototype in 6 weeks; 2 months later, they released two entire new projects built on MongoDB to address both the things the first, failed project tried to address and an entirely new requirement.

MongoDB was considered fresh and new around version 2.2, still. It was being talked about and criticized even though 2.2 was deep into its maturity. Similarly, Linux was considered a new product around version 2.4; it was in production in version 2.2, and RedHat was happily chugging along, but it wasn't a cultural revolution in the IT industry until later than that. Scarcely before MongoDB, there was CouchDB and CouchBase, which most people are only aware of academically.

I jumped on MongoDB when it was this thing that some people had leveraged successfully and most people believed was a brand new fad that would go away just like everything else that tried to replace SQL over the past 20 years. MongoDB doesn't replace SQL; it does something different.

In a year's time, we moved from a dev team of 2 and SVN to a dev team of 4 and Git; we moved from raw SQL to ORM; and we incorporated MongoDB into our applications where appropriate. We also moved onto a cluster system with GFS2, which was successful, but badly mishandled: I didn't want the security implications of logging into the internal LAN's vmware vSphere management panel from internet-facing Web servers, and management didn't want to build a DMZ VMware farm, so we used sanlock fencing. Never use sanlock fencing. If we had built the cluster properly, it would have been a reverberating success capable of handling all kinds of disruption without the slightest hitch. I made all the correct assessments, but we decided as a business to go about it the wrong way; I conceded, and my lack of knowledge prevented me from predicting just how bad these concessions would be.

Three huge steps forward, three huge gains. One other huge step forward, done in ways recommended against, with good gains, but with growing pains; and even that moderate failure was both still a major success and readily avoidable in foresight, with the nebulous problem of "this could cause additional issues in some unknown situations" being correct, if unspecific. I know about black swans, I knew they were out there, didn't know what they looked like, but knew how to avoid them; unfortunately, I didn't take the steps to avoid them, and found out what they look like.

They've found a correlation between poverty and small brain size, but it's a complex issue that's not as simple as money or food or whatnot causing a small brain. You have a point about nutrition, and that's an important consideration going forward; it is unfortunate that we can't solve this readily, but it's a good consideration to make.

Still, nutrition is only one small part of it. The brain isn't a muscle: you don't get stronger at math by flexing your math brain parts; you only get better at the particular techniques in use for the mode of math you're studying, and can thus apply those techniques to similar problems. Even so, the brain changes dramatically in structure during learning: people who learn to navigate cities for a living (e.g. black car taxi cab drivers) show a 7% growth in their anterior hippocampi, as they learn to use visualization more effectively. They don't magically gain a better memory, but they do find it easier to visualize and internally inspect things using their spatial reasoning, which forms the basis of techniques to remember all kinds of facts and figures and places.

Poverty is correlated with not learning, which is a direct cause of a smaller brain: by not learning, you don't use the parts of your brain that execute important reasoning and memory tasks; this in turn causes those parts to stay smaller. We know, as well, that poverty is correlated with certain social atmospheres which make learning more difficult. A small child in a poverty-stricken family will face more social pressure, as the social imperative is the natural survival behavior for humans: unable to hunt and gather effectively, humans form communities to hunt and gather more effectively, bringing down large animals to feed the group; one deer can feed twenty people, so you only need an average of one deer every twenty days per person to feed the group. To use less esoteric, more factually reliable arguments, impoverished children suffer from a loss of feeling of importance, and focus more on peer pressure to adapt to a social need and justify their marginal lives.

The larger part of the solution would be to adjust the education system for poverty-stricken communities. We should focus more on bringing children in an impoverished community together in the classroom, granting them a feeling of importance directly beneficial to their educational performance. Early grade school should encourage impoverished children to work together toward goals, to make friends in the pursuit of things they can be proud of, and to guide themselves through a variety of activities all able to serve similar educational needs. While this may create some small gaps in education, it will maximize the breadth of intellectual skills these children develop: we might not be able to teach them an exact, consistent set of memory, mathematical, and social skills, but we can improve their feeling of self-worth and of community while conveying at least some. A middle-class district might get a head start on these impoverished children, but the difference won't be mere success versus failure.

Unfortunately, I have little answer for that. I know the tools and techniques to teach, but I don't know much about managing a room full of school children; I can't structure an educational system for this purpose, although I know what would go into it. I know how to solve poverty absolutely, but that's of little use in this context; simply guaranteeing every American gets the basic needs of food, shelter, clean clothes and personal hygiene, and the like won't eliminate the hierarchical nature of our society, and will still leave people struggling at the bottom, even if all those at the bottom are readily surviving and under no immanent threat of starvation and homelessness. In any realistic society, the problem of social pressure within the communities of the poor will always have such implications as must be addressed as I have said; I have not solved that problem, but I would like to.

What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.

What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.

Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies ... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.

That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.

If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.

So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?