They basically lied to her about the function of the app by not telling her that they would be tracking her every move 24/7. When she discovered she was being tracked all the time and her creepy boss was making creepy stalker-like comments about her, she complained, then removed the app. The company would be very smart to settle out of court.

Law enforcement isn't all that dangerous of a job. In fact, it doesn't make the top 10.

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice from me, pay my retainer. If you get your legal advice from slashdot, you deserver whatever happens . . .

Anyway, I've read much of the below. If you are in this situation, and it's not worth paying a lawyer who practices in this area, what you're doing isn't that important.

I don't work in IP at the moment, but there is enough misinformation below to keep several lawyers busy.

There is a reason for hiring a professional programmer instead of doing it yourself. Similarly, there is a reason to hire an actual lawyer rather than misinformation of the internet . . .

hawk, esq.

I only see this causing issues.

1) Windows Admins writing power shell scripts to do stuff on linux boxes
      a) setting permissions to 777 because they got in the way.
      b) why will it not write the file to c:\?
      c) A power shell script developed and tested on Windows, then pushed out to all the servers and crashing the Linux boxes.
      c) Do you really believe that a Linux admin would allow a windows Admin to run a Power Shell script as root?
2) Linux Admins being asked to manage windows servers because "You know Power Shell" (If they can get the Linux admin to manage the 300 windows servers on top of the existing 500 Linux servers he manages, it saves them headcount and $$$)

Personally I see it going the way all the other Microsoft products have gone when they release a Linux version. It gets adopted by a few windows admins that are forced to work on linux. However the Linux admins and the bulk of Linux systems will never see it or use it. It will eventually get dropped because of the bugs, memory leaks, and issues that are found in it. Those that are never fixed because they concentrate on the Windows version and ignore the Linux version.

Judging from history it is another Embrace, Extend, Extinguish attempt. Microsoft is just pulling from it's old bag of tricks.

Right, it is not like the BBC geo-blocks. I am sure everyone in the US can get to the BBC streams without issue.

Not just US companies doing it.

Now I feel left out, the Commodore PET's we had in school did not have mice, or hard drives, or usb. Just a keyboard and a 5.25" floppy drive. :(

No, I can't. I started out and I sucked. I got better eventually through experience. In order for it to be truly bimodal, people have to start in either camp A or camp B and end in the same camp they started in. Because if you transition from one to another over time, any point in time will capture a group of people in between the modes. Now, you can argue that people don't spend much time in between those modes but you haven't presented any evidence for that. What's more likely is you have geocities coders on one tail and John Carmack/Linus Torvolds on the other tail. And in between are people like the presenter and I. And since I'm not instantaneously going from bad to good, the reality of the situation is most likely some degree of a normal curve filled with people trying to get better at programming or even just getting better though spending lots of time doing it and learning a little along the way.

For all your attacks on the presenter, your argument of a bi-modal distribution sounds more flawed to me. I would love to see your study and hear your argument.

To be fair, you can spend a great deal of time talking about something and make progress on the issue without solving it.

For example the current metrics are abysmal so it's worth explaining why they're abysmal. I just was able to delete several thousand lines of JavaScript from one of my projects after a data model change (through code reuse and generalization) -- yet I increased functionality. My manager was confused and thought it was a bad thing to get rid of code like that ... it was absolute dopamine bliss to me while he felt like our production was being put in reverse. KLOC is a terrible metric. But yet we still need to waste a lot of breath explaining why it's a terrible metric.

Another reason to waste a lot of time talking about a problem without reaching an answer is to elaborate on what the known unknowns are and speculate about the unknown unknowns. Indeed, the point of this article seemed to be to advertise the existence of unknown unknowns to "recruiters, venture capitalists, and others who are actually determining who gets brought into the community."

Perhaps ... but that would imply that one does not transition over time from one hump to the next or if they do, it's like flipping a light switch. When I read this I assumed that he was talking only about people who know how to program and not "the average person mixed in with programmers."

But you just said there's no way to measure this ... how could he have collected data? What data set could have satiated us? The answer is quite obvious and such collection would have been a larger fool's errand than the original article's content.

You mean he's a natural crook?