The essential elements of a good developer lay in your personality.

• Are you willing to admit you are wrong or don't know something? If so, how readily?
• Are you willing to learn a completely new technology; i.e, if you are a Javascript developer, are you willing to learn C#?
• Are you emotionally attached to the technologies you use? If so, are you willing to use different ones if they perform the job more effectively, or are you going to use a hammer in every situation?
• Do you understand when something needs to be "good enough", and when something needs to be flawless, and are you willing to be flexible with either (i.e., will you accept that some things must be perfect and some things must be imperfect)?
• Are you willing to put yourself in someone else's shoes and describe technical problems in a "human" way to the business, without sounding ingratiating or condescending?

All of these things, good developers make and none of them are found in a math test. You might even say that these math quizzes do more to screen these people out than let them in. You don't need to screen programmers for math skills; if they were so bad at mathematics that simple algorithms confused them, they wouldn't even try picking up the trade, and advanced algorithms can't be divined on the spot anyway. There's a reason most of them have names.

I've never been to the St.Patrick's Day Parade, so, I couldn't make a comparison on that basis, even though I bet you guessed I was of Irish decent by my handle. :) Also, I was not present during the protest over the weekend. So I couldn't give you any first-hand numbers.

Thousands of people walk through New York City's streets in the financial district every day - by the videos, it would be hard to figure out who the 'bystanders' and 'protesters' were, for me at least, especially after having visited the park - a lot of the protesters don't really "look" like protesters - some of them are just kids, there are a few people who are well into or above middle age. The protest was enough to warrant at least one police helicopter and what I like to term as an "AT-ST", and a good contingency of police officers (more than were there at the park today), so I would guess it had to be substantial.

As a point of reference, the last time I saw a police deployment that large was at the West Indian Parade in Crown Heights (where, sadly, three people lost their lives), and there were definitely thousands of people there.

Yeah - I tried to address this in my post. There are only 200 people staying within the park, as in camping with sleeping bags and plastic bags for shelter. There are thousands who are participating that are staying elsewhere in the city.

I just took my lunch break off from work to check out the protest in Liberty Square. There seems to be about as many people there - staying with sleeping bags - as the small park can hold. It's no bigger than a block, and a small one at that. The estimates of about 200 people staying in the park are likely accurate.

From my understanding after talking with some of the protesters there, the incidents in New York happened when they attempted to march through the streets. In addition, I found out that the numbers of people over the weekend were not just limited to the people staying in the park; there are a lot of people who are not roughing it in the concerete jungle of NYC and are staying with friends or relatives during 'off period times' of the protest.

I can't speak to any police brutality during my brief visit. The protest was extremely peaceful while I was there (unless you consider a drum circle violent), but I did see several of the officers in the YouTube videos present at the square - although noticeably they were not the ones who perpetuated or committed any act of brutality (although you could argue they did nothing to prevent it). In fact, the officers I did recognize were the ones who had doubtful expressions on their faces in most of the videos. The officers were mostly staying out of it. There were also no "white shirts" there - the higher ranking officers whom, over the weekend, seemed to be largely responsible for the more egregious assaults. I also heard that some 100 officers refused to patrol the protest after the incidents over the weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if the commissioner or someone else "gave the department a talking to".

IMHO, it's really hard to discount the video evidence that there was unjustified force, given the multiple angles of the YouTube videos available.

I've heard some people say that some of the protesters' were "over-reacting" to the actions of the police. I think that is ridiculous. I would love to see how anyone would react to being pulled across a concrete street by four armed men. Additionally, one of the women maced in the YouTube video was deaf , and thats why she was screaming at a great volume.

It's not unheard of for police officers to attempt to arrest people videotaping them - and given a recent ruling in a Federal Appeals Court that declared video taping a police officer a constitutional right, the actions of some of those officers was foolish and irresponsible, a fact probably made more evident to not just the public, but their superior officers, by their absence today.

If by "pulled out of someone's ass" you mean "they engineered the test to perform best with Internet Explorer 9", then completely.

The main center-point of this test was evaluating a "cloud based trust ranking algorithm". But the study provides no evidence that these algorithmns exist in any of the browsers; its a simple assumption which is likely false (especially when you look at the graphs). What the graphs are really showing is the performance of each browser's black list versus a set of URLs they selected, and not randomly.

If you look at the graphs themselves, they actually don't show the action of any algorithm (which would likely linearly increase or show volatility); in fact, IE9 (With App Rep) is simply a straight line. It's pretty clear that the URLs they used were already in the black list before hand, and that straight line is a continual rejection of them.

Testing a browsers ability to 'blacklist' websites is fine, I guess, but my first problem with this study is that's not the only way to measure 'security'. My second problem is that there's no evidence that the browsers themselves actually perform this activity, making the tests in the study feel like "studying the maximum (flying) climb speed of humans, rats, horses, and bats". My third - and the most troubling - problem is that they don't provide any information as to how these lists were obtained. They only say they tried to "mix URLs so as to make sure that certain domains were not overemphasized", and "NSS Labs operates its own network of spam traps and honeypots.", in addition to "In addition, NSS Labs maintains relationships with other independent security researchers, networks, and security companies,".You can assume without being overly bold that this list could have been a list of URLs that they knew IE would block. Conversely, you could probably easily design a similar test that would have Chrome at 100% block rate, and IE 9 at 10% - it's merely a measure of "what sites were in our test pool that are also in the browser's black list"

Pffft.

Yeah, that was a little off the chain. I was more alluding to the ratification of the 16th Amendment, which 9th Court declared as beyond review, but it still seems like a sham that an amendment is ratified as soon as the Secretary of State is given authority to declare it so. (i.e, it is beyond review at that point). I'm not sure thats "constitutional", but I am not a member of the Tea Party. So there.

Incorrect. There were several exemptions made to ex post facto laws, even ones which led to eventual punishment, all on different grounds, and its hard to imagine "national security" couldn't be one of them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States

...and it's not like the United States has blatantly ignored the Constitution before, right? You might know about the IRS?

It doesn't, but Sweden has an extradition treaty with the United States (as does the UK), and all the United States would have to do would be to convict Assange of a crime in order to ask for those treaties to be acted upon. It is, however, up to Sweden to either a) try Assange first, then extradite him to the US, b) extradite him to the US, then upon completion of trial or sentence have him returned to Sweden for his trial there, or c) try Assange and simply deny the US extradition request. I would assume there might be diplomatic repercussions for Sweden if they chose c), however.

It's all about buying time for the United States to attempt to push the SHIELD bill through Congress. Right now, Assange is an Australian Citizen who has committed no crime in the United States or in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth of Nations. While in Sweden, Assange will be incarcerated or on bail while he awaits and undergoes trial, a process which could take years. This means that Assange will not be able to leave Sweden for a country which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States while undergoing trial in Sweden: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition#Extradition_treaties_or_agreements for a list of them. This would give the United States time either pass the bill, or find *something* they can stick on Assange. (While Assange is no mobster, remember that they got Capone on tax evasion. The powers that be don't always care about *how* you become guilty, just that you are.)

I'm sure they would have preferred to keep him in the UK - they are the provincial spear carrier of the United States, to use Chomsky's words -, but he committed no crime there, and they are trying to make this look as "legal" as possible. The last thing they want to do is make a huge scene over this, or make a martyr out of Assange through "unjust law" (although that still may happen) and spawn copycats. Thus the die down in press on Assange since his first denial of bond; until now of course.

Don't be surprised if the next thing you see on FOX News is Glenn Beck extolling the virtues of the SHIELD Act, while on CNN you have a "balanced debate" about "national security" and the "continuing need" for "tighter safeguards against terrorism".

It looks like Assange may have found a way to generate the capital he so desperately needs to continue his fight against conspiracy in government. He would have lost completely without someone in big media with serious cash on his side. Now it looks like he might actually have a fighting chance of having some success with his goals, and staying out of prison.

Likely because:

1. The federal reserve bank may have been testing a new system which would allow financial institutions to access a list of stolen credit cards via a web or network interface for electronic transactions in order to safeguard them.
2. FedComp is (likely) already a subscription service which is accessible via the internet for employees of said federal credit unions.

I don't think there's anything to see here. The guy stole "already stolen" credit cards and tried to sell them for a profit. He's a con artist, nothing more. There's been a lot of drum-up about US cyber security in the media lately (see: Stuxnet) and methinks its all just a lot of FUD in order to ply the citizenry into allowing "greater government oversight" of the internet and private networks.

Cost is generally not the biggest issue. Your boss is probably against FOSS because most Pay-For-Play software generally comes with support & maintenance contracts issued from the people who wrote the software, which are extremely important to management types, while software like Plone requires a support or maintenance contract through a third-party provider (i found this: http://plone.net/providers )

If you can convince him that the best way for him to handle this situation and all potential future ones is purchasing a third-party support contract which can also be supported by you if need be since the software is open source, then you might have a shot. Otherwise, I'm not sure. I've seen a lot of good software packages turned down as solutions to business problems simply because there was no support contract.