In the rush to kumbaya and make it out to be "the sisterhood versus the patriarchy," a lot of women and male feminists don't notice that there is a sizeable contingent of technically qualified women who by and large have little respect for most women. I saw this in college with the women who took CS seriously feeling like they had to work twice as hard because half of the girls were getting by, in their minds by "flipping their skirts and smiling the guys" to get them to do their work for them. A good friend of mine who was a mechanical engineering major observed the same thing in his department at a different university. In fact, our oldest female professor was notorious for being ruthless on the girls because she literally wanted to drive out any girl who had in her mind that women in CS should be allowed to get by in any fashion that even resembled "advancing on their backs."

So if anything, I would say be careful about letting female engineers interview other potential candidates unless they are known to be genuinely fair-minded. You very well may find that it's actually the women, not the men, who are discriminating.

If you asked most people with a TS clearance if they'd rather this or face a periodic lifestyle polygraph they'd probably call this a no-brainer alternative to the latter.

It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world. Legal versus illegal, its immaterial. The invisible hand doesn't give a damn whether they hold a green card or not and giving legal status to the illegals won't suddenly drive wages up because their mere presence in the economy provides at least implicit price competition.

Here's how you enact a sensible immigration policy. You crack down on the employers of illegals such that no one will hire them. You then offer a contingent amnesty to the illegals that allows them to come forward and face no charges if they leave the country of their own volition, and you even let them keep all of the money and property they've earned if they self-deport. Then, you only allow immigrants with provable skills to immigrate as singles or with their immediate family if they're married with children. None of this "let's bring the whole extended family" over. Grandma, the aunts and uncles and cousins have no business piggybacking on that green card. That's just a recipe for waking up one day and finding a large ethnic enclave in an American city (oh wait, that's precisely what's happened in many areas because of this, silly me).

MP3 is a robot from star wars? Even my older relatives know what a MP3 is. My grandmother, who doesn't have a computer, wouldn't even come to the conclusion that it's star wars related unless someone asked her "is MP3 the name of an audio format or a robot from star wars." I'm going to guess that this is similar to what happened when someone recorded himself walking around a campus asking "Is Obama a Keynesian (yes, he is)" and people were smugly saying that no the President was born in Hawaii.

If 500 seniors graduate in CS from a typical state university system in a year, but only 100 can actually function as an intern or junior developer upon graduation then you have 400 people who should probably have never made it past year two of their program. In my alma mater's case, we were weighted heavily toward testing because the alternative was that only about 30% of our CS students would graduate. Our valedictorian, an excellent test taker, couldn't even teach herself Python when she had a whole week or two to learn it and write up a presentation on it. Yet with a 2.5 GPA I managed to do Smalltalk. Go figure...

A similar thing is happening with managers. A lot of the PMPs I've worked with are no better or in fact worse than the non-PMP managers I've dealt with.

The cost of living and working is substantially higher in NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, etc. than in their suburbs. It makes no sense for a company to move into NYC where the costs are so high when it can provide incentives to live and work 1 hour away where the costs are much cheaper. Everything from building costs to payroll costs will be lower and the people just as happy or more so because the lower pay will correspond with lower cost of living and stress.

Suburbs do have their own public amenities, so his argument is completely fallacious in that respect. I'm sure plenty of residence of Fairfax VA would find it hilarious that businesses that choose to locate there as opposed to downtown DC are "avoiding public amenities like restaurants and transit."

How do they even know that they'll be able to target North Korea in this way? North Korea's systems are likely crude, home-grown solutions compared to Iran which used Siebel systems and stuff like that. North Korea is by comparison one Chinese power change away from being functionally embargoed by every other country on Earth. This strikes me as something akin to the Independence Day ending in reverse.

Go is still the best game online. I play at KGS and IGS. (KGS has better tools, IGS is easier to find an (apropriate) opponent on short notice.)

At the end of the day, I still trust Mozilla far more than Google, Microsoft or Apple to respect my privacy.

The main reason why corporate regulation doesn't work is that liberals haven't accepted the fact that if it's true that sociopaths thrive at the upper echelons today, the only cure is strict criminal law enforcement done against the perp not the company. Sociopaths, lacking empathy, don't give two shits about their company unless it affects them. Again, taking Deepwater Horizon as an example, the way to get a corporate sociopath to take it seriously isn't to threaten his company with a $20B fine but with a firing squad if his deliberate machinations result in employees getting killed.

Go after the executives. The executives who do this care more about themselves than the company. The only solution is to focus entirely on the leaders who do this and put them in prison. If Deepwater Horizon had resulted in the Obama Administration filing Felony Murder charges against the executives who directed the safety standards to be ignored (and resulted in 11 oilmen dying), any bets that safety standards wouldn't suddenly become top priority? Same deal here.

Google and Facebook have the talent that, with a several billion dollar (per year) federal contract they could probably be incentivized to put together a team and plan to make it happen. They have the infrastructure already. They just need enough coin to make it sufficiently attractive to work on the problem.

But the real problem here is uglier than this. The NSA program is the price we pay for living in a globalized, "open society" that prides itself on not doing things like "profiling" and that is unwilling to establish sufficient border and immigration security to reduce the risk of hostile foreigners stepping foot on our soil.

They said well it's possible they were a lot more advanced than we thought. You think? Unless there was a land bridge or glacier linking France and England, that means they were ship builders.

In Finland, it is illegal to plead with audience to raise funds without a special permission issued by the Police Board.

If that is even half true, that's just tyrannical. Think about it. That means even a church in Finland doing disaster relief cannot call together a congregational meeting and ask for funds without getting a "by your leave, sire" from a bunch of police bureaucrats.

Give the users what they want on the desktop. Give them what they loved about Windows 7 back and give it them for free. Maybe go so far as to offer a free copy of the previous version of Office to everyone who suffered through Windows 8.1 or 8.0.