And speaking as a hiring manager, draw on how your IT experience will allow you to develop solutions that will work seamlessly with the whole IT ecosystem at your organization.

I know I've seen over the years many situations where a development team will say "OK the code is ready!". When I ask them what firewall rules they will require, they just look at me blankly and turn towards IT, because that's "infrastructure stuff".

Typically we have a name for Development staff who doesn't do that... Senior developers :).

Min

My daughter was dada. Drove my wife nuts for months till she said mommy.

I've heard anecdotally that this is because the da phoneme is easier to perform for an uncoordinated infant than the ma phoneme.

Min

And really edgy!

Basically the way it works is you get, as a family, 12 months of EI for the birth of a child. You can apportion it in any way you wish up to 6 months for the father or 12 months for the mother.

Like you, I took vacation as we couldn't afford to lose that much of my salary. I think I have a very close relationship with my daughter, in part because I spent that time taking care of her while my wife recovered from the c-section. (As with all things parenting related, YMMV, and this was the case for me. Your case is likely different. Do not take as medical advice. :))

Min

Yes, nobody ever cracks hashes.

http://contest-2012.korelogic.com/stats.html
http://threatpost.ca/en_us/blogs/anatomy-lulzsec-attack-singles-out-web-20-weakness-052312
http://franx47.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/using-hashcat-to-crack-hash-password/

Bottom line - people pick useless passwords. The time required to brute force a hash given that you have a significant number of hashes to play with is sadly trivial. The various defcon contests are proof of this.

Until users start using random passwords, you don't want the bad guys to get a hold of your hash database. Especially if you're not salting.

Min

Try to emigrate to Canada.

Elaborate please? I ask because my wife did exactly that (emigrated from the US to Canada).

She would argue that Canadian immigration policy is much more even handed (score enough points, get in). This is especially true for US professionals (look up the NAFTA TN-1 visa). There are also guest worker programs.

Once you are a perm resident, there are two requirements:

1) Don't do anything deportable
2) Spend enough time in Canada, rather then somewhere else.

You do those two things are you get treated almost the same as a Canadian born person. The three exceptions are:

1) You cannot hold a senior govt post
2) You cannot serve in the military
3) You cannot vote in elections

Write your citizenship exam (you qualify after 4 years) and you are the same as someone who was born here. You can even be Prime Minister. No birth certificate required :).

Oh and we don't have any caps. We'll take as many people who meet the entrance requirements. No lotteries, no caps.

If any of the above is wrong (I am fallible :)) or out of date, let me know, but I believe everything above is correct.

Min

Contrast this with say, buying an iPhone, in which case you're Apple's customer

Not quite true - otherwise Apple would not be in the advertising business (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd)

In general, you can assume that any large company is treating you as the product. The only question is to what degree and if you're also a customer.

And if you bought a google nexus phone/tablet, you're also Google's customer as well as product.

Min

To paraphrase another author -- your biggest problem is not going to be piracy, your biggest problem will be obscurity. Being well known that piracy numbers are significant will be success, as it implies your software is actually well enough known for someone to put in the time for a keygen.

Min

How about we start doing actual risk analysis and stop reacting on a purely emotional level. How about we recognize that the chances of my daughter being abducted at some point in her life are approx: 1: 610,000, and that her odds of dying in a plane crash are approx 1:310,000? Let's not even discuss the chances of her getting hit by a car. She's also way more likely to be stuck by lightning then either of the above (1:10,000, given our geographic locale during her lifetime)

There are SO many things I would be better off spending time with my daughter discussing, including but not limited to her new stuffed friends, that any minute stolen from me discussing things with such a low incidence risk make me slightly resentful.

Now the odds of her posting a picture that causes her grief over her lifetime. That's a bunch higher.

Oh and the "Don't meet people from the internet" rule? I'd never have met my wife, and therefore my daughter wouldn't exist.

Life is risk. The only way to avoid risk is not to live it.

Min

As others have already pointed out in the thread, I was providing one realtively benign example of "selling your vote".

Other examples of transactions involving your vote might include (stolen from above in some cases):
"Vote this way, and I won't break your fingers"
"Vote this way and you can keep your job"
"Hey honey, can I see who you voted for? Uncle Fred didn't win...."

Vote selling happens in many subtle ways. The lack of a way to prove they got what they paid for prevents it. You can offer to buy someone a beer if they vote for Fred, but you can never know conclusively if they voted for Fred.

Min

The problem with this and most similar schemes is it allows you to sell your vote.

The thing that protects against vote selling is the difficulty of proving that you were faithful in your execution of the agreement. If I pay you 10$ to vote for the great flying spaghetti monster, I want to know you did in fact vote as instructed, and not for the lazy ravioli monster.

The inability to verify a secret ballot is a feature, not a bug.

Min

You're also forgetting that ppl south of the border have to deal with medical which was in my wife's case 500/mo due to a congenital heart defect. That'll put a crimp in your entry level job budgeting.

She'll tell you if you're poor, be poor in Canada, it's cheaper.

Min

Well it was a rather belts and suspenders plan. The platters were also encrypted, but we preferred to have as much plausible deniability as possible to avoid the 5$ wrench attack against crypto. (http://xkcd.com/538/) The exec REALLY wanted to avoid the 5$ wrench attack. :)

Min

Lack of a single identifying number is not an insolible problem.

Take Canada for example. We have a social insurance number (SIN - way better acronym :)). It is ILLEGAL to require it for anything other then tax purposes (in effect that means your employer and your bank if you have a savings account for most people).

If you go to buy a car, and they want to pull a CB on you, you can say no. If you refuse to provide a SIN, they will match you based on a compound key. (Name, address, telephone, previous address etc).

Ya, some times you get a mismatch, but those are relativity rare and usually resolvable if the person who happens to generate a mismatch isn't attempting fraud. I doubt requiring that SIN would improve things, it'd just provide more opportunities for it to be stolen, as we see in the US.

Does fraud happen? Yep, or I'd be out of a job. Is it common? Nope.

Min