A new way to profit: leave the holes in place, and charge anyone who discovers them. If the person is stupid enough, he or she will do more than notify you. If they exceed what a random uninterested person would do with the the hole, they've just self-identified as a criminal. You can therefor recover enough money from them to pay for fixing the holes.

This creates a whole new meaning for "honeypot" (;-))

--dave

The Progressive Conservatives were the equivalent of centrist Republicans, but they joined with Reform to become the just-plain Conservatives, who are roughly the Tea Party Republicans. Reform in Canada was pretty much the same as Ross Perot's Reform in the 'States.

--dave
[Full disclosure: I partnered with Perot Systems in my Siemens days: Ross' company was cool]

That's true of Canada, too.
As far as I know, it is also true of the U.S.: the telco must be able to wiretap a certain percentage of their customers without service degradation, and do a traffic analysis of up to 100% of their customers at all times. The latter is easy for telephone companies: they just use their existing billing systems.
The latter is easier in Europe, where billing for local calls is normal, and amazing hard for non-telco IP shops (ISPs), as they don't bill by the connection.

--dave

The Australian telcos, who are being converted to an IP backbone, found there were some difficulties. Because they must operate a wiretapping facility [citation needed] for their various police forces, they have to invent and build one for voice over IP. Being a new initiative, this is fraught with risk, unexpected costs and scalability issues.

This will be true of any telco in a legal regime where the government requires the telephone companies to provide the mechanics needed for spying on their customers.

--dave

The Canadian Library Association and the circulation software vendors like Geac continuously have to fight against demands they record and be prepared to report who has borrowed what books. Librarians are the people who first had to fight "lawful access" laws, which are now being drafted to force ISPs to record and report your activities.

Tracking and recording anything that can be linked to your name is excellent for counter-espionage, but I want it done only with a court order. At the very least.

The imaginary 1984 had cameras in each room: the real one had them on light-posts and police cars in the UK.

--dave

Leverage what you know by choosing a company that that uses an agile method: it's not "mechanical engineering", but it's definitely engineering.

--dave

There's an old, well-honored principle in Unix that explains why it's hard to design a good GUI, a good language, a good interface set or even a good command-line interface: Easy tasks should be easy, hard tasks should at least be possible.

It's easy to do one or the other. It's surprising hard to do both.

--dave
I think this originated as a criteria for the old Bourne shell, and it certainly was part of perl and Elliotte Rusty Harold's XOM.

A properly designed assembly line uses humans as supervisors and QA persons, not machines

I've worked on the old kind, where I actually manhandled truck rims, and it was an insanely expensive way to make them. The same time, Honda opened its assembly line for the old 305 twin engine: no humans did work! They made sure the machines worked properly.

If course, you needed to locate those lines where there were good (if expensive) machine designers, engineers and repairmen. For Honda, that meant the home islands. For certain other companies, it now means the USA and Canada.

--dave