A few other points..

I have seen many coding sessions where all the effort and push early is meeting basic functionality. That takes a lot of coding and communication to get going. I have been in agile sessions where they do their sprint and get basic functionality, then they write their bug reports, then go on to the next sprint coding the next batch of basic features. They never take sprints to fix bugs. You'll always see the number of outstanding bugs rise.

So, to the initial poster:

1) What is the time allocated for the coding?
2) What is the time allocated for debugging?
3) Does it take 90% of the contract timeline just to get basic functionality?
4) What are the metrics along the line for payment? Does the programmer get paid as they go along, or only at contract completion?
5) When is the spec freeze?
6) What are the test cases and who provides them?

I have a few red flags here that kinda indicates to me that it is irrelevant whether you bring in a contractor in-house as opposed to bringing them in from the outside. "Developers can make more work for themselves by causing bugs, and with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code." is a red flag for me. You don't trust your developers. I have *never* in 30 years really ran into any systemic problem along those lines, even with an individual developer. In general terms, bugs are the last thing to be addressed after getting core functionality and basic QA completed.

The reason why they generally don't complain upfront is because you are backloading all the ways to get away without paying them.

I was at IBM printing systems when they transistioned over to Ricoh. One universal item that cheered everyone up was the possibility of getting rid of Notes.. then, we found out that Ricoh used Notes.. was just cruel..

No, it's like how convicted pedophiles are not allowed to live or hang out near schools.

Obviously one has to draw a line somewhere, but comparing a computer to food is obviously not a rational comparison.

(And FYI, the analogy would be "People accused of lock picking are not allowed to have lockpicks". Which should be obvious.)

First off, £350 is probably not particularly out of line for the cost to process the records. If we were talking £350000 pounds, yeah, that would look like an attempt at censorship. But there's nothing pecular about £350. Secondly, if anyone in the media had felt it was even remotely newsworthy, they would have paid it. The media pays processing costs for records all the time. All that this means is that most news agencies consider Warg a non-story.

Warg's restrictions are special specifically because the crime his charged with is hacking. Banning a graphing calculator is probably overreach, but it's understandable why they'd want to keep him away from computers.

Sort of like the last leak, the "Kissinger Cables", that were publicly accessible data that journalists and historians have been making use of for years, which he downloaded, reformatted, and set on the Wikileaks site.

New slogan suggestion: Wikileaks: We Open Governments (by taking the data they've already released, running it through a couple python scripts, putting it on our site, and calling it something new)

I think you both might be a bit off.

You have to know the details of your strategy. You don't have to know all the details of implementation.

When i delegate to the people implementing here, I give scope of the project. How it fits in with everything. Resources available. Criteria it has to meet. I honestly don't care if when I delegate a monitoring system if the response comes back Nagios, or Zenoss, or something else. If I delegate a CRM system, I honestly don't care between Chef, or puppet. (I do however have an opinion about OCSInventory).

No technology is going to me all the needs, or it will do stuff in slightly different ways favoring one over the other in various categories. It is nuanced. And, unless you dig into this stuff every day, you won't know every single way it can bite you.. and *every* decision will bite you as nothing is cookie cutter. Get the scope. Pick the ones that match it, then hammer the details.
 

The real kicker is that this was sent *after* Duffy was referred to the US Attorney's Office on possible RICO violations.

    Blackmail is often the tactic used in racketeering operations to acquire money. I really don't like these guys and they have made zero effort to establish the identity of the downloader.. which is the issue here..

    The real question here is whether this falls into line of reasonable conduct and due diligence. I can see Duffy's defense to blackmail claims. If the IP address is not enough to establish the identity of the person who did the download, then yes.. the interviews with neighbors is, in fact, an appropriate action to take prior to filing a lawsuit.

    There have been a lot of legal responses in their previous lawsuits saying that they lacked sufficient evidence of the specific person who did the downloads. Exactly what steps would people think are reasonable to establish the identity of the downloader? I suspect that they do overlap with the steps outlined in that letter.
   

They could be part of an overall organization. As such, there would have been a working relationship prior. Or, it could be that they did a run in December to prove the concept, then just sold the cards upfront to people for that second run.

A large number of CNC controllers require the computer to interface via a parallel port and use Real_time kernels.. Impossible in any VM system.

I am reminded of what happened with digg. Nice free website and news site, like slashdot. They monkeyed with their interface and alienated a core group of supporters.

The very next day, usage on digg dropped and increased on reddit.

If UI changes can drive people away from a free service, what happens to people making decisions about expensive purchases?

Microsoft was not built on brand loyalty. It was built on vendor lock-in. It simply must take into account how the user community views its products because it can't count on people stick out of loyalty. I have to use it for my job. I don't have to use it in my personal life.

Yeah, where I work, we are not allowed to run any testing versions. Has to be the supported stable versions.

Well.. They have webcams on Mount Everest now, so I could see why no one climbs it any more..

I am going to have to disagree with the author. Fundamentally, you can not advance your technology, or pretty much anything, without a drive for exploration in one form, or another.

That changes in CO2 levels always happen after global temps change and never before.

You're talking about Milankovitch cycles. Nobody is arguing that Milankovitch cycles are *caused* by CO2; that's a total red herring. They're *amplified* by CO2. The math doesn't work out if they're not, the cycle simply don't produce enough temperature variation without some kind of atmospheric amplification. That is to say, the sun heats up the earth a bit, and this causes more CO2 emission, which amplifies the effect several times over. The solar heating pulse comes first, followed closely by the CO2 pulse; together they reach the maximum temperature during the warm phase.

Which is actually a very disturbing thing, because it suggests that if we do something to heat our planet, the planet will multiply the effect.

Anyway, Earth already did our current CO2-dumping experiment in the past. It was called the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) - look it up. Its the last time Earth rapidly dumped large amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere in a short period of time. It changed the world so much that we give the subsequent era a different name - the Eocene.

We're now creating the Anthropocene.

CO2 doesn't care what you believe about it. You are never actually going to be able to negotiate with it.

That does it, I now have a new life's goal - to build a supercooled sentient robot out of CO2 ;)

Or is CO2 someone's nickname, like a DJ or rapper or something? "CO2 don't care 'bout you!" "CO2 gonna heat y'all up!" "CO2 and Disco Stu gonna rock this house tonight!"