Hit the high points, I think :). Haven't tried the mob stuff myself either and hope I never have to... but it would be handy to have a workstation around that's not anyone's personal desktop/laptop for quick ad-hoc learning sessions.

Seems to me that most teams could do this easily and just don't think of it. Rather than having formal scheduling for group work, just put together a VM sandbox in a kiosk (common IDE/command line/barebones stuff) mode, snapshot it a couple times a day, and steam the screen/input to a single machine with a few wireless mice/keyboards. Peers could then connect over view-only shared VNC to watch what's happening on, or drop by to type something. If people really need to split into sub-groups, clone the VM and wash/rinse/repeat...

==UserScript== @name Nuke anonymous cowards
http://pastebin.com/7tsPe2X6

Had it with anon children. Sorry to those of you who occasionally post something of value without an account.

I'm sure there's a setting to control this in user options that's dead obvious, but I couldn't be arsed to look since the layout for simple checkboxes is hideously mangled. Also, I don't github/etc, and couldn't possibly care any less about "correct" JavaScript, so YMMV, don't expect me to reply with a how-to, etc. Enjoy!

Methinks people doth follow wend the times changeth. As a Canadian, I think I see your dogma and raise you definitions for "amendment", as well as the actual text of the constitution. If you can find "Google", "private enterprise banning products", or anything else in there... well, give me some of what you're drinking! Or if you're not willing to share, at least invest an equal amount of effort to correct this Canuck; this was a lot of work! :)

http://dictionary.reference.co...
    1. the act of amending or the state of being amended.
    2. an alteration of or addition to a motion, bill, constitution, etc.
    3. a change made by correction, addition, or deletion

Amendments
        Articles in addition to, and amendment of, the Constitution of the United
        States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the several states,
        pursuant to the Fifth Article of the original Constitution

Amendment 1
        Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
        or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
        or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
        petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution of the United States: Article. V.
        The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary,
        shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the
        Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [...] when ratified by the Legislatures
        of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof [...]
        Provided that no Amendment [...] shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses
        in the Ninth Section of the first Article [...]

        Clause 1, Section 9, Article 1
                The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think
                proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight
                hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten
                dollars for each Person.

        Clause 4, Section 9, Article 1
                No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, [...]

Apparently this flag thing is a pretty big deal to a lot of people, and private enterprise has decided to express their disdain for the message it sends. Wake me up when someone gets jailed for making their own flag. Or when the government decides to tax the flag so heavily that it can't be purchased or sold by anyone. Or when the government runs around silencing people who try to talk about the flag issue without unanimous support. // now where did I put my popcorn...

Linus,

If you were pressed against a wall and absolutely forced to name an operating environment that has potential to succeed today's Linux systems in terms of adaptability, flexibility, and popularity -- what project(s) would you name? Alternatively, if you cannot think of anything that is presently deprecated, in development, or in production... would you be able to articulate a broad set of standards that may facilitate the creation of a viable competitor?

The question is as broad-based as it sounds, with the only answer I'd consider invalid being "Linux forever!" :). You could approach this from the perspective of licensing, hardware driving new solutions, kernal architecture, all of the above, or however you feel the question would be best answered. I'm keen to hear your views on what the Next Big Thing might be, even if it could only exist in an alternate universe.

Thanks!

Go run the inflation cost of maybe 10 to 20 things you consider common. Cars and gas haven't experienced any hyper inflation. Essentials of life have - rent, loaves of (non-plastic-hyrbid) bread, going to the movies, the works. Plain and simple. (Blood pressure's too high or I'd do the work for you. Crap, crap, and more crap.).

Well, in Somewhere, Canada, a good deal on a 1 bedroom (that isn't a complete pile of crap with mold and literal shit everywhere): $900.

This got +5? ...what?!

This never really struck me as something to be concerned about (keeping aliases compartmentalized in an insane way). People used pseudonyms before the internet came around and couldn't avoid having their identities associated.

False positive matches and fraudulent application of information systems via automation and guesswork are what we need to be railing against -- NOT the simple fact that association of identity happens in the first place. Code that doesn't actually do what it says it does is a bane to us all. Let's take a job searching service like Taleo (everyone shudder collectively, now!). It's piss poor at reading a person's resume; could never uncover everything about a person accurately; and won't be able to grade your performance on the job... yet makes broad sweeping generalizations that lead to rendering decisions in the real world that are certainly causing pain.

Programs can read natural language and parse irregular grammar very well -- but they can't make judgement calls, they can't link up to the physical world in any meaningful way, and they certainly can't read into a person's intent. Thus, all remote identification is entirely devoid of value. Think of the "swatting" indicents with TwitchTV (another service to shudder over, for entirely different reasons!). Sure, if some jackass manages to get a cop squad to show up at your door and arrest you by phoning in your live stream to a local PD, it'd be extremely inconvenient and highly stressful to endure the ordeal. However, this is no different from having an asshole neighbour with friends in high places who develops a sudden case of dimentia and phones you in because you proclaimed "THE SKY IS NOT BLUE!!@!" that one time. You can't stop other people from living in fear. What you can do is educate them.

It's better to let this kind of nonsense (keyword matched employment; "swatting"; carding internet smurfs) go on until a critical mass of people are negatively affected. A tanked economy draws attention in a way that no mere mortal could hope to, and in a perverse way, we're lucky that there's so much money behind information systems that are doomed to epic failure -- or at minimum, epic change. If people are unsuccessful at exposing systemic flaws with rational argument, trade collapses will do the trick eventually (though I sincerely hope this never comes to pass!!).

I have a very common name and only realized this after looking myself up for shits and giggles a few years ago. I'm a huge software geek / armchair psychology enthusiast and don't pass up a chance to learn about much of anything. I've probably got a halo over my head in one database, and the raging fires of hell in another. I'm aware that the average intellectual capacity of everyone from a Facebook account admin, to HR representative, to the NSA boogeyman is far below the threshold of genius. I know people in all of these kinds of jobs, and it scares me that they are responsible for anything more important than flipping burgers. But I think hard about this stuff: if I was alive in 1900, I'd be terrified of religious people, in the same way I'm scared of people who lack critical thinking faculties today. One slip and my atheist leanings could have made me a target through the early 1900s for all kinds of abuse. However, if I'd been alive then as the same person I am today, I would have made no effort to hide myself because it would have been -a] largely impossible, and -b] detrimental to advancing the cause of rational thought. History is teaching us that secular sensibilities continue to evolve while fundamentalist religion gets kicked farther to the curb each day. I believe (but cannot prove...) that the same thing will happen with making decisions about others based on information systems. It will become just as unpopular as it is to determine one's views based on which fictional book they read. We'll take the good lessons we've learned -- how to build complex algorithms -- and apply them responsibly in ways that help, while gradually throwing out the wonton use cases. Nuclear war aside, of course... I understand the outcomes from such war would be pretty nasty. All the more reason to stop worrying about petty people, and get the fuck into space, ASAP :).

It's going to be a looooooooong time before services like Facebook are actually useful for anything except fast communication and establishing rudimentary, superficial trust. Some of us are ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding this. Some of us ditch the service out of irrational paranoia; others, because it provides no benefits in exchange for a ton of maintenance work. Welcome to the human race! Stand up for yourself, act out what you believe to be right, and enjoy your stay as best you can for as long as others will let you :). Living life any other way is simply counter intuitive.

Extra bonus points if s/he fleshes it out with silly sounding acronyms.

"We discovered a plain text file payload with a random set of characters that just didn't make sense -- IDSIRA. Our first tip off was the file encoding, set to ASCII instead of UTF-8. After investigating this matter and cross referencing against thesaurus.com, it's clear that the Indian Demonology Squad for Interdiction and Reactive Attrition is alive and well."

Markup fail! :) The line about teaching was supposed to be a joke, but I can't remember it now. The link's better anyway ;)

http://www.stilldrinking.org/p...

Wasted my mod points or I'd vote you both up; sorry!

Most of the senior and lead postings I see in my area are asking for appropriate technical skills, with odd expectations for years of experience. That would be fine if candidates could sit down and hash things out in an interview, but, recruiters. Many of them aren't reading resumes. I tell them right off the bat that I refuse to participate in defense/military work in any way (there goes 75% of my opportunities ;)). I'm also clear about having over 10 years of extreme hobby experience, and that only a fraction of my skills have been tested in a workplace with a proper team. ...despite this, I was getting enthusiastic calls at least once a week for writing nuclear efficiency algorithms, holding team lead positions, developing military radar tech, working top secret clearance jobs, and lots of stuff demanding Oracle product knowledge (the only tech giant whose stuff I have literally never touched, Java aside, and my resume makes this pretty damn obvious). WTF?! This is stuff I am wildly unqualified for, or have explained I'm entirely against on an ethical basis.

I would drag out phone calls, keeping recruiters on the line longer than was necessary to make sure they were at least listening to me. I altered profile settings, iterated on the CV a few times, and the nonsense offers didn't stop. Then, I found out I couldn't delete my account on half of these sites, leading to some interesting emails with an recruiting IT department head. Two firms had no issue deleting my account and kept things simple (hooray!), others had a button hidden away on their site... but one place tried a refusal conversion on me. WTF?!

But it's not just recruiters, or companies. Massive government contracts feed voracious consultants readily, and an endless supply of people who would rather lie and fuck up on the job believe their need for a paycheck supersedes basic social responsibility - like don't try to take a job you can't do if it might kill someone. The scary part is that I could have pulled one over just about any of these recruiters with a few keyword changes and a tonal drop in my voice. If the hiring manager at the next stage was a dunce, I could have easily found myself writing code that actually carries a risk of ending life. Third time, WTF?!

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. http://www.stilldrinking.org/p...

I don't know how it works in the states, but there are multiple ways for charitable organizations to draw revenue here.

Fun story; I left such an organization where IT costs had ransacked the place rather silently. I was hired to keep a seat warm and not ask questions. Bit of a latch-key kid, so I come off mousey but tend to hit hard. I pushed nearly every single day for consolidation of architecture, refactoring efforts, and other things that would keep costs at net zero and set us up for efficiency. I over-worked knowing tens of thousands counted on what I did. Of course, that's way more involved than keeping a seat warm and definitely not what the sleepy organization bargained for.

Over the first month I wrote some paper saving software. When it came time to use it, the org opted to ship out several thousand pre-printed items instead of, y'know, using the said software to reduce costs and waste. I don't normally care about the trees, but it was quite ludicrous watching the post office take off with truck after truck of forms that my code was fully capable of handling on demand, as required. Strike 1. It gave me an axe to grind with executives from that day on, and I didn't let up, with good reason.

I was sent on bogus "training". Our core system was an AMS where the owners did the old bait-and-switch; avoid insolvency or whatever the hell else is going on under the guise of seeking opportunity in new ventures; let the company fail; then consult for it. I could smell this a mile away and suggested we save a buck and do remote courses to satisfy the parent company's training requirement. Nope - I had to be flown somewhere on company dime, hotel and all, to watch a "trainer" click a few GUI buttons on an entirely SQL-driven system. What fun. I made my displeasure clear. Strike 2.

Oh, and day to day purchasing choices. I explicitly stated I didn't want new equipment and would periodically walk in to discover a shiny new on my desk. The least knowledgeable staff managed to sucker management into buying a fancy new server before I even heard about it - which we couldn't use on site for various good reasons. When I tried to get permission to grab a consultant so I could run him ragged on my own terms, the idea turned into an excellent way to screw around and waste time. Management batted 5 or 6 competitors back and forth, often using closed door phone calls with these consultants as an excuse to slip out at 1:00pm. There was some new horse shit every week. Strikes 3, 4, 5, 6......

Needless to say, this wasn't the kind of place a to start a career, and I'm too young for a heart attack, so I quit. Sorry I can't share more. The membership of this particular organization continues to enjoy their basic services and I have no desire to jeopardize that enjoyment -- and the organization doesn't vend life-or-death services, so there's really no incentive to blow a whistle. I'm just happy I kept everything running, made some kind of forward motion, and was able to stop a few bad deals cold. ...it needs to be said that in at least one non-profit, I most certainly met people who were both acting in evil ways and managing poorly. The trouble is, there's no distinction between the negative effects from either problem at end-of-day. Evil and mismanagement look, and act, identical.

I've noticed this as well. I can't be arsed to reproduce the behaviour, but killing my ad blocker and reloading the offending page did the trick -- on two separate google pages -- when keystrokes weren't registering at all. I expect there's a rule in my config that's a bit too aggressive about a JS resource; YMMV :).

"I'm not saying I agree with this law, but it is wrong to say that what you're doing isn't illegal."

If I may build on this, social contract is largely broken. My grandparents used to laugh when poor laws would surface, presumably because they lived in a world where it was physically and digitally possible to hide from abuse. We aren't laughing in my age group, or the one superseding it, and yet so many people are happy to itemize problems and b-line it straight for apathy. Your post wasn't done, you were on a roll, please finish next time.

On matters of law, apathy has reigned supreme for long enough that rules, in aggregate, have begun to create mass pain for demographics well outside intended boundaries. We haven't lost the religious principle of vengeance in any major culture yet. So when rules are violated, the multitude of knee jerk reactions usually involve inflicting more pain. I imagine Bell doesn't want pain, nor does Netflix, nor do the users. But let's call DNS selection a form "loss of property" and carry on beating each other over the head with the way the world is today, instead of how it should be...???

The thing we have to get across to people is that social contract is too complex, and the method by which all humans load their morality is haphazardly based on genetics and environment, NOT any specific book. And that everyone has a say in the way forward -- if we'd just quit being jerks to each other already.

The nonsense going on in tech and the world at large is rooted firmly in the impossibility of learning law; it is as complex as software, yet we do not delude ourselves into thinking that a genius could learn every language and device.... let alone Joe Blow who who serves fries for a living. I want to hear someone speak of a new methodology for building consensus... because ultimate freedom, mob rule, and parental oversight were only valid ethos for governing in the context of building civilization. Maintenance governing requires brand new thinking. If a feasible solution hits me, I'll share, and hope everyone would do the same.

Holy crap. You're not kidding. I'm just about ready to run screaming back to IRC. I'm getting rather sick of this experiment we call the world wide web and all the trappings of advertising that fuel the beast. ...but I also recall running into all sorts of unpalatable crap before the WWW made it big. Mainly, square eyed nerds with small minded evil streaks. "Will this program attempt to burn out my CPU, or will it sort my email?" is a question I haven't had to worry about realistically for years. As much as I dislike the power "clouds" give to businesses, I will say that such models have made it a lot harder for some depressed person to reason that they can be ruinous. And mistakes actually get noticed... a step in the right direction.

I think we just need to be more stringent about policing our own kind, and the type of ownership problem SF has spurred will fix itself. Specifically, I mean growing a pair as an employee to stop poor management internally, insisting on having competent help, etc. I disagree with a comment below saying we should click buttons to report content. All that does is drive participation numbers. Want change? Spend 20 bucks on an old PC, 10 on a domain, and roll your own SVN/git/etc. Then, treat SF as though they never existed. Problem solved... ...or have I missed something crucial & worthy of an ethical crusade??? ;)