No. When using company equipment, at any company with a reasonable Computer Usage Agreement in place, all data related to said company/equipment remains the property of the company.
True in the US, but definitely not true in general. In the EU this kind of data collection would be 100% illegal.
No and no. Real software development requires design. Agile is a race to accumulate band-aids. Never time to fix anything, only time to cover garbage up.
That's not true at all unless "Agile" is being touted as excuse to do a sloppy work. Part of the work when doing Agile properly is refining design decisions and aggressively refactoring consequently. There should be a lot of design considerations being done continuously when doing Agile.
Said that, there are teams which do use "Agile" as excuse to cut corners and keep solutions half-baked, so I get what you mean.
Agile targets managers, it defines doers as literally all the same and interchangeable, then creates worthless metrics that managers can use for performance claims.
That's a key issue. The "original" Agile Manifesto and Agile movement was developer-centric and tried to offer pragmatic solutions for developers wanting to get the job done. When Scrum entered the place, it turned "Agile" project-management-centric, with focus on processes and "ceremonies" to integrate in a corporate strucuture which is almost inevitably highly hierarchical and top-down driven.
This is a big source of endless discussion because the two are very different things. It's like an American talking about "liberals" vs. an European, where in America it means "neo-liberals" and in Europe more likely "classic-liberals", which couldn't be more far apart in ideology.
Agile is cheating, they are synonymous. No design, ground up approach, worthless metrics, no long term values, no team development.
Some of the most elegant and effective designs I produced were developed with Agile. "Emergent design" can be superior because it can profit from lessons learned during its own implementation and will continuously get refined during the life of the solution, as long as the solution gets properly adapted to those lessons which is exactly what Agile is supposed to achieve.
How Agile operates is by continuously adapting to new lessons learned and situational changes, but it is supposed to be done aggressively and in a clean way. Not doing that or doing that through ugly hacks is not how it's supposed to work.
Larger team sizes. This can work if the team owns enough to keep everyone busy, but it can lead to effectively being independent subteams calling themselves one team while being inconvenienced by each other.
A large team will inevitably split itself into smaller units.
Among the larger team there should and will be some higher level coordination, but the lower level discussion necessary to get things actually done only scales up to small team size before becoming so much overhead to become problematic.
Dawkins is right. Detractors are just clinging, faith-like, to the idea that our brains are somehow magically more than computation devices
That's not how it works. Even if human-like consciousness could be replicate by a machine, there is no evidence that LLMs are doing that.
What he is saying is that it "looks enough like actual consciousness that it must be it", but that is not sound reasoning.
Something can be functionally equivalent enough to the real thing to give the impression of being the real thing without actually being the real thing.
What happens if the cap is exceeded? Forced abortions, sterilization, and euthanizing the surplus?
From the text of the initiative, basically the government would be required to implement restrictive measures once 9.5M are reached. If 10M are exceeded, the government would be required to terminate international treaties that drive immigration.
This is effectively a constitutional amendment, so many details are not defined at this level. If successfull, the details would need to be elaborated by the government, e.g. by the Parliament enacting new legislation to satisfy the new constitutional requirements.
But to my knowledge, they are month to month, meaning the contract is for the month, and by agreement a new contract is created each month
No, it's not: it's a subscription contract that lasts until one of the parties terminates it. This means the contract lasts effectively indefinitely but can be terminated or in some aspects modified during its course without having to agree to a full new contract agreement, which the consumer would have to actively accept every time.
The issue is that for these contracts the law does allow for modifications without requiring a full new contract agreement every time, but the clauses in the contract need to be specific about what can be changed and why and cannot give the provider too much unilateral power. The clause Netflix was using from 2017 to April 2025 were instead very generic, giving Netflix basically unlimited power to unilaterally change the price without justification.
In the Italian system clauses like these, which give a party significant unilateral power over the other party, are called "vessatorie" (vexatious) and are void unless individually accepted and signed by the other party on top of the contract containing them. In case of online contracts this might require a separate digital signature for each individual clause.
Note that a proper digital signature would otherwise not be required for an online contract not containing these type of clauses, which can be accepted by a consumer by simply clicking on a consent box. This means having these clauses makes an online contract much more problematic to accept.
Since the clauses Netflix was using to increase prices were found to be "vexatious" and were not accepted with individual signature, they were found to be void. Since they were void, Netflix could not use them as basis to increase the prices. After April 2025 Netflix introduced clauses that were considered not vexatious and Netflix can increase prices based on them.
Sure, I can see how for most typical voting (winner takes all, after picking 1 answer) people about to vote might adjust their vote based on current results. Lets ignore situations like the US where different states seem to announce their own results at different times (which already breaks this goal).
But ranked choice systems should negate any benefit of doing so, right?
It would not negate e.g. the bandwagon effect.
The bandwagon effect can take place in voting: it occurs on an individual scale where a voters opinion on vote preference can be altered due to the rising popularity of a candidate or a policy position. The aim for the change in preference is for the voter to end up picking the "winner's side" in the end. Voters are more so persuaded to do so in elections that are non-private or when the vote is highly publicised.
At a very low point of activity you can always determine it, though. If you can swap out USB keys before and after a single person votes, then the swapped key contains only one vote. When you decrypt it you'll know how that one person voted.
Sure, but technically you can do with a physical box too... In e-voting they employ mechanisms to avoid that kind of tracking before tallying, e.g. mixnets.
The mix network is the basis for the complete verifiability of Swiss Post’s e-voting system. It consists of mixers that mix and re-encrypt the votes after the electronic ballot box has been closed on the Election/Voting Sunday. The mix network prevents the individual and the vote they have cast from being linked to each other and ensures that voting secrecy is protected. Additionally, the mix network provides evidence that no votes were changed, deleted or added. The algorithms used in the mix network are available in the published open-source library of cryptographic primitives. Swiss Post has completely rewritten these algorithms. Swiss Post’s e-voting system is based on the Bayer-Groth mix network.
My point was that it should NEVER be possible for ANYONE to determine how an individual voted. I don't care if you promise to encrypt it. That information shouldn't be stored anywhere, in any form, encrypted or otherwise.
So if THAT'S their reason for encrypting it, people need to take a step back and think about the reason.
What is encrypted is the ballot, so e.g. "yes" or "no" if that are the available choices. The ballot does not contain any identifiable information.
By decrypting the ballot they would be able to know whether it contains "yes" or "no", but they would still be unable to know who cast that particular yes/no.
Between the transit abroad and then back to Switzerland, I wonder how many overseas ballots actually make it back in time.
It's estimated that about 1/4 of the voters abroad have issues. It's one of the main reasons e-voting is being pushed.
Signed? Sure, that makes perfect sense. But encrypted? Why do you even want to do that? Unless the ballot isn't anonymous and you can see who voted for which candidates, but I certainly hope you're not trying to do that?
You need to do that to preserve confidentiality of the vote. Nobody except the voter should know how they personally voted. Furthermore, nobody should know how the votes are being cast until tallying officially begins.
What they do is they authenticate the user to make sure they are eligible to vote, but the ballot is submitted end-to-end encrypted from the voter's device. The system that receives the ballot knows the user is eligible to vote, receives the user's ballot, but cannot read the ballot's content.
The ballot can only be decrypted by the tallying authority and the decryption is performed only after the tallying can officially begin. This means nobody knows how a particular voter voted and nobody knows how the vote is going in advance.
It is permissible to make the form of payment a condition of sale.
This is exactly how it works in Switzerland too and this vote did not change that: the vote is mainly symbolic without practical consequences.
This entire vote seems like it was a colossal waste of time.
It is kind of explicitly acknowledged: (quote translated in English)
Neither the popular initiative nor the counter-proposal has any practical effect. No new tasks or additional costs will arise.
Said that, it was a popular initiative: the people of Switzerland decided to put the matter to the vote, not the government.
I'll admit - I don't understand how companies haven't gone cat and mouse with this. For example, if a company wants to create a speculative product, couldn't they just fund a "contracting company" that hires people? If the bet is successful, the parent company buys out the "contracting company" - otherwise, they stop paying the other company and it just goes bankrupt.
I think it's basically "tactical insolvency."
The cat and mouse game does happen since companies do try these kind of tactics, but regulators know them well too.
If a company exercises enough control over a contractor, regulators can decide that the relationship is effectively an artificial construct meant to skirt employer's obligations. If that's the case, the company can be determined to be the actual employer of the contractors, with all obligations that come with that.
I don't want to justify or forgive US meddling in South American states- but to claim that how fucked up South America is, is the fault of the US is patently absurd.
It's not entirely the fault of the US, but it's pretty clear that the US did significantly contribute to the situation.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.
