I live near Minneapolis. For us, at least, this "study" is bullcrap.

The local idiot mayor supported the protesters (rightfully) and made sure that the cops didn't incite any violence, and in fact cleared areas for protests. But when a certain segment turned violent, he even ordered the 3rd precinct to be evacuated to "prevent injury to the protesters" who promptly burned the place and everything near it down. And things went downhill from there with 2 days of massive violence and destruction.

At that point Gov Walz realized that the mayor was in over his head and took control. He initially tried a restrained National Guard response that consisted of support to the police, but by that time passions had risen and the rioters were emboldened to increase their violence.

We've been calm the last few days, but only because of overwhelming police and a National Guard presence that was almost 10x the initial deployment. The police went in and started forcefully enforcing the curfew and breaking up even "peaceful" but unlawful gatherings at night. Those peaceful protesters were behaving, but they were also unwittingly providing cover for the violent and making it difficult for the police to respond to the rioters. By reducing crowd size the cops could better respond to violence and looting.

What we're seeing now are pretty much peaceful large daytime protests, which everyone supports. But nighttime protests are pretty much shut down because of all the troubles those caused.

In my small suburban home town we've had protests and seen similar results to Minneapolis. A small group tried to turn the first protest into a riot, but the police responded with overwhelming force and immediately broke up the protest forcefully and the instigators are still stuck behind bars. We have had a couple of smaller protests since, but no more attempts at violence.

CBS said that Bdier didn't make the points as well as others did. That's a highly subjective judgement, but one that journalists do all the time, and it's nearly always true that no matter how expert you are, there are folks who can explain something better than you do. It's *extremely* rare that someone who discovers something like say, general relativity, explains it as well as someone coming along later with a broader, more conventional view.

In this case, Bdier was a developer, intricately involved in her project. The along came a conventional CEO Partovi whose whole job involves public relations, managing messaging and expectations who gave a better interview and CBS went with that. How is that surprising? It's like expecting Torvalds to make an excellent public relations representative for Linux rather than a leader of coders. Sure, in theory he could be, but I'd be rather surprised that someone who coded up a kernel would also have the skill set to smoothly manage the press.

And ... you fail in your understanding of the US and how it is organized. In order to form the US, the states had to agree to a configuration that gave the smallest states a forum (the Senate) in which they had equal power to the largest states. It was done to prevent the large population states such as slave-owning Virginia from overpowering states such as New Hampshire. They also a forum which was almost population based (the House) and set them to balancing each other.

So that 37% of US citizens has outsized influence on how the US makes many decisions -- witness that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but failed to become President based on her unpopularity in smaller states who disliked her proposed policies. Those rural and small population state voters will have an overly loud voice in determining how quickly electric cars will be adopted in the US, and will thus have a very formidable impact on how quickly the world turns to electric cars since the US is the largest market.

The Founders of the US were pretty sensitive to making sure that minority opinions weren't run over roughshod and that strong consensus was required for making policy -- they even had a filibuster in the House at the beginning.

Note that all Trump has to do is enforce the law to reign in the most serious of the abuses like the Disney IT one. That requires no creative new executive order, no "I have a pen", just a willingness to enforce the law as written. Just the threat of the DoJ looking into a deal will likely scuttle most H-1B proposals.

Of course, if that ticks off enough of the Congress they can pass a new law, but I somehow doubt that very many politicians are going to willingly jump to support that. It's one thing to vote to enlarge the program, it's quite another to pass a law removing safeguards. It's not impossible to do, especially in a budget reconciliation, but it will be rather more difficult given the divisions in this political environment.

Just remember, surrender was a really complicated question for Japan. Even after the nukes were dropped and the government agreed to surrender, there was a revolt that nearly toppled the government to try to keep the war going. Were it not for the Emperor's direct order, it's likely that the coup would have succeed and the war continued. If you find that even after multiple atomic bombs the Japanese would consider fighting on, read the accounts of what happened at Okinawa and you will understand that the invasion of Japan would have had far, far more civilian casualties than were lost in the atomic bombs. Strangely enough, they were actually the merciful and life preserving way to end the war.

I worked in the drive industry for almost two decades, and I've made this comment before, but I'll make it again.

Modern disk drives detect failing sectors automatically. They go through increasing complex recovery schemes to recover that data (I know one company used to use around a dozen unique methods with various parameters) and once that data is recovered they remap the failing sector onto spare tracks. All without the knowledge of the user, and without triggering SMART (unless the sector is unrecoverable, of course). This is not cheating, it's actually fairly common and an expected part of the drive aging as debris hits the surfaces.

It's when the drive runs out of spare tracks that SMART comes into the picture and starts letting you know that things are heading south. That's why my advice has been consistent for more than the last decade: when the drive starts telling you it's having trouble, back it up and replace it fast. There are failure modes that SMART isn't good about detecting, too, like the electronics components since those usually give you far less warning than the magnetic or mechanical components.

But SMART is NOT a universal standard, it's more a format for reporting errors and what one company views as "normal rewriting" is another's "exceeds thresholds". It's how the drive makers decide to set their thresholds (what level of recovery algorithm was required to read the sector and whether that is something that SMART should know about) and what they measure that determines how useful SMART actually is. The biggest differentiation there is company culture. IMO, HGST had (has?) probably the best balance of any company I worked with having had the longest cultural exposure to the idea of SMART, and some really, really sharp guys.

You're wrong. Toshiba's desktop/server line has very, very little in common component wise with HGST, and their own design and manufacturing centers. In fact, HGST has relatively little in common with their now parent WD as far as hardware goes (although I suspect that will change now). Toshiba drives have more components in common with WD than with HGST.

In Linus' case, I'll cut him slack. He's been doing it so long that anyone in his position would get tired of seeing the same crap coding being submitted. He's got standards, and if you're not willing to adhere to those standards you shouldn't be dropping stuff to him. It's not like he hasn't said the same basic stuff 1e6 times in the past, so expecting him to change his standards to not offend some poor snowflake that couldn't be bothered to figure out what was expected is asking a bit much.

In his current rant, yeah, that code was crap and should never have been submitted. Readability isn't security, but security and maintainability gets really harmed by unreadable code.

What an interesting contract. Every one I have ever signed has stated that I would return or destroy any company confidential or proprietary information I possessed upon expiration of my employment there. And as I've always told them upon leaving, I will delete all such information, especially passwords.

Tell me, are such contracts common in your experience? Normally folks are very happy when I tell them I am deleting all records I have of passwords I had on systems there, but this seems to be a unique requirement and normally one that would trigger all sorts of red flags since it would create multiple intrusion points and security risks. But maybe I've been exposed to too many sensitive projects for big companies or agencies.

I've done this, too. When one employer when through tough times I survived numerous layoffs until they decided to let the whole hardware group go. Even though I wasn't required to, when some of the lawyers from the ex-company called a few years later about a patent suit I helped them find where I'd documented some research I'd done on a patent I got. So even though I left that company and they did that division in, they called 5 years later to offer me a new position. I declined politely, but I wished them success.

So in normal situations, be polite, helpful and go the extra mile. It's good for you, your morals, your self-respect, and your reputation Generally a company is in trouble if you're reasonably competent and they're laying you off, so helping them only helps you by keeping options open down the road.

But this situation is not a normal one, I'm afraid. When you're training your outsourced replacement in a situation like the one described in the article, I don't consider that a situation where I'm willing to go 1e-9 meters more than absolutely necessary to help the company (in this situation, when those H1Bs started shadowing me my new first priority would have been trying to find another job, even at great impact to the present one [taking lots of vacation time to go out interviewing, etc]). Last I heard, Sun-Trust wasn't hurting for profits. In this case they were just making a business decision that US IT workers weren't worth employing, so if I'm one of those US IT workers why would I help a company that made an incorrect decision for no good reason that hugely hit my life? Now if Sun-Trust were going struggling I might change my mind, but that's not the case here. They'll say it's just a business decision to out-source, and my response would be that if they are asking me for something after all that, they've obviously underestimated what my time is really worth.

And that's where it's actually fun.

IF you were to sign this and IF they actually called you in for something it's pretty obvious that their H1-B guys and the Sun-Trust management are clueless as to what was done, so milk it. You have to be reasonably available -- which doesn't mean you have to lose your current job, so the only time you can work is at night, right? At night, with your feet on the desk and obviously struggling really, really hard over this intractable problem. "It's gonna take months, and months of work ex-boss. You better plan on this taking years of work, with you hiring me at consulting rates after the severance has run out. Oh, you don't think so, you think I should finish this faster? Then why'd you call me in if someone should do it faster?"

Dumping the "why the hell do you think I'd help someone who fucked me over" attitude, my guess is that Sun-Trust is trying to cover their ass. According to the article, the H1-B folks were shadowing the workers for a month or two, meaning that they've not really had a chance to see everything that the employees really do. So down the road when something that they haven't seen comes up (annual RedHat upgrade, or whatever) and something unique that their setup/software requires breaks they want to be able to come calling the ex-employees asking for help.

In a normal layoff due to rough times for the company, I don't think the ex-employees would fight those severance terms too hard. The thing is, when you're being replaced by less qualified H1-Bs for no good reason I think you'd be hard pressed to expect much cooperation. If it was happening to me there would be a decision tree that goes like this: (1) It's an easy fix, but it was a weird customization we had to do to make specialized software work -> "Damn, ex-boss, that's weird. I have no clue, it's been too long since I've been there for me to remember how we did that. I know it was something really strange, sorry." (2) It's a harder fix, requiring more than a day of customizations -> "Oh that. Yeah, I vaguely remember we used to have to have to heavily modify packages u,v,w,x,y,z with some wrappers and a bunch of new procedures. Of course, if anything else was modified in the environment it'd take even more changes and analysis. You're talking a couple of man-years since I don't remember everything we did and frankly your environment is totally different from where I'm working now. Sure, I can be "reasonably available" for consulting after my current gig. Did I mention that I'm working 60 hours a week, so "reasonably available" is maybe a couple hours a week late at night? Yeah, that might push out that couple of man-years worth of work, I suppose, why do you ask?"

Switching power supplies are complicated, but here's a simple conceptual version.

You've got a high voltage coming in. You've got a transistor that you turn on and off that goes to a capacitor and to your load. You pulse the voltage at the capacitor/load and turn the switch on and off to keep the voltage at the load close to what you want by varying the width of the pulse. Ideally you want that transistor to conduct with zero resistance when it's on so that you deliver current to the load with no power dissipation. That's why GaN is a good solution, since its channel resistance is much lower than typical Si transistors.

To give you an idea, what I just described is like calling a computer something that does 1s and 0s to put pretty pictures on the screen. Practical systems require stability analysis, use inductors as well as capacitors, dual switching, have to worry about EMI, etc.

Switching power supply efficiencies are typically in the range of 60-80% depending on load, configuration etc. Typically, slightly more than half of the "wasted" power is in the switches, and about half of that is switching the gates themselves if you're trying to go much above 5 MHz (as you go higher and higher frequency, you burn more and more energy charging/discharging the gate of the switch and your efficiency drops, which is why you don't typically see non-integrated switching power supplies above 5-10 MHz). So even best case, completely eliminating the resistance of the switch will only buy you a 20% savings in energy, and even then that's assuming a power supply that's not well tuned to its load.

GaN is neat stuff, but gallium is nasty and can be both dangerous and touchy to process. It's been "the next new thing" for switching power supplies now for at least 5 years, but this is the first time I've seen someone actually announce general purpose devices using it.

I disagree as to the cause. NASA's issue is NOT pay, NASA's issue is that it's been caught by the bureaucracy, and I know because I saw it firsthand.

Back in the day, NASA projects were urgent, so the rules were suspended. You could order parts and get them without going through government regs.These days it's months and months as it goes through channels.

Then there's the obsession with safety. "Failure is not an option" is killing NASA. I worked on a test satellite for them. The flight team came in at the end and said we couldn't fly it. We asked why, and they said some of the components in the satellite hadn't flown before. I exploded! If we can't fly new components on a test satellite, when could we ever fly them?! Things are somewhat better now, but that was the way it was when I was there.

And then there was the HR lady who came in and told us that all us white male engineers would never get a promotion until we got to a gender and racial balanced department. Like that would every happen. I left soon after that.

These days, being an engineer at NASA is little more than being a glorified project manager. It's the contractors at JPL and the like that get to do real engineering and that's because they don't have all the government red tape tying the employees' hands. Don't get me wrong, there's still more red tape dealing with the government than IBM, but contractors don't get all the crap that government employees get stuck with.

I do disk drives, and have for the last 20 years or so.

Practically speaking, unless you have a government actor or someone with extremely deep pockets coming after you, just wiping a drive once is enough for privacy.

Not practically speaking, and assuming you're worried about a government-grade attack on your drive, a single write of a constant value or a psuedorandom pattern that I can predict isn't enough to completely erase the data. Heads are always slightly misaligned from the servo track, so there's always some leakage at the edges that usually survives a wipe, although it's usually -20 dB or so down from the main signal and requires some finesse to get to. It's this misaligned head that's the most practical attack on erasures. Then you can go to more exotic things (transition modulation, etc) that are less likely to work.

There's also a problem with abandoned sectors in your drive leaking data. What we do in modern drives is that we have multiple tracks that we use for backup data. When a sector starts to go bad and we have to do multiple retries to read the data (including some very, very weird read modes), we'll take the data and move it to a backup track, then mark the original sectors bad, while mapping the new sectors into the file system so that everything is transparent to the user. You'll never see this, it's all done behind the scenes in ways you can't detect. So the old sensitive data is still there, but hard to read, and nothing you do as a user can ever get to it.

But all these weird modes are HARD to get to, and the data recovery is often pretty manual and extremely expensive so unless you're Edward Snowden it's not worth the time of the NSA or DoD to come after you.

So my view is pretty simple: single pass erasure for normal business users or personal use, although I tend to do erasure and a reformat to a completely different filesystem type (e.g. to ntfs from ext4) if I'm giving an old drive to a friend/relative. Usually I take my old drives to the shooting range for destruction just because it's a lot more fun. If the data is really, really private where not one bit can afford to be found, then shred it. It's not like disks are super expensive.