Slartibreakfast

Jack, you're way too intelligent to pretend that you don't understand what I'm talking about here.

It's simply common sense - if you're going to hire someone, you should pay them the same amount, within reason, as any other qualified person on your team.

"There's increased risk - real and/or perceived - involved in hiring someone who has had difficulty staying within the confines of the law."

This is the same argument banks make when they jack some single mother's interest rate to 39% when she misses a payment on her credit card. It has nothing to do with risk, and everything to do with seizing an opportunity to take advantage of someone.

If you're going to help someone return to society, then you ought to pay them in the same range as everyone else on your team. That - is just good business.

I think that's the same thing people say when they pay African Americans less money too.

Yep, about half of ex-cons end up back in the joint.

And this is all the more reason, if you're going to hire someone with a criminal record, to try and treat them with the same respect you'd treat any other employee. For the very fact that many of them get treated so poorly when they get out that it makes just as much sense to go back in.

I've only recently discovered the horror that is AT&T U-Verse. Some buildings in Chicago have a contract with them so there's no escaping it. I can't imagine how bad it would be if a whole state only had one provider like this.

Nothing like taking advantage of someone who has nothing to lose, I mean - what could possibly go wrong.

I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know about half.com. That is pretty cool.

I know how I'd spend the first $100:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/introduction-algorithms

I don't know about the other $1.9K.

Mark Russinovich was hired by Microsoft for any number of reasons, not the least among them being the fact that he was easily one of the top Windows hackers out there. I can still remember marveling over the books he used to write about Windows internals - good stuff, and really made me aspire to become a better developer.

You're probably already aware of it, but Martin Thompson of LMAX has done a lot of great work on HFT systems and his blog "Mechanical Sympathy" is excellent:

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

Although a lot of people think HFT is just a race to the bottom (and they are probably right) it's still great fun to try and wring every last nanosecond of performance out of your code.

The next thing you know, we'll have a Secret Court. Oh, wait.

The whole notion of absolute immunity for government agents, whether it's the mailman or a prosecutor is completely nuts - it seems ridiculous to me that our legal system includes government agents who are allowed to operate outside of the constraints of the same laws that govern the rest of us.

I don't have a problem with a cop or prosecutor being immune to a lawsuit as long as he was acting within the bounds of the law, but I do have a problem with that immunity being considered an inalienable right as opposed to a privilege - I would prefer to see immunity granted by a grand jury in the same way that indictments are. I know you'd have to put some work in to figure out how to do it, but there has to be a solution of some kind - blanket immunity for government agents is not something that a free society should tolerate.

Probably. The whole patent system is broken and it is just infuriating to observe the farce. I have simply lost count of all the examples of patents which should never have been granted being used in litigation.

I'm so sick of software patents. The solution seems pretty simple - the approval process for software patents should consist of running the idea past three people off of the street. If they say "Well, duh..." in response to being presented with a complex idea like "Method for Storing Phone Number With a Name" or "Method for Buying Something by Clicking On It" then you don't get your freaking patent.

I don't know, sounds like he got off pretty lightly considering he threatened an FBI agent's children. I would expect the jail time would be a lot higher, but I guess I don't know what guides the court's decisions in these kinds of cases. I suppose five is enough time for him to figure out the error of his ways.

I think user drawkbox says it best in his post:

"Nothing amazing will happen with words if you couldn't change it with actions in possibly years of work."

This is it. Plain and simple.

The easiest way to avoid making mistakes in an exit interview is not to participate in one. You're not obligated to do an exit interview, and nobody takes it personally if you don't.

The irony of it was that they already had a whale on the hook. The person whose identity that they had stolen was someone with an incredible net worth. They actually had direct access to his bank account and funded the account on our side with an ACH transfer. The bank reversed the transfer once the guy figured out his account had been hit, but by then it was too late on our side and the goods had already gone out the door.

I have no idea why they used that picture - they took a template driver license, populated it with the guy's personal information, pasted the picture on it, then faxed it to us. I suppose they figured it would be so grainy from the fax that it wouldn't be obvious, or maybe they just did it for the lulz.

I like digital currency, and at the same time I am somewhat concerned about the idea of moving away from paper currency and over to an electronic system. My main concern is that once we can't buy something with coins or paper currency, it will be too easy for the government to suppress people by threatening their ability to perform even the smallest transaction.

It's been a while since I've done an integration with fraud prevention systems, but the credit bureaus do offer functionality like this - for instance, they can give you a red flag back if an address has been used by a number of different identities within a certain time period. This is important because often times a scam artist will have a drop that's been working well for them and they will use it for multiple scams simultaneously.

It's good to see a business sharing stories of having been scammed - a lot of times start-ups are so involved in the process of growing the business and making sales that they forget to remember to train their sales team to have good operational security.

A start-up that I worked for got taken for over $100K by a scam artist who, believe it or not, used a picture of a famous middle-eastern leader on a fake driver license to open an account - I'm not kidding. The guy was instantly recognizable from any recent TV news story, and yet the scam artist pasted that picture onto a drivers license (that had otherwise legit information on it) and faxed that in when he opened an account. After opening the account, the scam artist then filed a change of address, which shifted the shipping destination from a swanky neighborhood full of mansions (where the scam artist had stolen an identity from) to a dilapidated building in a really bad part of town. The operations team didn't catch any of this, and shipped the merchandise.

They were only able to get the feds to catch the guy when he showed up and tried to pull off a second heist a few months later.

I thought Chicago was hilarious - it's the only place I've lived where two people can walk in opposite directions and both still have the wind blowing directly in their faces.

Millenia of History? Hell, that ain't nothin' - we got us a Millenium Falcon!

This. If there's one thing I can't stand about Houston, it's the mold. You could probably make a living selling bleach door to door in this town.

Houston's a tough and gritty place, but it's not without its charms. For instance, a lot of people don't know that Houston is the home of the largest medical center in the world - including M.D. Anderson, which is routinely ranked as the top cancer treatment center in America.

I know, I know, having been cured of cancer probably influences my opinion just a bit, but I think Houston's a pretty damned cool town :-)

I think every place has it's own charms, you just have to look for it - in some places you have to look harder than others, sure. I hated NYC the first year I lived there, and later came to really like it. But, I'm the kind of person who'd enjoy living in the Mojave just as much as I'd enjoy living in Manhattan - it's all good, and every day I'm breathing is a great day to appreciate wherever the hell I happen to be.

Shhh, you're going to ruin everything. And right when I've got a bunch of investors on the hook with my idea for a healthcare portal run by a former surgeon general.

It's important to remember that many of the security folks at these companies are actually pretty good. This is more of a C-Suite problem than a security team problem - security people can't get much done if senior management doesn't prioritize a good information security program.