Tangaroa

This is well off-topic, but from my memory:

* It would have been nice to count all of the votes. The decision of who won Florida was in the hands of Bush's Florida campaign manager Katherine Harris, who ordered a halt to the counting of votes and declared the state for Bush as soon as he was ahead of the votes and it was legally permissible for her to do so (some amount of time needed to have passed).

A consortium of newspapers did count all of the votes and prepared to announce the results on September 12, 2001. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they delayed the report for a few weeks and then declared it official that Bush won and was our legitimate President even though their numbers showed that Gore won by a negligible amount, fewer than 400 votes.

* Harris should have recused herself from her Secretary of State duties regarding the election for the obvious reason that she was the campaign manager for one of the candidates, but she did not.

* Harris had Republican-tied companies aggressively scrub the voting rolls of somewhere between 20,000 to 150,000 "felons" and people whose names resembled those of felons if they lived in a heavily Democratic area. Voters removed from the rolls were not notified of their removal and were simply turned away when they went to vote. This is why there are now "provisional ballots" for people who want to challenge their ineligibility. Also, about two-thirds of the people whose voting rights were taken away were black. The best source for this is Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".

* Blacks were turned away from voting in some districts. This may be related to the scrub lists, with individuals being turned away from the polls, but there were also rumours of police blockades around polling places in Jacksonville and Orlando turning black people away while letting white people through. One of the alleged police blockades was later attributed to a traffic accident.

* The US Supreme Court decision forbidding the full count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was so ridiculous that the majority wrote in their own opinion that it should not be used as precedent in the future.

* One Republican county clerk took a list of 2,000 people who had not voted into his private office and came out with 2,000 absentee ballots voting for Bush.

* A group of Republican Congressional staffers from DC raided a polling place where votes were being counted in an attempt to show that public opinion was against counting the votes. They also tried to steal a ballot box from a county official carrying it.

* Punch machines in some areas were broken, producing the notorious pinhole, dimple, and hanging chad votes. These mostly occurred in areas where the Democrats were running the election system and can be blamed on their incompetence.

* The first picture of a "butterfly ballot" that I saw in the media had the left page misprinted at a slight angle so that the arrow or line by Gore's name pointed directly to the box for Buchanan. Every subsequent press report used a picture of a correctly-printed ballot with straight lines. Buchanan got the same amount of votes in that district as he did in the 1996 election, so it did not really matter.

* One Democratic lawyer attempted to challenge the legitimacy of a few thousand military absentee ballots that were technically invalid. The rest of the Democratic party convinced him to pull the suit.

Mentor him. "In this section of code, you can do this and it looks cleaner." It sounds like most of the problem is that he is short on experience and does not know how to be a good programmer, so be the best example of a good programmer and teammate that you can. Teach him a few things and he might look up to you and start picking up your habits.

Make sure he knows how to debug so that you can tell him about a bug in his software and he can fix it so you don't have to.

Nice use of the :target pseudoclass. I was not aware that CSS could do this.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#target-pseudo

I worked at a company where the employees were careful to separate recyclable waste from regular garbage, and then the weekly cleaning crew would toss both into the same garbage bags. So much for good intentions.

I've done that for a few forums and gaming sites to discourage myself from wasting time there. A lot of people used to trade lists of marketing domains for adding to their hosts files before browser plugins were created for the same purpose. It is not an uncommon practice and should not bother anybody unless they suddenly need to access one of these sites from your computer, which can be easily fixed for a short time.

Try to find out which blacklist you are on, and work with its maintainer to fix the problem. These links might help:

http://senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/rep_lookup

http://rfc-ignorant.org/

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

http://multirbl.valli.org/

Also make sure your email list is double-opt-in so that malicious people cannot sign up other people for email.

From the perspective of wanting to get paid for your work, you will want to consider the same things that investors do because the company won't be able to pay you if they run out of money. Do they have a product that people will pay money for? That's the key question.

Another is: Will they actually pay you. or does the contract they give you talk about "binding arbitration"? That's a huge red flag of a failing company looking for a way to cheat its employees and is doubly bad for a woman or minority jobseeker since she would not be able to sue them for sexual harassment or racist promotion practices. If you care about the company obeying the law on any matter affecting you, you will want to retain your right to sue them in a court of law.

An employee stock plan might be seen as another sign of poor financial status since companies in poor shape will look to their employees as a last-ditch funding source. However, this conclusion is more coincidental than automatic. Many healthy startups have an employee stock plan and getting into one early can make you rich if the company strikes it big.

You will want to be paid by the hour, rather than a salary, so they cannot work you more than 40 hours a week without paying you overtime.

As for the company culture, you may be able to get a sense of it by simply keeping your eyes open. Is there a dress code or are people in T-shirts? Is everything neat and tidy or do people have toys at their desks? These are things you can see for yourself. As for the core principles, you can simply ask.

You will also want to consider whether you will be happy and productive in the position, and if you can see yourself making a positive contribution to the company and its customers.

Wait a minute. We're supposed to be upset that the feds took a guy's computer after they matched his fingerprints to a bomb bag used in the Madrid train bombings that killed almost 200 people? And we're supposed to believe this was ethnic harassment because "he is a muslim"? If any police anywhere find near-conclusive proof that you killed 200 people, it doesn't matter if you believe in the flying spaghetti monster. They just might take your computer away from you.

It turns out the fingerprints belonged to somebody else. Blame it on faulty software and faultier human interpretation. This scaremongering about routine evidence-gathering is socially irresponsible.

You are 100% wrong. The term is often misused by people who wants to discredit their opponents, but it refers to people who use violence to discourage other people from exercising their lawful rights.

College is an upper-middle-class luxury. Most job-seekers don't even have that piece of paper, so they'll have an even more difficult time finding work.

I'm in the same place as you. I've been trying to break into web development for over a decade. The only thing that worked was to accidentally walk through the wrong door and have a chat with people who, it turns out, were looking for a web developer. After finishing the project and coming away with a good reference, I still don't have enough experience to get into the few entry-level web development positions that exist, let alone the more common senior positions. There are too few openings and too many competitors.

Putting myself in the position of a recruiter, I would expect any web developer to know the names of the five major browsers, how to use the w3c validator and why, when to use different image formats and how to optimize them, some CSS, how CGI works, enough jquery to select an element, and a server-side scripting language, and to have once sniffed an HTTP connection to see what was happening. The better class of web developers at the entry level might know why to use SCP instead of FTP, common web security concerns, how to build a page that uses Javascript but does not require it, shell scripting, system administration, web server administration, what a SQL join does, how HTTPS works, how DNS works, how TCP/IP works, and a development framework or two.

Get an RSS feed reader and attach it to the websites. It will pull down the headlines and let you read them quickly.

A certain segment of Norwegians reacted to terrorism by being enthusiastically for it. These included the leaders of the Labour Party, including the leaders at the Labour Party's Utoya youth camp.

http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2011/07/utoya-not-so-innocent-yout... http://www.debbieschlussel.com/40472/karma-2-norway-utoya-ca...

This is a factor that seems to go unmentioned in all discussions of the Utoya massacre, but is necessary knowledge to understand the event in its entirety. It adds detail to Breivik's motive, and it raises the question of why there has been no condemnation of the Labour Party's support for similar massacres elsewhere being conducted on racial and religious lines so long as they happen far away and are done by a faction that the Party approves of.

This is beside the point that Schneier makes, so I apologise for going off topic. To that point, the US overreacted (an understatement) and Norway faced little threat of further attacks. Norway did consider fudging its laws to give Breivik a life term as a mental inmate rather than the statutory limit of years as a prisoner, and that can be questioned as an expansion of security. More generally, no one in Norway could argue a need for greatly expanded security since the threat ended with Breivik's capture.

It could also be location-dependant. There's apparently a skills shortage in the South Bay and Peninsula, but there's a jobs shortage in the North Bay.

Then there's the fact that recruitments for managers and lead engineers outnumber those for junior-level programmers and testers, and nobody is taking the effort to train junior-level employees up to the skill level that they are looking for.

A company could also have obscene contract terms that highly skilled employees with good job prospects will turn away from. Things that I've seen or heard about include non-compete clauses that are broad enough to force you out of the industry for up to three years after leaving the company, NDAs broad enough to prevent you from blogging about your whole industry or even mentioning that you work for the company, surrendering all copyright to everything you have ever developed or would develop independantly of your work at the company (California law allows you to have personal projects regardless of contract terms so long as they're unrelated to your work), and pledging to never sue the company under any circumstances no matter what they do to you (objecting to that one cost me my last job). Word can get around about these things, and the most skilled employees with the most job freedom can afford not to bother applying to certain places.

Maybe the recruiter was looking for somebody who used a specific tool rather than someone who knows the fundamentals and could use any tool. In the early 00's, I was turned down from a web job after they found out in the interview that I developed web sites using notepad, vim, and text files instead of Dreamweaver. The same thing might have happened to you.

Download Eclipse and the Android Development Kit. The emulator and development environment are free.

Procmail hasn't updated in over ten years. Maybe it's done.

The BSDs are always dying. They do seem to be less influential than they were ten or fifteen years ago.

Enlightenment was popular before Gnome and KDE got better but it relied too much on one programmer and stopped updating.

Amaya was supposed to be the web's standard browser. It's still being produced, but last I checked it was a decade behind anything else in features.

I don't know how big the developer communities for any of them got.

For $33 million, I would expect not to see "American FactFinder requires an Internet Browser with Javascript enabled." I would expect them to be able afford a developer who knows how to create links with an "a" tag rather than using Javascript to duplicate a core browser feature. Given that this is a federal website, $33 million should be more than enough money to comply with disability guidelines that forbid such sloppy development practices on federal websites.

$33 million is 500 programmer man-years, minus a bit for overhead and profit. That should produce a lot of development.

I wonder if the $33 million cost includes the backend work done on the DADS II contract, or if that figure is just for the web frontend.

Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process:

1) Interruption of user work process

Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked.

Then there are the popups and request to reboot that also interrupt the user's work process, given that the user has probably been trying to get work done while the download was going on.

2) Stupid versioning

For as long as software version numbers have existed, most vendors have used the major.minor.patch pattern. A change in the major version number usually means a break in the public API, so software vendors provide a different API library for every major version that they release, and they allow plugins to decide what API version to use.

Mozilla decided to increase their _major_ version number for every _patch_. Firefox's latest version 420 or however high they are now should probably be something like 4.2.20. The stupid numbering will only annoy users who expect Mozilla to follow best software development practices, but it shouldn't affect plugins. If Firefox is doing their updates correctly, they will be exposing a separate API library for every major version update that they've done in their rapid major version update schedule.

Of course, they're doing it wrong. Plugins built for version 4 or version 5 no longer work because FF is only providing the latest API version 420, and only until next week when 421 comes out. Mozilla's solution is for all plugin vendors to update their plugins after every FF update, and for users to wait until the plugin vendors have done this.

There would be no plugin breakage if Mozilla had updated the patch and minor version numbers for non-breaking updates. I've said this on /. but the Moz devs argued that their choice was between rapid major version updates or no updates at all. I find that hard to believe. Something is wrong with their toolkit if they cannot support minor version number updates.

HR has taken to calling low-level programmers "engineers" for some silly reason which makes the term meaningless. "Software Architect" is the new term for what used to be called a "Software Engineer", the one person in charge of the design of the whole system. In ten years the ads will probably be calling for "Software Architects" with two years of experience, and we will need another new word to describe the job of the software engineer / architect / ???.

He's a hero because he let people warez and they lost their favorite source for warez when his system was shut down.

Everything else -- the FBI fuckups, the legitimate users losing data, and so on -- is a secondary justification for supporting a warez site. Those issues can be opposed on their own without making the warezer-in-chief into a hero.

Blizzard claims that the specific users complaining were in fact cheating. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#40...

via the /. thread: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/07/03/141208/linux-users-...

Franzen (the linked article) discusses the justification for surrendering the user's public tweets but not the user's private information. Judge Sciarrino's decision distinguishes between these tweets and the user's "non-content" private information, finding that "The law governing compelled disclosure also covers the above mentioned non-content records." This law is 18 USC 2730[c][1][B], which is fairly straightforward.

http://law.onecle.com/uscode/18/2703.html

In short, this is no big deal. The information was legally subpoenaed in connection with a criminal investigation. I think this is only on the front page because it has the words "Twitter", "Occupy", and "Forced" in the title.

SEEKING WORK - Sonoma/Marin area. Can work remotely.

Well-rounded junior developer. Full-stack LAM[PHP/Perl/Python] incl. HTML5 and JS, prefer backend work. Can also do AD/IIS/Exchange, switch/router admin, Java, C, GIS.

Contact: dturover@student.santarosa.edu

About twelve years ago, I wrote a CGI script with a loop like "for(i=10;i>0;i++){}", with the counter going in the wrong direction. Since it was running as apache, I did not have rights to kill it. My buddy used this server for his business and I had DOSed it for about fifteen minutes until the integer overflowed. If the language had used a bignum, it would have been worse.

I made as similar mistake on the school's server a couple of years later when I had an infinite loop in an XSLT file that I was developing. Fortunately, libxslt had a way of detecting infinite loops in which it logged a warning to /var/log/messages and, far less fortunately, repeated the loop. Once again, I did not have rights to stop it and I had run it on a weekend when nobody was working. The hard drive was full well before anyone came in to work on Monday.

Lessons learned: Test web-based programs from the command line whenever possible. If you're a server admin, let your users' CGIs run under their identities and consider using resource limits.

If the startup succeeds: great! Of course, success or failure depends on whether you have a good idea and can execute it.

If the startup fails: you're broke and probably deeply in debt. Hope you can find a church to take you in.

If you don't try for a startup: You still have a buffer of money to fall back on for a time. If you were "insanely employable" before thinking about a startup, you are employable now and can get a good job before the money runs out. If not, you would have been in even worse shape if you had tried to launch a startup and it failed.

Here is the heart of the problem:

<blockquote> Peter Cappelli: Well, the employers, if you look at what the hiring managers are saying and what they’re looking for, they’re not, for the most part, hiring people out of college anyway or out of high school. What they want is three to five years’ experience. So the shortages that they report, the difficulty hiring, are for people who have quite specific skills, and those skills are work-experience based. </blockquote>

Workers without three to five years' experience will never get three to five years' experience. The only way for a young worker to be hired is through corruption, by knowing somebody or lying about their experience. The employers have designed a system to create the shortage that they complain about, and they perpetuate it because everybody's doing it that way.

In any workplace, the grunt workers should outnumber management. It is no different in software. For every software engineer there need to be testers, bug fixers, and doc writers. Yet in the want ads for programmers, it is the other way around. Senior this. Senior that.

The way to fix this situation is easy, but like anything else it will require time and effort. Next to the routine 3-5 year want ad, also post something like this:

Job title: Computer Programmer. Requirements: can program a computer. Compensation: $14/hr or DOE.

You will get plenty of applicants because the economy is that bad right now. Use interviews to determine the best fits for your company. Hire two or three for every Project Manager or Senior anything that you have. Give them raises if they are any good, treat them with respect, and they'll stick around. Three to five years later, you will not only have coders with three to five years of programming experience. The coders will have three to five years of domain knowledge of your company's operations. That might be just as valuable as their coding ability.

Silverstein often quotes a senior Israeli official to say it's Israel's fault whenever something goes wrong in the Middle East, but he never produces evidence and his assertions are rarely backed up by independent reporting. I suspect he's making it all up, or his senior official source is a senior official in a political action group and not the government. In any case, he is not a reliable source.

From the intern side, when I have been paid (I had a three-year unpaid internship because it was the best job opportunity around), it's been between $8 and $25 an hour. The $8/hr was for other jobs in which I was also asked to do work that included software development. The $25/hr was way outside standard deviation; from reading the want ads and talking to other CS students, intern programmers usually make in the $14-$18 range. A real, non-intern job in IT paid me $16-$17/hr.

The "NYT view" was a crude stereotype of the tech industry and the stereotypical male nerd tech worker, introduced to justify the article's position that the tech industry is male-dominated and sexist. There's plenty wrong with it.

And as a matter of fact, the contributions of men did heavily outweigh the contributions of women because women at the time were NOT ALLOWED to become engineers in most of the United States. In the rare places where it was allowed, high school advisors discouraged women from going to college and college advisors discouraged women from taking advanced math. Society was generally sexist and the potential for women to contribute was suppressed.

In the tech industry, women were allowed to become computer operators because it was seen as a natural progression from being typewriter operators, and because the tech industry was more progressive than the NYT gives it credit for. The heavy math, engineering, and design work was mostly done by men because, with rare exceptions like Hopper, they were the only ones with the skills and training to do it.