Tangurena

The folks planning 911 used this same technique of using drafts to send messages back and forth. I'm certain that these are now always saved permanently for law enforcement use to comply with CALEA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...

My sister also uses "shell" companies. She is a prominent ex-scientologist and scientology has an established history of using litigation to punish and silence critics and exmembers. So when her car gets rammed, and she gets sued, by being broke she can't pay damages, and the car is owned by an LLC that only owns the car, so the plaintiff is limited in the amount of money they can extort.

She has more than a dozen LLCs just to protect what little she owns.

It depends on the bank. Some will open accounts for LLCs, some require ID cards for signers and corporate records to show that the person is authorized. It also depends on who is behind the desk, as someone who needs to meet their quotas for the day will be a lot more amenable.

I know this because my sister is a prominent ex-scientologist and they've been harassing her to the point that everything she owns needs to be in a separate LLC.

Existing iris scanners can be deceived by pictures of other people's irises. I do not doubt that facial recognition will be fooled by people making masks (to fool infrared scanning).

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/fake_irises_fo...

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18997580

The basic principle of biometric reading is the equivalent to sliding your photo under the door to a guard. The guard checks the photo against an already existing set of photos and lets you in. They don't check that the photo is of you - which is a common failing when you let marketing design your security.

> The CEO of a company cannot "take back" or "wipe out" your right to purchase stock, aka stock options.

The folks who thought they had options at Skype found out that there were secret addenda to the option grant that let them swindle you out of your options when you leave.

http://framethink.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/lee2.pdf

http://framethink.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/how-employees-get...

It was Win 3.1 that had the AARD code that locked out DR-DOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

I deny the charge that it was "going downhill" before all the deletions started. If the "quality" is declining, then it is due to the vast quantities of new questions being asked, and the inability of regular users to find questions that they can answer.

Yogi Berra described the situation as "Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded".

Not if a moderator locked and deleted it - a 10k user can then only view the question and vote to re-open it. Sometimes the moderators act extra viciously by editing each answer before deleting the answers as well. That way the user can't recover their own answers in order.

Sample: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14827/typical...

The highest upvoted user got 122 points for that question.

Because when it comes to changing passwords, it would take me about 45 minutes to come up with a new password that met the rules and had a reasonable chance of me remembering it. I took to writing them down as I was trying to come up with something, and keeping the paper handy for a few days because I'd frequently forget the passwords by lunchtime and lock myself out of the system.

One thing to remember about these rules is that there are some other ones not publicized. All you know when it refuses to take your password is that it says "password doesn't match" instead of "password doesn't meet the rules." I got some different error message when I tried using Russian obscenities, but I forget that error message.

This looks exactly like the Dept of Energy password guidlines when I worked there.

For item #5, you should be aware that they check for dictionary words of 3 or more letters, both forwards and backwards. I'm not sure what dictionaries they were using, but I found that most of the Japanese, Russian and Finnish words/phrases that I frequently pick from were forbidden.

Missing from this article are all the scientists who took funding from BP in exchange for silence. Those scientists betrayed science as well.

Sample: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/08/17/contract-gag-sil...

The religious war of "free" versus "open" is what turns a lot of people off.

Previously, when posting code I wrote, I'd pick MIT license which would allow users to do what they wanted. Picking GPL would mean that many potential users would be prohibited by company policy from using it.

The mods on the StackOverflow sites seem to be trigger-happy deleting and locking posts. Most of my major upvoted answers are on threads now closed as off-topic - so this tells me that the StackOverflows have changed to be a place that I'm not welcome at anymore.

> Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

That hasn't worked out well for Madoff's "investors".

> Look companies that are "bad actors" are going to cheat the SEC and the public anyway...

And Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley to prevent future Enrons and WorldComms. HR 3606 repeals SOX for the first 5 years of an "emerging growth company" stock issuance and returns us to the "good old days" when fraudsters were able to run wild.

Section 201 of HR 3606 says

> Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission shall revise subsection (d)(1) of section 230.144A of title 17, Code of Federal Regulations, to provide that securities sold under such revised exemption may be offered to persons other than qualified institutional buyers, including by means of general solicitation or general advertising...

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3606/text

They no longer have to limit their pre-prospectus info to qualified investors - it is now wide open to advertising to everyone. And instead of only selling to qualified investors, they now can sell to anyone that the seller reasonably believe is a qualified institutional buyer. I can imagine the conversations now: "I can only sell to qualified investors wink, so since you want to buy it, I believe that you are a qualified investor!"

Bughouse lets you have experts and novices playing without the novices getting totally stomped. Because you can always move a piece, or place a piece that your team-mate captured, you have a lot more options. This also makes it far more fun for lesser skilled players than regular chess.

Where I used to play, we mostly played standard chess openings. Bughouse is different enough that one can have expert chess players playing against novices and since it is team-vs-team, the novice doesn't get totally stomped flat.

Something rather common was for most of the pieces to end up on one board, so my guess is that these strange openings are intended to block off places you'd normally use to drop in a piece that your team-mate captured. So it becomes more like Go,

Having read HR3606, so many existing requirements to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC regulations are eliminated for "emerging growth organizations" that there will be huge amounts of fraud. Not all "emerging growth organizations" will be fraudulent, but this makes it far easier to get away with.

One of my theories is that "morning people" have a tendency to get promoted in managerial tracks, while most IT workers tend to be "evening people". Thus to the mismanagers, it appears that their staff comes in late all the time - so to the "morning people", the "cure" for lateness is to make folks come in earlier and stay longer.

It seems to me that mismanagers never get the point that longer hours "in the seat" do not correlate to more positive work acomplished. In our profession, we've been aware that "crunch mode" is counter productive, but the lessons don't seem to get uphill to the people that dictate such things.

http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

That truth seems to stop flowing upwards in organizations is something that appears far more often than I'd like to happen. In the worst companies I've worked for, truth stops moving upwards at my direct superior's level. In the better ones, it is a few levels uphill. The most bureaucratic and hidebound company I worked for - GM - had 15 levels of people between myself (and I was salaried) and the CEO; which was more than enough for multiple thermoclines of truth to occur.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

http://www.cio.com.au/article/250886/thermocline_truth/

> or worse

Well, I'm running for election this November, so I suppose I could show them my campaign site.

My suspicion is that you may want to move away from trivia based questions (what is the 3rd parameter of the form.print dialog, or how would you move Mt Fuji) to ones like "describe a situation where you inspired others to meet a common goal" or "Describe a situation when the quality of work you completed wasn't the highest quality it could have been. What were the circumstances and what did you learn?".

Competency based interviewing is a bit harder, since you first have to figure out what the actual job competencies are and then base some questions around them. The questions won't have "correct" answers, instead they help you - the interviewer - determine how the interviewee thinks/makes decisions and you can then decide how they'll fit into your organization.

In addition, you may want to look at their resume and tailor one or 2 questions based on what they did at companyX. The PDF linked below should give you some idea of what sort of questions to ask.

One book that may be of interest: http://www.amazon.com/Competency-Based-Interviews-Master-Int...

Some example questions: https://sharepoint.sandiego.edu/hr/Employment/CompetencyInte...

Website with some explanation and examples: http://www.wikijob.co.uk/wiki/competency-based-interview

Wikipedia articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_Task,_Action,_Result

Under the Human Capital approach, learning via books or free/cheap online courses has the same effect as learning at the most expensive school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital

Under the Signalling Theory approach, going to an expensive university is a stronger "signal" to prospective employers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

These 2 show wildly different results when you consider the difference between forgetting a subject and failing the subject. You may know just as much as another person, but the one of you that passes some hurdle signals to prospective employers that the hurdle passer is the better candidate. This is because hiring a person is trying to predict future behavior/success with limited information, and many people use signals as heuristics. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....

One dissertation that described some of these differences is called "Hiring and inequality in elite professional service firms". An interesting read, and it explains some of the "unfairness" of employers using signalling instead of the human capital model. http://books.google.com/books/about/Hiring_and_inequality_in...

In 1962, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

In 1983, the Able Archer got the Soviet hierarchy in a tizzy. They misinterpreted a NATO exercise for an imminent attack. Reagan's announcement of SDI (more commonly called "Star Wars") lead the Soviets to believe that the US possessed technology that would shoot down any retalitory Soviet nuclear missile strikes, while permitting the US to fire nuclear missiles at will - thus defeating Mutually Assured Destruction. Add this to some jokes by Reagan such as the remark "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." While the "5 minute" remark happened the following year, it was in character with Reagans other remarks about (and hostility towards) the Soviet Union.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYAN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

To the Soviets, this exercise looked too much like a repeat of Operation Barbarossa, where the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union causing about 20 million deaths during WW2.

For those who don't get the reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8

I worked at one of the national labs and the books I'd see on shelves were usually ones from when folks were still students. The pristine unread books were either bound copies of the person's dissertation, or books he authored.

From a managerial viewpoint, if folks had the skills to manage telecommuters, they could manage offshoring and save far more $. I contend that most managers have a hard time managing folks directly in front of them and don't have the skills to manage remotely.

To become a patent attorney, one needs an undergraduate degree in science or engineering, followed by a law degree. Most folks aiming for law degrees pick easy majors for their undergrad degree and are thus automatically excluded from sitting for the patent agent exam (when you pass the bar, you then become a patent attorney).

To make things more difficult, the America Invents bill passed last year changes a lot of things, so folks studying for the exam now have twice as much material to study in order to pass.

Ahh, no. Sales of credits to fund RMT in games like Zynga is where Facebook's largest growth in revenues come from: about 30% of the sale price of the credits goes to Facebook. Games like Zynga's make FB users more "sticky" and spend more time on the site which helps raise advertising "hits".

We're underestimating the risk because we're using Net Present Value to determine the value of future events. While it can be useful in business to determine profitability of future endeavors, it isn't useful when we are unable to correctly calculate all the other things that get wrapped up into the word "externality".

I'm going to recommend watching Cool Hand Luke. While many folks love being rebels as they are youngsters, there is a cost to being "cool".