jerrya

Apart from that, I can revel in my ignorance that tells me that collecting grain from a common silo and spraying it with roundup is not much more a big deal than going to a river and panning for gold, or passing a list through a filter.

Or even was growing yogurt, and intentionally subjecting his cultures to "too cold temps" in order to evolve strains that would grow at lower temps.

Though admittedly a little long-winded, she raises some very interesting points.

(I was there in that capstone project where you had a bug in the excel spreadsheet and we just pasted value over it!)

And even readily field reparable.

(I am a bit shocked by the $100K price tag.)

Even if we all agree the practice is malodorous, without public discussion of it, we are apt as individuals to concede to it as we believe we have no alternatives.

It's similar to the puzzle interviews which are controversial and many people here dislike. By talking about it, by raising it and discussing again and again their negatives, it helps raise awareness of strategies on how to avoid them, what to do when one is encountered, and can even raise awareness in people that do like them as to why they are problematic and encourage them to find alternatives within their company.

FWIW, I think credit pulls are obnoxious, and even so, yes, I have been asked to consent to them as well as background checks for jobs which should not need them at any time.

And it's Saturday.

It does make me think that most people claiming to be full stack developers are jack of all trades, master of none.

In my largish apartment complex, there is one cable provider: Cox. I can't use a sat dish, my apartment faces the wrong direction and I'm on the second floor. FIOS isn't available. CenturyLink agrees no "prism tv" whatever that is for me, and directtv is out because I am on the second floor and face the wrong direction.

So there's really no free market in cable providers for me, it's a monopoly situation.

The free market solution would be to require Cox to allow other cable providers to use their cable to get last mile to me and then let Cox, et. al., charge me however they wish.

I would be curious to know which situation Cox would prefer: mandatory unbundling, or force them to share the cable.

EDIT: I do wonder what keeps Verizon from offering FIOS if they wanted to. Is it too expensive to rewire a huge sprawling multi-floor apartment complex?

But:

a) It is Windows b) It is a good (in the best sense) example of what is still cripple ware c) It is not available to people that don't purchase a scanner, even though PDFs and legal documents often come via email d) It is slow e) It makes every recipient of that document have to OCR it, as opposed to just teaching/demanding the lawyers and courts to distribute them in their original Word/GoogleDoc/WordPerfect/TextPDF form.

I assume this is how it was delivered to and archived by the court, and not just a scribd artifact.

The document was almost certainly produced on a computer, but it is archived as a scanned in document. The downloadable pdf is not searchable, the downloadable txt is useless.

Scanning legal documents encourages errors (the document is tilted), and makes OCR and searching difficult for the average layman consumer of legal documents (that is in many cases, the plaintiffs and defendants) that do not have access to cheap, accurate OCR.

When will it be expected that legal documents archived by a court will be normally available to the public in "machine readable", searchable, full text behind the image, cut-and-paste form?

In my own experience, the ability to use simple, command line based, text searches to hunt through collections of legal documents is invaluable.

I am more worried about the folks that just jump into a complex project without seeing if someone has already done this beforehand.

Because that's how I engineer. I try to stand on the shoulders of others. And Google provides such an excellent step-stool.

But as I've said, that doesn't seem to go over well.

Implement your favorite sort algorithm? I don't know that algorithm, I tend to use the sort algorithm that comes along with the libraries of the language I am using on the assumption that a) it's good enough until proven otherwise, b) it's well implemented and mostly bug free by the language designers, and c) schedule is paramount, the most bummed out, tweaked out, sort is not.

You seem to be begging the question (in the formal sense) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

(And at other times, various courts have ruled:

    * citizens cannot decrypt encrypted cable tv signals passing through their homes
    * citizens cannot monitor even unencrypted cell phone transmissions) (I think)

I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of United States v. Jones (2012) at the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal.

And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012))

But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by a cop walking a beat.

I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.

I was uh, fingered by our Physics professor who ran into me before graduation, and said, "Jerry, what did you do?"

Was pulled off the grad night school bus just before it left for a talk with Nick the Narc, Principal, and LAPD.

We talked for a bit, I explained I hadn't done anything terribly unique, pissed them off by telling them I copied my designs from the Rockford Files (google it), and then they sent me off to Disneyland with the rest of my graduating class.

(Had I known how popular that made me on the bus that night, I would have done it sooner.)

Went to college, found one other engineering student in my small class of engineering students that had done practically the same thing I had done the same week within the same state.

This was back before zero tolerance of course, and back before GWOT, and back before we decided we had to burn down our own village in order to save our village.

Back when folks grew a sense of humor.

So Kiera, I think what is being done to you is a gross abuse.

What is wrong with administrators, and what is wrong with prosecutors?

And where are the lawyers working pro-bono to defend her? And where are the other parents in the school to demand the school do the right thing?

I am appalled and saddened by the crap we force today's youths and young adults to put up with.

Zero tolerance has to go.

I admit I am curious how she feels about contests, prizes, scholarships targeting American women novelists. https://www.google.com/search?q=scholarships+women+writers+a...

I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer science and software engineering get rolled into IT?

15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering.

In the past 5 years, it's become much more inclusive (or so it seems to me.)

It would be an exaggeration to refer to that as minimally viable code (mvc). It is really only a statement of the lack of engineering actually being practiced, and makes me wonder about the lack of robustness, the lack of security, the numbers of bugs in the systems produced.

I am not certain this is a winning strategy for open source.

You can think of it in terms of Maslow's Pyramid.

Societies at the top of the pyramid are filled with individuals that no longer need to take the highest paying jobs, but can now take jobs that uniquely fulfill their interests and desires. And it could very well be that taken as two bell curves, the interests of women are different from the interests of men, two overlapping bell curves, but with different means, and different variances. Concluding that try as hard as you might, it just may be that women do not want to work in tech and preferentially prefer different sorts of occupation.

There's a story about boxing in America, and that is as various poor immigrant groups came to America, they each in their time rose to the tops of boxing. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians, & the African Americans. These groups saw boxing as a way to rise above their income levels. And as the various groups either assimilated or as a group rose above their resources, their interest in boxing waned.

http://voices.yahoo.com/ethnic-boxers-america-part-i-105696....

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, boxing has been a sport dominated by men of meager means and questionable sanity. Who in their right mind would choose to pursue an occupation in which you expose yourself to habitual beatings? Such a calling speaks to men who possess an overabundance of rage, and a dearth of opportunities. Historically, ghettoes are the environment most likely to produce such men. These are neighborhoods where too many people compete for too few resources, and the inhabitants face daily frustrations more profound than those known by more prosperous men.

Something similar could be happening in tech as women in general might prefer occupations that are more female friendly, more family friendly, more human centric, more social, etc., like medicine, or law.

I am explaining this theory, I am not necessarily supporting it. I have no idea why their is a dearth of women in programming. I know in the places I have worked, as a whole there are many women who are often lead developers and managers.

Advertise your position for a designer.

Make sure that the ad is seen in plenty of places where women designers may look. Do as much outreach to women as you want to. Speak to women tech meetups. Pass your job position along to professors likely to know qualified students and let them know the position is open to everyone, but you'd like to hire more women in general and are having problems reaching out to women. Use facebook, linked in, pinterest, to reach out to women developers.

Ask your #1 employee if she is interested in speaking to schools, meetups, conferences. Sponsor her speaking.

Interview qualified candidates.

Then hire a qualified candidate apt to do well at your position.

Also, let it be known you are always interested in good candidates, regardless of their specific expertise. Then when you find good candidates, make a position for them. This works well with your outreach and internship program.

(Other activities: sponsor outreach to high school girls, sponsor women in tech conferences, sponsor outreach to all high school students, create internships (and advertise those internships all across campus))