jmccree

I'm not sure if you're referring to a certain jurisdiction in the US, another country, or speaking "theoretically per your interpretation of the US constitution if a case made it to the supreme court", but that is not accurate for the majority of the states in the US. Most US states I'm aware of currently grant officers police authority on and off duty per state law.

As I mentioned to the other poster, off duty officers here (and many/most places) work in their department issued uniform with their badge/radio/gun with full police powers/immunity. Besides neighborhood patrols, another common use is parking garages or high end shopping centers hiring officers to stop traffic to let people in/out of their location on busy streets. It's not just ATL, NYPD paid detail unit supplies off duty in unform officers with dept insurance. Many police department websites even have online forms to fill out if you want to hire officer/s with standard rates.

I believe there are a few states/jurisdictions that restrict off duty officers from working in uniform w/police power, but that's probably a minority. With budgets being cut everywhere, officers being able to earn an extra 50% or more of their normal salary working off duty gigs is a "free benefit" the department can offer, or like in NYC where the NYPD charges a 10% admin fee ($1.18m earned in 2011) it's extra income for the dept.

For example, if Facebook was located in San Jose, they could just pay $46.50/hr for as many officers as they wanted, in unform, per http://www.sjpd.org/PDF_Forms/SEU_Secondary_Employment_Emplo... .

By off duty, I mean fully in department issued uniform, badge, gun, and radio with full police authority same as on duty.

I'm not really not sure about the unconstitutional argument, but it's extremely common. Normally it's done more explicitly by hiring off duty officers. NYPD has the paid detail unit to organize private details for businesses. Where I live in Atlanta, every neighborhood you'd want to live in has their own privately paid force of off-duty officers patrolling. I'm more surprised that facebook is basically offering a grant/donation than outright hiring their own off-duty officers.

It's pretty common for food and drink products. I believe Coke and Pepsi are (in)famous for doing this. They basically rent the shelf space in grocery stores and then maintain the stocking of it so they fully control the presentation.

Interestingly enough also the way (pre-ban) machine guns and grenades are managed by the feds. Legal, but expensive and time consuimg tax stamp required. Obamacare fines were also considered to be a tax. Taxation is limitless.

This goes back to peering between Cogent and Verizon, and possibly "legitimately" has nothing to do with netflix the business. Verizon's public peering policy states:

"1.2 Traffic Exchange Ratio. The ratio of the aggregate amount of traffic exchanged between the Requester and the VERIZON Internet Network with which it seeks to interconnect shall be roughly balanced and shall not exceed 1.8:1."

Their equal traffic ratio has been in every tier 1's peering policy since the 90s. The issue is that Cogent (One of Netflix's ISPs) is used almost exclusively by content providers, and thus traffic ratios are going to not going to be balanced. Traditionally peering was only free between those with similar traffic ratios, and it was free as payments to each other would cancel each other out anyway. Verizon, you could say legitimately, believes Cogent is not a peer and should either pay them for the interconnection, or purchase transit from someone who is a peer.

This is not new with Cogent. At one time they were practically giving away IP transit to any eyeball heavy ISPs to help balance their ratios. They muscled themselves into Tier One-ish status by buying cheap fiber after the bubble burst and sold transit for cheaper than anyone to build up traffic. Rather than paying settlement fees to make up for the traffic inbalance, Cogent has played hard ball and went through numerous de-peerings where Cogent's customers were unable to access the other network.

Peering is a messy world. It used to be the content providers and the eyeball networks both had to pay the national Tier 1s for access and the Tier 1s interconnected for free. Now the ma bells ended up buying the Tier 1s. (Verizon bought MCi/UUnet, SBC/BellSouth bought ATT) and so the eyeball networks are the Tier 1s. And the Tier 1s also own cable networks that compete with one Cogent's customers (netflix). This is a newer development and so while Verizon's network team may rightly be suggesting Cogent should pay them, this ignores the bigger picture. The old peering paradigms may need adjusting now.

1080P security cameras and above are easily available, and likely affordable to a company like MS.

In many areas the Telco company also offers TV service.

Our HOA fees cover providing internet access for every resident. I've found the end-user "tech support" to be totally incompetent. (A call back 3 DAYS after I submitting traceroutes showing my traffic was stuck in a routing loop in their network, wherein the "tech support professional" asked me to try rebooting my computer before even asking me if I was still having issues. I hung up mid-script.)

However, when we had consistent outages and horrible service, I eventually gathered enough evidence to give to the HOA of what the problem was, and when the HOA contacted the ISP, they looped me into an email chain with their account rep and we got immediate service. If we all had to choose Comcast or ATT individually, neither would really care about individuals. But the HOA is in a much larger bargaining position and our ISP cares about losing the whole building.

From my experience and friends in the area, those in condo buildings with the exclusive ISP arrangement tend to get better/faster service than those in condos with the standard cable/telco choice. Since condo buildings are managed by the residents who mostly use internet, usually enough percentage care about the quality of internet access to hold the exclusive ISP accountable or replace them. Of course in Apt buildings, mgmt just views internet as an expense and it's a different scenario.

I think what you're missing is DVCS is a subset of "version control". A large percent of developers have moved from CVS to SVN and for the past few years are hearing Git is the successor to SVN. So they are comparing the new hot version control Git to their previous SVN. A lot of these people don't care about the distributed aspect, just whether git is better than svn for their version controlling needs.

I think the thing that generated much of the initial git confusion for svn users was a lot of the git documentation at the time were devoted to using git in a very distributed, very branching, type of of manner, which while it's awesome that it's possible, is needless complexity for many dev teams. Particularly this post was passed around as the gold standard: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ .

A lot of svn devs were used to a pretty simple work flow. Checkout the current branch in dev, make some edits, commit/push. Rinse, repeat. On many teams no one other than the lead dev/release master would ever need to even do a merge. Now show this team the above git branching model, which suggest Bob can pull a feature branch over from Alice, make some commits and push back, but wait Sam has also needed to pull Alice's to make some commits, and merges in her latest changes from Develop which conflict with both Bob and Alices current. Now you have the lead dev or release manager wasting hours trying to figure out this merge mess with 3 broken repos and the PM demanding Sam's changes in develop are needed for a hotfix by Pat yesterday. I hope you can see the massive complexity increase in the way a lot of teams were initially told to use Git.

Once people figured out everyone could pull and push from a centralized repo (Github heavily helped this) and that branches should (for a certain type of dev team) always be pushed/pulled from the central repo instead of shared peer to peer, the workflow was much simplified. Git with a central repo is more than likely better than using svn for many teams. The easy branching and offline commits are benefits whether a team needs the "distributed" aspect or not.

It's apparent that you really understand and use a DCVS, many people do not. It's important to realize on many projects devs don't want or need to become experts on DCVS, but could still benefit from using Git over svn. For a lot of open source projects, merging and reviewing patches is a big part of the project as that's how new code gets in. For a startup team, any time spent on dealing with a VCS system is time not spent developing the product.

Protests in front of your local federal court house does nothing. It annoys the residents when FPS brings out the dogs to sniff trash cans and the college newpaper camerman is blocking your front door, and the real news media couldn't give a crap. Voting is the only thing that actually matters.

They posted over 3 billion dollars in shipping losses in 2012 and are currently saying they will likely increase the cost of prime soon. Perhaps if you haven't used prime you may not realize how much many prime subscribers use it, I'm not being tricked. Looking over the past few years of my amazon orders, I average 50-100 orders per year. I know they have good shipping rates, but I doubt it's less than $2/package for at min 2day.

Have you mentioned this to amazon? I had a book a few days late and amazon overnighted me another one and told me to keep the other one when/if it arrived. Their customer service is rather decent in my experience.

Last I heard amazon was losing an average of $11/yr on prime subscribers. They are relatively famous for caring little about making a profit in the short term. I'm not sure how often you order from Amazon, but just a few overnight $4/orders and you can save the $80 easily. I've bought multiple pieces of furniture off amazon with free 2 day shipping. I don't want to know how much that would have cost me.

I love how PHP is mentioned in one paragraph in a long interview, yet gets two bullet points and the title here at HN. Hate much?

You are lucky if deadlines with actual penalties have been a "tiny minority" of your experiences. The problem I experienced too much at some companies is "management" making artificial deadlines become real deadlines. VP of X sees feature set for delivery on Friday, sets up demo for potential client on Friday. Now everyone is in crunch mode or the company suffers when client can't see the feature. Or CxO drops in and says "I got invited to Conf Z in two weeks, I told them I'm going to demo Feature C and they just tweeted it, that's still on track, right?" Now, those were not the best managed companies, but I'd imagine there's a lot of people who end up in similar situations. As well, the author works at a consulting company, where I imagine many of the deadlines are baked into the contracts as deliverables with financial penalties for not meeting them. Consulting is a different world than a startup where you get to build something you hope to personally use for years.

I feel it's unfortunate there's likely a lot of people newer to or unfamiliar with the bandwidth market that will not fully grok this comment.

There's a sub-species of programmer that loves /programming/. Not getting things done with code, but the act of writing code itself. They'll happily over engineer and refactor things for eternity if left unchecked. Leave them alone for two years, come back and ask if Hello World is done? "Not yet, I'm working on optimizing the text to speech plugin api". It's to these people that this article should really be speaking to.

I'm curious why you don't buy the "we're all criminals" line? Since the federal government cannot even produce the number of current federal crimes, it's at least fair to say none of us can possibly know that we're not criminals. I have a pretty good memory, but I can't even remember all the criminal offenses in my city's municipal code, much less the state and federal codes and statues. I'm sure I've broken enough laws to rack up at least a 100 years of sentences if every infraction was automatically prosecuted with the maximum sentence.

I went T60P to T520. Its about time for an upgrade and I'm not looking forward to the keyboard setup on the W540. At least they left the trackpoint...

Buffet is the one (via one of Berkshire Hathaway's insurance companies) who is doing the insuring. Quicken loan is paying buffet/berkshire a, likely large, premium to pay the billion if someone wins. Given the odds are 1 in not gonna happen, it's likely an easy million or two for buffet, and free promotion. Buffet/Berkshire also insured the pepsi billion dollar prize thing a few years back.

You do realize that all Buffet is doing is providing the insurance through one of the many insurance companies he owns via Berkshire Hathaway, and that Quicken Loans is paying the premium. Berkshire Hathaway is one of the largest re-insurers in the world and specialize in multi billion dollar insurance policies. A quick glance at last years annual report shows they paid out $20 billion last year. The market cap of berkshire is almost $300 billion dollars. Do you really think they are worried about paying out $21 billion instead of $20 billion in insurance claims this year?

I'm not sure if you mean what's so hard for a "linux evangelist" or in general. Linux probably has the best and easiest GPG integration. In general, encrypted mail is practically useless for every day communication and provides little real benefit. Unless you only communicate with linux experts, 90%+ of the people you're talking to likely don't even know what a "MUA" is. I use gpg for transferring sensitive data (passwords, api keys) occasionally to the rare few clients that have gpg, but the rest of our emails are still sent unencrypted. Why?

Encryption requires everyone in the thread to support it. Need to CC in the C-Level exec on something? Good luck getting them to setup it up in their outlook and use it properly. Even with my help, it took a good 30 mins to set my dad up with GPG on Windows/thunderbird. Have to figure out which software you need, the nomenclature for key generation etc is different in each program.

Encryption breaks search, at least in thunderbird. You can't search through the encrypted messages and they aren't indexed. This makes sense if you're sending very sensitive data perhaps, but for general business correspondence it's reduces productivity. There's an open bug in EnigMail by a user who saves every email in plain text to use regular file search tools. That's useless.

There's the aforementioned webmail. Tons of people only use webmail, and there's no way to interact with them. More importantly in my book, encryption breaks mobile access. Sure, there are addons for gpg on android, but I don't trust my private key on my phone. In the near future there may be some way to use a yubikey with NFC for passing in the private key, but that brings in it's own set of problems.

Lastly, it's the cost/benefit that really keeps encryption use from being wide spread. It costs you time in getting each contact you use to use it, time dealing with being unable to search, time setting up your phone to securely access mail, unable to use webmail at all, and for all this you really only get two benefits: Prevention of e-mail interception by intelligence agencies or internet backbones and access to your mail by your e-mail provider. If I'm not concerned about these, just using proper TLS access for IMAP/SMTP prevents anyone I'm actually worried about (wifi interceptor, bad ISPs) from reading the mail. For mail inside an organization with their own mail server, mails are never anywhere unencrypted than company owned equipment, TLS in transit.

Doing encryption right is hard, for 99% of email the threat model just doesn't justify the expense in time and headaches so the NSA doesn't know there's a conference call at 11am tomorrow or that you should call grandma tomorrow because it's her birthday.

I've never been asked a single question on if or where I went to high school in my entire career.

The cost of underground construction varies significantly depending on local geological, soil, and water table conditions. In some areas with deep well drained soil underground construction is relatively cheap, as it's basically just earth moving. In others you hit granite bedrock after a few feet and you have to excavate the bed rock to go deeper. It's certainly possible to expand out from a basement, and every so often the news shows footage of elaborate underground tunnels for drug manufacturing etc beneath a normal house.

If you're interested in underground structures, you should check out limestone mines converted to office space or storage like subtropolis. They mine the limestone of a solid horizontal layer leaving pillars to support the "roof", creating an entire underground building millions of sqft and acres in size. Subtropolis is over one thousand acres.

It amuses me people want PHP to follow the path of Python or Perl. On the latest version of Ubuntu: PHP 5.5, Python 2.x Perl 5.x. PHP has gradually improving, adding functionality, and spreading minimal BC breaks over a long period. If PHP had went the PHP 6 route back round ~08, it'd likely be split into two projects already, splitting up the community with it.

I suspect a third party would be far more likely to expect only one term and attempt to accomplish as much as possible without worry for re-election. Though there have been so few examples of "true" third party wins at high levels to know. The best example might be Jesse Ventura. As well, you might expect people who consistently run as a third party knowing no chance of winning to be less susceptible to the political machine than others.

You'd likely have to leave or face a felony with 10 years prison sentence. (Per H.R. 347, it's 10 years for entering a secret service permanent or temporary restricted area without permission with a firearm.)

Thanks for that! I was unaware of that exemption, apparently that was added in Jun 13. It doesn't seem to be a widely published exemption.