Container checkpointing -- very cool from a forensics use case! I hope someone produces a useful "container diff" tool to make visualizing differences between checkpoints easier!
I have 8 years of experience doing OS-level coding in the storage industry. I've dabbled in embedded on the low end and userspace / application development on the high end. I've worked remotely from New Zealand for a US-based company for about a year and have proven my effectiveness as a remote employee. Also completely keen for working locally with an Auckland company.
This is an excellent point. Your communication is only as secure as the weakest endpoint (in the same vein, perhaps your correspondents might be of the opposing viewpoint and might feel weird about their personal mails being stored by someone who's rolling his own IT and security).
So what if I were, say, a US citizen living abroad? I am legally able to work in the US and in my home country, but of course since I'm not actually living in the US some companies might find that problematic. Do you?
I think it's important to note that a fear or anxiety reaction may not, as you say, keep us safe. When I'm calm and rational, I make better decisions than when I'm gripped by fear.
As an avid hiker and explorer, occasionally my fear of heights interferes with my enjoyment of my hobby. I try to push past it as much as possible, but when my heart is racing and my legs are shaking, a situation which would otherwise be safe can become dangerous.
Also, unlike you, I do have two friends who suffer from PTSD (it's common enough that one may be surprised to find that a friend one has known for years wrestles with PTSD in some aspect of life but doesn't advertise that fact). One of those friends has gotten off an elevator early because being in an enclosed situation with a stranger gave her a panic attack. Another called me on the phone nearly in tears because she had to stay late at work and walking across the deserted, dark carpark to her car was almost more than she could handle.
I think it would be great if a drug could help people like these two friends of mine go through life without feeling controlled by anxiety in situations like these. I also think it would be great if people like me whose day-to-day lives are unmarred by fear can do more things -- safely; the drug does not impair reason -- through this therapy. The tradeoffs are important to know (and as you say, the article does a great job exploring them), but to me this sounds really promising.
Yeah, that paragraph was where she completely lost me. The desire to ensure the poor are taken care of and given opportunities for advancement is not mutually incompatible with the automation of rote tasks. It is not incumbent on society to stop technological advancement in certain areas to ensure that no additional humans lose their jobs to automated processes.
Getting upset at the loss of jobs is the luddite position. The more socially liberal position is getting upset that the savings from the loss of said jobs are rolled up into the pockets of corporate executives and working to ensure that wealth is equitably distributed. The socially conservative position is that the additional wealth freed up by the automation will create new job opportunities elsewhere that the recently unemployed individual can seek out and pursue. I lean more to the socially liberal side (and hopefully this bias did not creep out in my description of the conservative point of view), but either one is preferable to putting the kibosh on progress because it might step on someone's toes.
I work for a company which makes network devices. We've detected many hostile intrusions in our network. If you make hardware or software that runs in enterprise datacenters, someone is surely going to be trying to steal your source code to find exploits and possibly put backdoors in.
We use multi-factor authentication just to get in the corporate network and a separate, airlocked engineering network to store our IP. From what I've talked to from my colleagues at other major device manufacturers, this is becoming the industry standard (seven years ago I scoffed at Ericsson's paranoia for having a sequestered engineering network. Turns out they just saw the attacks earlier than we did).
In our case, doesn't seem to be the NSA. Looks more like China. Could easily be either one, or yet another party. This is the world we live in.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's not unprecedented, but I also don't think a lot of the companies that get hit by something like this talk about it so publicly.
This is interesting, because you're ignoring the fact that the author worked in this exact business for some time and claims that it did once work and doesn't anymore.
Either he was deluded at the time and overcame his delusion without ever realizing he was deluded (which is possible) or there's more to it than you make it seem. Because I think someone who says "this used to work and now it doesn't" may have something profound to say that the person saying "this has never worked" needs to hear.
Perhaps you're right and software outsourcing has never worked, in the sense that from a total cost standpoint it has never been better to contract development of a software project to a third party than to create it in house. I don't agree with this, but we'll accept it for the point of argument. You're still ignoring his point that the change in economics has caused a cultural change in the attitudes of those who lead outsourcing entities.
The article claims that previously, the economics allowed them the luxury of trying to deliver a result to their customers. Now, they are not able to do so because the economics require them to milk their customers for every cent in order to break even.
This may not directly affect you if you have always believed that outsourcing doesn't work and you disagree with his opening statements attempting to rebut that mindset. But it's still an interesting view from the inside.
Either the article doesn't make it clear or I'm bad at reading, and the YT Red site itself just tells me it's not available in my country: I assume this is $10 US a month?
Let's not lose sight of one thing -- this doesn't make chip-and-pin less secure than swipe-and-sign, it just makes it no more secure, in the worst case.
That's a very positive spin on the message. The way I read it is that developers and maintainers are encouraged to make Emacs work better on free than non-free platforms.
This is, sadly, self-defeating. If Emacs were widely recognized as the best editor (or whatever of its myriad functions you use it for), "works best on GNU/Linux" could advance the cause of free software. As it stands, though, "only works well on GNU/Linux" instead just means that fewer people will be using it.
Is it "silly" to buy a house when you don't have $50k in your emergency fund? I have been very financially lucky, but I'd still have to sell a lot of stock -- dipping significantly into funds earmarked for other things -- to pay off a surprise $50k expense. I certainly couldn't have done so right after having bought my house.
It's kind of scary that something of this magnitude would depend on the kindness of the claims inspector. The one I dealt with was professional yet friendly and helpful (and climbed my wooden stepladder while wearing heels without a second thought). If she had been having a bad day, or just generally of grumpy disposition, or whatever, things could easily have gone the other way.
When one of my upstairs toilets started leaking in my house in the US, it finally got so bad that I noticed a stain on the garage ceiling. The insurance inspector said that insurance would not cover a "slow leak". I was very nice and polite and pointed out how soaked the subfloor was and that there was no way to know when the leak started (which was true). She wrote her recommendation that it be covered, which the company apparently accepted since they wrote me a check.
Definitely not $50k (more like $2.5k), but it's still disturbing that the line between insurance covering it and not covering it was so thin.
I wonder if a more thorough inspection would have caught it. Surely houses built around that time are routinely inspected for asbestos, lead-based paint, etc before purchase anyway. (Actually, going back and reading the comments, he actually addresses this point: http://www.jefftk.com/p/mercury-spill#fb-752340840802_752343.... Perhaps he could have made it a condition of purchase, that the seller pay for a mercury vapor inspection? Perhaps it's not such a common problem that such a requirement would be reasonable. Hindsight, etc.)