davengh

500 (pay) channels and nothing on...

That unemployment pay is more attractive than working says a lot about prevailing wages. If unemployment covers rent and working does not, why in the hell would any rational person want to work? And why should employers think they shouldn't have to compete with that?

In the U.S., a very short step since the courts have already held that e-mail service providers' copies of messages don't get the same protection as personal copies. I don't see how Alexa or any of the other "Hey, Spy" devices' third-party handling of speech for translation/interpretation would be considered differently. Especially given the ignored/clicked-through ToS that say "we're sending this home, is that OK?".

> And the 20-year-old systems are slowly dissapearing There's still COBOL code out there running core business systems that's older than I am, and I'm closer to 60 than I am to 50.

One of my tasks for Y2K prep was to modify an in-house-developed record-based "database" to accommodate a the century change. Originally developed in the '60s the year had originally been a single digit because everyone thought commercial DBMS' would be viable in few years so there would be a replacement before the decade rolled over. :-| They'd grafted decade handling into the thing before I got there so it could survive the '70s because they had a lot of expensive data in various file sets that contained the data. Converting to a commercial database was expensive and represented a huge business risk, so...

When 5MB disk storage system is the size of a small car and costs $50k, you fight for bytes. Or if your data is stored on magnetic tapes and reading in a dataset can be costed by the kilobyte, takes minutes per megabyte, and requires a million dollar's worth of equipment and dedicated staff, you fight for every byte.

The phone I carry today is hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the $5,000,000 mainframe I was working around Y2K and the apps on it - most delivered freely - make it far more capable than the raw processing power difference would indicate.

We've been forced to deal with the TLS issue by our software product's customers. Some of our technically-minded folks have been raising the issue for a while but new features are sexy and sell, and fixing not-yet-broken code doesn't. Amazing/discouraging that only the threat of immediate loss of six figures of income gets any attention.

I've seen these precluding secondary employment with competitive entities, but it seems there'd be little competition between Fred's and Alice's businesses (based on name alone).

Your definition of "wretched existence" might be very different from the folks seeking union representation.

The details will always have to be looked at by the inheritors - it's more important to not say something wrong or contradictory IMO. When I've had to do something like this in the past I circle through it, documenting the high-level ops before details anywhere. Tricky or especially complicated details next, then the operational details for as much as I've time for.

I'm doing this now for a couple of things I've inherited because my predecessors either never documented it or it's been lost to time. High-level flow, tricky and/or problematic bits with operational & recovery info, then the mundane as I have time. That means the mundane or some of the less-tricky tricky bits will be "vague" for a while.

Because sometimes he "wrong" action is the right thing to do. No automated system can anticipate everything. Think the NASCAR "drive at the wreck in front of you" - by the time you get there it will have moved.

Especially on a ship that might have to spring from "situation normal" to active combat (maneuver/attack/defend all at once) without a pre-knowable trigger condition.

We offer escrow of our source as an option for our customers who have concerns or policies about mission-critical software. The escrow includes instructions about tooling needed & versions (Visual Studio and others), any third-party (Telerik) or open-source things we use, database creation scripts, etc. A couple have run DR drills where they pulled the escrow, went through the instructions, and produced executables.

If he did decide at some point to buy a subscription, the simplest way to enable it is to send a signal to the sleeping-but-live tracker. Else he'd have to go to a dealer for some "factory authorized" service. That might not be reasonably done in some locations.

At a certain point, it is incumbent on the buyer to do some research and understand something about what they're buying. The availability of these systems is not a secret.

We just put up a Ring doorbell on our house. I know that making the (surveillance!?!) video available to my phone requires something be stored somewhere and transmitted over some network. Storage and transmittal mean other people will have it at some point. Should I be surprised or offended about that at some point in the future? Or offended that after some trial period I may have to pay somebody for that service?

We've agreed on a system of law. Actual justice is frequently only an accidental byproduct.

There are intersections here where 3 or 4 cars will continue to turn on a red signal - it's insane. Sounds like targeted enforcement at those intersections is called for.

I think they're referring to the reported costs of social programs used by WalMart and Amazon workers because they average pay is so low.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

https://newrepublic.com/article/146540/amazon-thriving-thank...

Arthur C Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

My in-laws are firmly in the "computers are magic" camp. Say what you like about they should learn etc, but they're in their 80s, have already lived through multiple technological revolutions, and at this point don't have the energy or interest to work through another one.

Firefighting risk is a general environmental risk - fighting a fire puts you in an area with fire byproducts. (not to mention the PPE firefighters usually wear) Vaping cuts out the environment part & introduces the combustion byproducts directly to your lungs.

So... in the U.S. we have 0.5/3?

Reading the comments in this thread and others, it seems to me that a lot of people want to argue about how many canaries have to die before the threat to the miners is taken seriously.

That any of the Schengen information made it to the US at all is a dead canary.

When I interview candidates for the company I work for I describe a key part of our system in general terms (20 possible elements, at least one active but any combination, items are single/set/hierarchy) then ask them to talk me through issues they can see writing generic code to handle data management and computations given these conditions. They don't have to write code, but they do have to be able to think logically and express themselves clearly. Some describe pretty much what we do, some get creative, and some are completely at a loss. Some pseudocode to help describe what they're thinking, most don't.

Even if their "solution" is incomplete I look at if they get the gist right.

> save a local river bait fish

A few or more of those and we have real loss in biodiversity. Maybe your "local river" can sustain that for a bit - but overall they are all important.

I worked at the state courts in California for a while. The "Penalty Assessment" fee amused/enraged me; at the time IIRC it was $17.50 per $10 of statutory fine. So the effective cost of a $100 statutory fine was $100 + $175 PA + court costs ($40 or more) + special fees ($1 if the charge could be adjudicated in night court, for example). So a $100 offense started at an actual out-the-door cost of about $315.

Being a fee, "Penalty Assessment" could be changed administratively as opposed to changing the actual fine which needed legislation.

They're currently admitting to losing passport #s, but what else - like credit card info which they aren't supposed to keep in any case - might have been compromised?

Yet. That we know of.

I'm something more than twice your age, and have felt the same way you do now. I've spent countless hours "keeping up" - lost a marriage in part due to this - and there is always stuff I don't know and am curious about. There is always someone more knowledgable, or faster at coding, or better at interpreting requirements. That's one reason I like working with smart, capable people-there's always something to learn from them. I've lived through marathon coding sessions, death march projects, been a manager, been an employee and been a contractor.

I don't care to keep up on everything any more. I remain intensely curious and "keep up" in a general fashion, reading articles, playing with code samples etc with an eye to being able to converse with my colleagues about what they're doing, not with the idea that we're competing to be the alpha geek.

Some of the other posters here have suggested you find something you're actually interested in and spend time on that, or that you find cause you can volunteer for and to that. Those are good suggestions. Find something outside your head you can do and commit to it. Part of your anxiety is because your world is narrowing because of the concentration on what is in reality a little area and you see others doing "better", whatever that means to you. Get out of that world for a bit.

Understand that time will pass and whatever technologies you get to know well will pass out of the market sweet spot. Maybe you'll be ready for that and maybe you won't. The question is will you have enjoyed your life when you realize this? Tech is a tool. One you use to make a living, one your employers of whatever stripe will try to use to make money. It is not a reason to get up and breathe.