vizeroth

Just because no one managed to create WannaCry for Flash doesn't mean the security problems are overstated. They've published over 50 vulnerabilities in Flash this year, when the installed base is in the toilet.

Java may be worse (or it may not be, but I would avoid installing either on most client machines), but blowing a bigger hole in the system's defenses doesn't really make the slightly smaller hole any less of a problem, it just changes your priorities in patching.

The only thing impressive about Adobe's security record is the number of times their source code was compromised.

Kids make stupid and dangerous decisions because their brains aren't fully developed, they don't have the same sense of perspective that they will (hopefully) have as adults. Once upon a time, this was part of why we had a separate judicial system for them, too.

Religion comes into play because the lobby against making birth control available to teenagers is also the lobby against abortion clinics (and any clinics that offer health services and birth control to teenagers) is also the lobby to teach abstinence in schools (or not teach sex ed. at all), and that lobby gets most of its funding from religious organizations.

So, the slightly awkward week in sixth grade where my teacher gave us anatomy lessons and a birth video is something my daughter didn't get to experience, even though I brought my family back to my hometown. Instead, she gets the even more wonderfully awkward talk from her parents, which my wife likes to paraphrase as "your mouth won't get pregnant" (thanks Bill Clinton).

Teen pregnancy is not currently a common issue (it has been declining since 1990), but that doesn't mean it won't start going back up if we continue making it more difficult for young women (and men) to have access to birth control and education about safe sex.

We even had some discussion in school about how to reduce the risks of experimenting with drugs, though I don't think many people followed those directions.

This is where it can be difficult for people to understand the culture in which people are operating. From the outside, a public University is the ivory tower, but from the inside, it's just short of chaos. Sometimes faculty have direct access to post this stuff and either don't understand the requirements or don't care. Other times the staff who post this stuff don't have the support to stand up to faculty when they're told to post it.

The University is not removing all of their content, and they plan to continue to add new public content. It would definitely be a significant undertaking to make 20,000 audio and video files accessible. I'm sure the people responsible for the content will consider prioritizing that undertaking and possibly seek funding to get some of that content back out there.

Something else that is missing in their discussion of requiring University credentials to access the content is the fact that the same requirements apply to content they distribute to students, faculty, and staff. The difference is primarily in the likelihood they would be sued, and the fact that they would have a much easier time finding the funding to make something accessible if a student needed it.

Yes, you could change the law, which would theoretically benefit the people who could access this content, but would completely set back the few gains we've seen in web accessibility (assuming we're not also talking about everything else the ADA does).

Or you could set priorities for the content and fund the effort to make it accessible if it's really worth making it available. Fund research into improving automatic captioning/transcription, put your students on the path to better jobs, and improve the content for everyone.

While on the surface this is true, the amount of work required as a developer to learn how to do this is insignificant compared to the total time required to really understand your craft. While you may have to spend more time testing accessibility if you want to use the latest features in the bleeding-edge versions of JavaScript and CSS (or whatever language you're using which compiles down to them) or WebAssembly, you'll probably spend more time on browser compatibility testing, too, with those technologies (or you'll take the IDGAF approach).

When you really dig into it, though, most of the accessibility issues for the UI of a web application are still among the things you have to know to present accessible content on a website. In either case, the important point is to know when you're pushing the boundaries so you can make an informed decision about your testing requirements. It's just another metric to consider, like browser compatibility or mobile presentation.

I think people underestimate the difficulty of getting this done in a University environment, but I also think people are too quick to side with Berkeley in this particular case. One of the points made by the DoJ was that Berkeley makes resources available to faculty and staff to do the captioning, so, in theory, the captioning could have been done as the videos were made (at least those which were made in the last couple of years), and it should have been done as they were posted (again, at least those posted in the last couple of years).

So, the problem is getting the faculty and staff at Berkeley (and nearly everywhere else) to take the requirement seriously. Many of the people working to make content accessible are not in a position of authority over the people creating the content. In some cases it's a battle to educate the people who are in authority regarding the legal requirements and the consequences of ignoring those requirements.

As much as I wish that content didn't have to be pulled because of accessibility issues, sometimes there is no other way forward.

It is worth noting that the Berkeley case was federal law. California law does make the requirement for state Universities to comply with the ADA more explicit, but the US DoJ isn't in the habit of investigating violations of state law. The DoJ's letter to the University cites the ADA and various portions of the US Code: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).

If a system gives you two options for storing a date (using 2-digit or 4-digit years), how many dates do you need to store and use in calculations before you end up saving space by creating a new data type and all of the supporting operations to make the storage of the date itself more efficient? In recent years, it's more common to make this type of decision because something else is causing an issue, otherwise we rarely consider the space required for a date (and many languages no longer have a separate type for dates).

Another solution was to set the prefix for 2-digit years on a sliding scale, so they are interpreted as a date within a specific 100-year period (date windowing). For example, see the 2029 rule: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/214391/how-excel-wo...

This turned out to be one of the most cost-effective methods of fixing the problem, and was probably one of the most likely to be implemented. This was especially the case in situations involving software which ran closer to the hardware (for example, BIOS or firmware) or on systems where RAM or storage couldn't be increased and/or the change might increase the software's requirements beyond the system's capabilities.

32-bit Unix timestamps have the 2038 problem.

Despite how common these problems have been in the history of computers, we keep making them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...

Most countries apply intellectual property law to anything published on the internet. In other words, when it comes to something you pull down via http, you should assume that, if you attempt to republish it in any form, someone out there might decide that it's worth their time to use the court system to destroy you, so you should take the time to read the ToS.

So why did the U.S. sign the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement in 1942? The Migrant Labor Agreement of 1951? Why did the UFW hold protests at the U.S. border in 1969-1973? Why did the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 specifically address agricultural workers?

Importing large numbers of foreign workers, migrant or otherwise, has been the backbone of the agricultural labor market in the U.S. since the country was founded. It's not necessarily a good thing, just not a recent thing by any means.

There's a significant gap between the bottom end of people with other sources of income and those who will "accumulate it with no intent to spend it". Further, even if you give it to everyone across the board, most of the people who don't need it for basic expenditures and have no intention of saving for a big purchase at some point in the future (e.g. a down-payment on a car or house) would likely be making enough money that the UBI is less than their taxes.

I realize this is days later, but I felt the need to respond even though I didn't feel the need to check for responses earlier.

I do see how it can be easy to believe that ratings have more influence than students. At the same time, many ratings include student surveys as a substantial part of the ratings process.

Additionally, I can see how it can be easy to believe that there is significant administrative bloat in universities, even when the reports on funding sources and costs state that the administrative costs have been going down. For many the budgets and administration of public universities simply don't have enough transparency, and even when they strive to achieve transparency there may not be enough historical data to give people any real perspective.

Further, it's easy to point the finger at all sorts of practices within a University as sources of said administrative bloat, regardless of whether the budgets support those arguments.

When you have a significant reduction in state funding for public universities, you drive those institutions to look for ways to overcome those budget shortfalls. Generally speaking, it's hard to get people to accept salary reductions, so cost-cutting measures come from other directions. Where I work, tenured/tenure-track faculty in some colleges are teaching significantly more credit-hours than they would have ten years ago, so there are fewer lecturers, students, part-time faculty teaching classes. Since the tenured faculty don't get paid more for teaching more classes, this is a pretty effective cost-cutting measure for some colleges, but it has its limits, especially since those faculty are also expected to continue with other intellectual contributions (such as research).

Every new staff or faculty member hired anywhere within the University has to be justified. They no longer hire someone simply because a position has been vacated, so when someone retires it's possible that their duties simply get distributed among others and the position goes away.

However, if someone's job is basically fund-raising, it's probably going to be easier to get approval for that position, especially if you can find a candidate with a proven history of improving the budget situation for an educational institution.

Meanwhile, programs and physical things like buildings and equipment tend to be attractive to donors. You can put up buildings and fill them with equipment by demonstrating a willingness to pay for 50% of the cost and then creating a big push for donors, and with the right people working on the project you can end up paying significantly less (or nothing). Further, you can then leverage the new building/equipment for further facilities/equipment upgrades.

Good luck getting someone to pay someone's pension or to pay the salary of any of the staff dealing with the budget, custodial work, IT, etc.

The key is to avoid the extreme of a wizard design where the user clicks through multiple pages with little value in what is displayed on each page.

Many colleges are being pressured (by accreditation committees, donors, government, etc.) to provide methods for students to acquire connections that make it easier to succeed. Networking opportunities, guest lecturers from industry, internships, and special programs are fairly common ways that colleges can make a difference for students beyond an education.

While some (perhaps many or most in some schools) professors live in the isolation of academia, lecturers or part-time, non-tenure professors often work in a field related to the subject they are teaching, and can be a good source of connections for students.

Sure, simple attendance may not be enough for many students, but most colleges do at least try to give you the opportunities and tools you need to succeed.

HIPAA does not make your medical information private, it makes it Portable. Whether it has improved the protection of your digitized medical records is debatable, but it definitely forced almost every industry remotely related to medical care (and some previously unrelated industries) to digitize their records and share them.

Sure, paper medical records suck and aren't inherently more or less secure, but no one breaks into a car and runs away with 500 patients' medical histories when each patient's record fills pages, folders, or filing cabinets, rather than bytes on a hard drive (or even better, it slips away through a network connection that no one in the hospital even knew existed thanks to a back door on a piece of medical equipment).

HIPAA largely means that your medical information has been outsourced to whatever software/network/hardware provider claimed they could do the job (and whoever they outsourced the job to in some cases). If you don't sign whatever HIPAA agreement(s) your provider puts in front of you, chances are they can't treat you, so what choice do you really have?

Though El Salvador is no stranger to having popular governments overthrown by corporate interests.

Mixed-use streets and a mis-guided desire to build urban and suburban areas on grids of wide straight roads are the root cause of the problem. Fast cars are just a symptom.

In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit.

Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).

This depends somewhat on the number of lanes and the situation. In California it is possible that you could be ticketed for impeding the flow of traffic, although most officers are unlikely to pull you over for this as long as you get out of the lane when they come up behind you (unless you were causing a serious problem).

One of the reasons they would prefer to flush you out of the lane rather than pull you over and give you a ticket is that the very action of pulling you over (possibly across all lanes of traffic) and sitting on the side of the road while ticketing you causes other drivers to slow down (sometimes erratically) and increases the likelihood of a collision.

The CalTrans manual for setting speed limits includes some references for many of the issues this article is discussing: http://www.dot.ca.gov/trafficops/camutcd/docs/california-man...

If you're developing on Apple hardware in Xcode, you have a number of simulators available in the development environment to test/optimize most of that. I'm sure someone will come up with plenty of reasons that this isn't good enough for some developers, but it's not something I ran into when I was developing for iOS.

You hire junior developers for those roles because you can pay them less and find the people who work well in your environment, get rid of the ones who don't, and leave the rest to decide for themselves whether they can find something they like about the entry-level work (and somehow continue to live on that wage) or go somewhere else once they have more experience on their resume.

I've been through so many long cycles of trying to find someone to fill a developer role where it would have been so much simpler if we could have started with someone who understood the environment and work load up front, rather than finding people who went back to the job search 3 or 4 weeks into it because it wasn't working out (but they were usually smart enough to get another job offer before they quit). I would almost prefer to take someone with little or no programming experience who works in my office with a desire to learn and a strong work ethic and give them the programming job, hire 2 or 3 more people to answer phones on a help desk, and save everyone the pain of reading resumes and interviewing for a developer who ends up negotiating a higher salary, socializing at the help desk from 8 to noon, managing their social media empire from 1 to 5, and either quitting or (somehow) getting fired after a few months so we can start all over again.

Yes, I have to train someone, perhaps even more than I would have to train someone who comes on board with some applicable experience, but the alphabet soup that goes out on my job postings isn't easy to replicate on resumes, and doesn't guarantee that I won't need to review the material with them anyway.

Other than the appearance, a great deal of the design goes into cooling and noise reduction. Many Macs can do quite a bit without spinning up a fan, and the more powerful machines usually have more complicated mechanisms to make this possible.

Yes, it's easier to do all of this with a bigger footprint, but Apple has a hard time pleasing people with the Mac Pro regardless of which direction they go, and at this point I don't think they would win over many fans by pushing out a standard tower.

Although 1 person driving another person from point A to point B reduces the number of single-occupancy vehicle trips, it doesn't necessarily reduce congestion. It could even increase congestion because all of those "private shuttles" are putting in so many miles on the roads when people would otherwise take higher-occupancy options or drive themselves (fewer miles, but that dreaded single-occupancy vehicle trip count goes up).

More importantly, at the backbone level, the phone system has been run through the same type of SONET fiber optic networks as the internet for the last couple of decades, at least. In most cases the only reasons the two were isolated from one another were: - phone traffic was considered higher priority if an outage occurred (it used to be, but probably not any longer) - regulations on the internet (especially as pertains to giving access to ISPs, such as the cable companies) giving the phone companies incentive to segregate the two as much as possible

Another point regarding the consolidation of the two industries comes in the form of most of the cable companies now delivering home phone service through the internet.

The national infrastructure for the internet and POTS is the same, and has been since the mid-1990s, if not always. Internet PoP sites and telephone PoP sites in the U.S. are housed in the same building, usually in the same rack. The fiber was run in separate trays and they used slightly different equipment for each (OC-48 vs. OC-192 in the mid-1990s), but at least from that point on the primary difference between POTS and internet has been that POTS usually runs through a slightly lower-bandwidth version of the same system. The same people built, maintained, and upgraded the cables and equipment on the backbone, whether it was POTS or internet. It's still run primarily by Level 3 (which swallowed up most of the companies that built it, or the infrastructure and employees that survived or spun out of those companies) and AT&T, and many of the fiber runs across the country are still marked with MCI's logo.

I don't think the FCC is the best place to fix the problems with the internet, but I don't see the "repeal and don't fix" method that seems to be so popular with the Republicans lately as a better way to deal with it.

SOPA/PIPA was not as clearly Republican vs. Democrat as you make it out to be, either. Whenever a law is dressed up as IP protections and backed by the entertainment industry, you will probably see a lot of support from CA's representatives, which means a lot of Democrats. However, there were a lot of people from both sides supporting (and eventually opposing) those bills. SOPA was introduced by a Republican, and 8 of its 12 sponsors were Republicans.

Of course, since I live in California, both of "my" senators are Democrats, one of which has been in office since I started high school (24 years ago); it would have been both if the younger of the two (Boxer) hadn't retired.

Somehow, "my" representative is a Republican, though I still think most of the people in this district don't realize that he replaced his father (who held the office from 1981-2009). Maybe the DoJ investigation into his use of campaign finances for personal expenses will open some eyes, but it seems more likely that, if he is removed from office, whoever gets on the ballot with the R next to their name will get the seat (or maybe we'll get multiple people with an R next to their name, like most of the local races).

PSR-2: http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/

Of course, these have little to do with core PHP, but PSR-1, PSR-0/4, and large portions of PSR-2 have been widely adopted within the PHP development community. The most-debated portion of PSR-2 is, of course, the use of 4 spaces for indentation (no tabs).

PSR-12 aims to bring the guidelines up to date with the latest features in PHP 7, but I've mostly lost track of things in PHP-land since moving to a new job and burying myself in XSL (and occasionally C#).

but there are 10 other circuits on an equal footing and dissenting opinion even within the court, so, while it is a federal matter and could be applicable throughout the country, you probably don't want to be the person who has to go to the Supreme Court to prove it.

While circuits disagree, their rulings still hold weight outside of their district or circuit. A case comes to them because it is federal in nature or because there was a reason to remove the case from a state court. By the very nature of a federal court their cases have national weight, and they are not usually supposed to rule on matters of state or local law unless the issue at hand is a law which violates federal protections.

One of the important points in almost every part of this particular ruling is that the court denied or upheld claims almost entirely based on whether there was a reasonable belief that the officers should have known they were violating the law and/or his rights, and in most cases they chose to protect the officers even when making broad statements about the right to film officers. The dissenting opinion is also important (as it sometimes is in Supreme Court rulings as well) in showing that there are other ways the law can be interpreted, and even within this particular district (or on appeal to a higher court) you may not have the same result just because you think you're in the same situation.

American adults read so little that this attitude only comes from a minority of the minority. For the most part, people see it as a waste of time because they may only read 1-4 books a year, so they might feel those books should have some meaningful purpose in their lives (or they only read a book because it is supposed to be great or have some use they can apply to their lives).

Read more, worry less about what others think. I read an average of a book a week (and I'm a slow reader), and most people find that to be argument enough to read whatever I want.

It's not necessarily that the FSF spends a lot of resources on this page, but that Stallman appears to spend a lot of his time and resources on the issues that are repeated throughout this page (or the whole "Philosophy" section of their website). In some ways, it's good to have someone like Stallman around to remind us that there is another way to look at some of these things, and to push the political debate.

One of the biggest issues in my mind is that the GNU camp likes to expropriate words with established meanings, then attempt to categorize everyone else's use of the words as inappropriate. However, that is only a part of the in-fighting which tends to occur between the "free" and "open source" software movements and helps to marginalize them in the eyes of the layman.