Hmm, I use perks as a significant way to judge a company, but more isn't necessarily better. You must always ask what? why?

Do the perks fit with the industry and intentions of the company? Are the perks well thought out and canceled when they are a detriment to the company and/or employees?

I've always worked for companies with unlimited coffee and some group outings. I would be largely for companies with unlimited fruit juices, functional athletics centers, well thought out awarded perks, etc.

Yet, I am very skeptical of companies with free soda. For example, Netscape was very short sighted and ended up with similar (and perhaps newly diabetic) employees. I love some of their results, but as a company I am glad they went and I wish they went earlier, certainly before their server products were considered an asset..

Similarly, I am not swayed by lots of stock options (is there a reason they are so frivolous with them? Is this place so miserable that vesting periods are all that can keep me here?) But I expect some together with a heartfelt apology for not giving me more from a manager who seriously tried.

Perks should be the food for conversation on the topic of compensation. (Or some such HR fueled poetic nonsense.)

The default installs of shells and window managers are likely to reveal whether the command has either ever or recently been run.. Disabling the defaults is also "suspicious".

I don't think you can fix a social problem with a technical fix. Innocent until proven guilty (of a crime with a victim please!) has to apply to employment law and clearances. Otherwise we are building a group of criminals who can honestly be believed when they say they are willing to violate the constitution to protect executive branch interests.

The trouble with the Snowden case is that the NSA now has more power to filter its employees/contracts in order to further violate the terms of the agreement.

Even drastic action would not fix it. Impeach the entire chain up the executive branch and the next one will be more secretive and let Hoover shine as the simple misunderstood Prom Queen he wanted to be.

I just hope Obama's actions will ruin him and this nonsense about replacing the President with an outsider. If that suddenly gets you an honest system instead of a cynical President, then kissing the frog must work too.

If BackTrack were outlawed as a munition, it would spread more, briefly. http://www.backtrack-linux.org/ Download it now, whether or not you need it, because it adds noise.

> Download it now, whether or not you need it, because it adds noise.

Why would I download a security specific image?

If you want to be as secure as possible, download the smallest possible system that can bootstrap the compiler then build out from source, retaining all source and looking for variances when you recompile.

Personally, I don't much care. I am not looking for a technical solution. I am looking for a social upheavel in the form of citizens visibly exercising rights: http://www.aeinstein.org/ to finally end the cold war mentality in the US government.

That is how the legal system works, so do you seriously plan to arrest the NSA?

But the topic here is about maintaining a secure system. You must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that every element is either secure or allowed to be owned by your antagonist. Technically no one should have ever trusted something that can not be observed (and it sounds like the people responsible didn't.)

If you chose to trust intel for no good reason, then you must now untrust them given that there is a reason. As a company they would be idiots to introduce such a thing. But if every US company can clearly be threatened with even worse outcomes into going against its own market interests then such an argument does not apply.

As a side note, I do think there was already plenty of evidence that the US was actively forcing companies to do the NSA's bidding. The encryption export laws were largely designed to keep everyone who makes encryption products perpetually afraid of losing all their right to export anything mostly by "governmental discretion" on handling the companies inevitable 'incidents' of support talking to the wrong person about how RSA worked.

Perhaps Germany could create a program of secret renditions to fetch them...

If people believe that your state is actively using whatever data it can obtain for economic reasons (for example to give foreign trade secrets to local companies,) then clearly no foreign company should hire anyone from your country, use your country as a web platform or use any operating system or software developed by your nationals.

If everyone moves to local services and infrastructure, that could be beneficial to the export/import situation of many medium size countries. But the US would not benefit. It is heavily invested in exporting these products.

Interesting to think about, but the publicly searchable web seems like the only meaningful number to me.

Ok, there may be a whole bunch of social media in some language each accessible to small groups of facebook users. Does that help the average speaker of that language find a manual, recipe, learn a programming language, etc?

Groups brokering exploits is definitely scary stuff. But the non-privatized government researchers have existed long before them and are better at keeping silent and therefore largely perpetual exploits.

Under it all, the current model remains a by obscurity model, where anyone with orders of more magnitude of resources can certainly do enough reverse engineering to find the weak links and break in without planting backdoors.

Vendors reaching the point where they can offer bounties without contemplating bankruptcy implies considerably more resources are going into secure by design software and will continue to flow if they plan to remain solvent and unembarrassed (equally emabarassed?)

I've been playing with a chromebook and I am delighted to see frivolous and even fairly significant features were dropped to develop a secure boot model with a reasonable opt out. I'm sure it will still be broken, but 5-10 years ago it would have been trivially breakable to meet some last minute corporate request for tftp booting, marketing demo, or what have you..

Similar to the drug market, you can not drop the open market and expect everything to stop. Instead you must capture as many resources as you can and direct them to the right goal. I would hope that goal is secure kernels that expand out towards today's features, since the opposite clearly does not work with the resources at hand.

The US town I last worked in was not at all happy about the traffic externalities of office space. Their attempt to remedy it were complex and entailed a lot of overhead for everyone. Surveys, building restrictions, reimbursement plans, etc.

A tax system could simply charge employers based on the commutes of all employees and offer free to board public transit. Then it could stop allowing commute expense to be deducted in the covered areas..

I find tolls to be a little backward since virtually everyone traveling during the max capacity times can deduct them, while leasure travelers can not.

Why should employers be responsible for the transit habits of their employees? Does this not also increase the cost of employment, thereby decreasing the employee's income?

From what I can see, this would be a hidden tax on the employee, which violates the principle that democracy requires maximum possible transparency.

> Why should employers be responsible for the transit habits of their employees?

Because an employer is responsible for the transit habits of an employee which determines the capacity and cost of major arteries.

We have payed for these roads at the federal level first for the defense and now to allow the DOT to bully everyone. Transparent, eh?

In a world where we could measure everything for free we would charge employees directly for the externalities of their commute (e.g. the road space they consume). Since this is not practical we make the best approximations we can.

Xing is still very popular among German speakers, though linked in has been making quick progress.

A professional looking portrait photo is essential here in Switzerland, and age based discrimination is legal? and the norm, so not disclosing your age may waste everyone's time.

Here they also send around a cover letter and a bunch of documents from past employers, but they don't seem to expect that from foreigners.

I enjoy both javascript and scala.

For work and anything I would want to put on a web site it is more practical to write javascript and when I've had time for my own projects I've enjoyed scala.

For me this is a great direction. The idea that I'd suddenly replace my javascript is silly. But being able to pull in things I'm familiar with from both into the same prototype (and at the same layer) of something and debug it all in the debugger I'm most familiar with (and with correct code line references!) is awesome.

Similarly, for someone who is learning scala and doesn't have/want java+IDE experience, this could lead to learning scala as a language with much less overhead and/or while learning a more useful combination of debugger and editor.

I think the overly negative comments come from those who view javascript as the "problem" that every new way to integrate languages with it must have been designed to tackle. Since every language has trade-offs, there is always ample criticism available from that vantage point...