A Corporate Republic (from Civilization: Call to Power, one of the government types available in the Genetic Age).

"The Imperial Trading Companies such as the various East India Companies should possibly be considered corporate states, being semi-sovereign with the power to wage war and establish colonies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_republic

Instead of $1/day, do $365/year to limit transaction fees.

You could even offer to let them withdraw the dividend each month as an allowance or let it reinvest.

Yes, practically speaking that'd make more sense, but you could still frame it as a dollar a day for a child.

I was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.

That's exactly it. The stand-up meeting was created because typical status meetings were a waste of time. Much was said, but most people were bored out of their minds.

The solution was to get everybody together to have a quick, real conversation about the upcoming day's work. And to keep it quick and dynamic, everybody had to literally stand up. Done right, this is great.

Merely renaming a lame status meeting to a stand-up meeting doesn't fix the problem. If people find so little value in doing an on-line stand-up that you need a machine to force them to do it, that's a sign that nobody sees it as worthwhile.

It could be worse: PayPal and their 3.1 MB Child_Snowflakes_8_V2.mp4

At least if you have T-Mobile it will download nice and slowly.

Not really. One could be deaf or blind from birth, yet fully intelligent. It's more a matter of getting sensory from the world into the brain. That sensory may be visual, auditory, touch, etc. The brain is very plastic in this manner.

The processing of that non-visual input will still be performed by the visual cortex.

It certainly won't be in sighted individuals, and I doubt it can be adapted as you suggest in blind people. The visual cortex is quite specialized, and performs quite low-level image processing, e.g. detection of edges and corners, as well as movement. It does not do any object recognition. That's done elsewhere. For example, the fusiform gyrus is involved in facial recognition.

A good introduction to how the visual cortex works can be found in Eye, Brain, And Vision: http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/book/bcontex.htm

For example echolocation (in humans, not bats) is done in visual cortex[1]. Visual cortex shows activity during dreams and imagination. Blind people do use their visual cortex.

[1] Sorry, don't have a cite, but there are a lot of results on Google talking about it: https://archive.is/iDE27

This doesn't surprise me. They are using their visual cortex to process sensory data (auditory images) which substitute for sight.

It seems a lot of consultancies follow this pattern:

    1. Hate permanent job.
    2. Start consultancy.
    3. Spend half the day finding work/collecting bills; other half programming.
    4. Eventually find reliable client with long-term project always pays on time.
    5. Cancels all other contracts to focus on reliable client.
    6. Go to step 1.

The way to break free from this is to scale the consultancy by hiring developers and profiting on overhead. This was not mentioned in the post, but if you neglect the scale factor, it will be very difficult to break past a typical employee salary. There are only so many hours in the day. The alternative is to sell a product.

I think your post is a little misleading in that #1 implies working for BigCo on the first read-through, but then working for yourself on your own business stuck with a single major client on the second read-through.

Perhaps some people will find this equivalent, should both stakeholders (BigCo/single demanding client) be equally unpleasant, but I for one still see a lot of value in having full control over my life and my time.

Of course, then you aren't writing code, you are building a business and doing sales and recruiting. Which is fine, if that is what you want, but most folks who are technical probably want to focus on technical services.

Both trying to charge more than typical employee salary as a solo consultant and scaling a consultancy business have their own difficulties.

Personally I’d find it more difficult to try to scale up my consultancy business rather than just convince the client that I provide results that are worth more than what they’d normally pay their own people to try to provide.

In reality though, I'd like to know what the author did for health insurance when he quit his job weeks/months after having a baby. Medical risk is very high during this period.. looks like he is based in Canada (not US), so I guess that answers it.

Yes, in some countries the idea that if you don't have a job or are low income that your children's health should suffer is considered pretty inhuman.

I'm eternally bemused that the US considers itself entrepreneurial and pro-business when it doesn't get this.

Then again, if your cost of entry is much lower and more people can bootstrap from personal savings, they're all that much less likely to need investors just to stay alive, or to put up with demands for unicorn growth.

Even if you quit your job in the US, you're entitled to COBRA coverage for 18 months if your employer had more than 20 employees.

It allows you to continue the health plan you had at your employer, provided you cover the entirety of the cost. With Obamacare, COBRA is not necessarily cheaper now, but it was in the past.

When I left my previous job, I elected COBRA coverage because HSAs weren't available on healthcare.gov. I pay $280 for an HSA plan with a maximum deductible of $6k, dental, and vision in Texas.

It's not cheap, but it's not completely unaffordable either.

One of the features of KeePass is that you never see or type an actual password. You simply hit CTRL-C to copy the pw to memory and paste into the form. This is a guard against key loggers and visual snooping.

Better: Auto-Type. That way it's never even in the clipboard.

What does this mean: "extraction of KeePass 2.x password database information from memory"?

When is KeePass data held in memory? When the program is simply running or only when you copy a password to the clipboard?

KeePass shows accounts in a ListView type of control and in a dialog, both of which probably store the data in memory. I'm just wondering if this tool can snatch accounts just from simply having KeePass running, in which case this could be bad for malware/spyware. Picture a malware program running, waits for KeePass to show up in the process list, grabs all your accounts and sends them to a remote site. Yikes.

I've been on two interviews recently, and both saw experience in .NET as a negative. I found myself having to down-play experience in .NET in both cases, in order to guide the discussion toward more applicable skills for the role. Even when you may be a polyglot programmer, interviewers tend to label you as .NET or Microsoft. Which, has apparently become a bad thing. Unless you're interviewing with a Fortune-100 company, in which case, .NET is still somewhat popular.

I would think twice about joining an organization that thinks negatively of your former experience in a different stack. Sure, they may not be relevant to the job at hand, but good programmers will write good code in whatever stack they have to work in.

It would probably be pretty crappy to work under technical leadership with that kind of mind set anyway.