If you want to defend against hijackings, the problem you're trying to solve is one that programmers know well: the buffer overflow attack.
In a buffer overflow attack, someone gives a program much more data than it was expecting. The data is too long for the memory allocated for it and overflows into the memory occupied by the program itself. Suddenly the computer is running the attacker's code.
In a hijacking, the same thing happens to a plane. A plane has two separate spaces, one for the people carried on it, and one for the people who control it. A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin. What was cargo is now in control. By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs.
And that is what has gone wrong with democracy -- the ability to buy power with money. So long as that is possible, democracy will always have a half-life.
You're the one claiming there's a huge body of research disproving his claims. Your link upthread points to stuff that supports his argument and other stuff that counts as weak evidence against. Nowhere is there anything remotely like disproof. You can also find evidence (e.g. in http://cmdept.unl.edu/drb/Reading/overtime2.htm from the link above) that how you structure your work and rest periods can improve your production. After all, somebody doing office work 60 hours a week with some regular exercise is probably going to outperform somebody like me, who's fat and doesn't exercise. I certainly outperform myself on days that I walk to the office instead of driving. There's clearly some variance involved in individual employees' age, health, height, diet, and attitude, so it should be obvious that you can't just talk about averages over the construction industry and apply them to programming, and to all programmers, with the degree of certainty that you hold.
> All sovereign states--be they allies or rogues--have a legitimate claim to and expectation of privacy where their internal dealings are concerned.
They're governments. They don't have any rights and as local monopolists of violence certainly don't have any expectation of laxity in others' vigilance.
There really aren't that many laws governing how nation-states should behave towards one another; and there certainly isn't any notion of rights to fall back on. The international arena is effectively a lawless "wild west" world, and it shows; particularly in the attitude and demeanour of those who have been exposed to its' vicissitudes for any significant length of time.
This is crazy. Hire engineers that can talk to non-technical people, but then have one of these engineers interview non-technical people to make sure that non-technical people can talk to engineers? But the engineer can already talk to non-technical people, so that wouldn't work!
It would be a good idea to make the phone screen more rigorous. Use some etherpad clone-du-jour and have them write code in the phone screen. This way you'll filter out the bozos more efficiently.
You shouldn't expect somebody hired for an entry-level Java position to even know Java. I mean, at least if you're trying to hire somebody who'd be good, they'll have experience in other languages, and the cost of them catching up on Java is miniscule compared to the cost of them catching up with your codebase, with being a professional programmer in general, and it's certainly less than the cost of searching for somebody who's not quite as smart and talented but has better Java-specific knowledge. If you find somebody who has weak knowledge in _everything_, they might still be okay, but if you find somebody who has fairly good knowledge of other aspects of programming (be it another language, or data structures, or HTML or web programming or some protocols and such) then it's a sign that they're not dumb and are worth considering. You should be comfortable simulating how quickly they'd pick up Java when starting.
Edit: Of course, there _are_ a lot of fresh graduates who are scrubs that can't code, signed up for the video games or the money, and thought they'd just focus on grades and they just suck in general. People with general Java background knowledge who just don't know that Java has exceptions are one thing, people who mess up the exception-throwing syntax or forget about checked exceptions are another. What kind of person are they -- did they go to film school or did they go to "films"? People who went to film school will know what their professors told them to know, people who went to films might not have looked at Java specifically but will have a bunch of other knowledge about programming that they looked at outside of class.
I would expect a product named Facemail to be something created by Facebook either less than or as much as I would expect a product named Facetime to be something created by Facebook.
When we start making these decisions more heavily on the subjectivity of users more than objectivity (e.g. the colors would be completely different, and if they aren't then a trademark infringement could be filed at that time), then we're just giving the free market to large corporations.
The more popular a brand is, the more likely more people are to associate related names/colors/symbols to that brand. Trademark law simply does not exist for cases like this. It exists to prevent genuine outright infringement.
I don't disagree that a well known mark should get more protection because it is well known--otherwise people could just trademark every word in the dictionary and enforce it with equal weight as Google.
But OP wasn't using Facebook, he wasn't using Facebok, he wasn't using Facbook, he wasn't pretending to be Facebook, we wasn't competing with facebook, he wasn't using the colors, the image, or anything related to the brand.
No, he was punished (i.e. the government used force against him to hider his free market ability) for using a name that started with Face. That's simply not a threshold that we, as a society, should accept as protected--no matter the popularity of the brand, no matter the laws a group of 435 people influenced heavily by corporations have managed to actually pass.
Besides that, the ruling is by it's very nature a subjective decision. I disagree with their subjective decision.
So did a third of other random people surveyed. You would not be in the majority apparently, and after seeing a logo or web page you would hopefully be able to figure out it is not created by Facebook.
I think the question is whether you find yourself confused by the fact that Apple makes FaceTime while Facebook makes Facebook (and Think makes FaceCash).
At some point, and this is why the Star Trek / Star Wars example matters, consumers realize that the prefix is generic within the scope of a given market. Telecommunications and faces overlap a lot these days.
Personally I would think that FaceTime and FaceCash were made by Facebook Inc. (As I had actually never heard of either of those).
I also thought that Star Trek and Star Wars were related or the same thing for most of my childhood. I didn't want Star Wars because I'd seen Star Trek on TV and not liked it (I was young).
It's just something people do (or at least I do). I think it's maddness to prevent the use of names starting with "Face" because of this confusion. I thought that iPlayer was apple related like iTunes for a long time. It's confusing yes but I don't feel you should be able to prevent someone using a similar sounding name.
In a buffer overflow attack, someone gives a program much more data than it was expecting. The data is too long for the memory allocated for it and overflows into the memory occupied by the program itself. Suddenly the computer is running the attacker's code.
In a hijacking, the same thing happens to a plane. A plane has two separate spaces, one for the people carried on it, and one for the people who control it. A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin. What was cargo is now in control. By promoting themselves from data to code, hijackers on September 11th promoted box-cutters into 400,000 lb. incendiary bombs.