I never understand why USAians refer to Benedict Arnold as a "traitor". It's a really stupid word to bandy about in a civil war. The country was governed by Britain. Everyone who fought against the government was, by definition, a traitor. Using a word with such a definite negative connotation in such a complex environment is either disingenuous or obtuse.
For similar reasons, using the word "traitor" is also stupid in the case of Snowden. Against whom / what was he a traitor? - The government? A branch of the government? The constitution? The people?
I wouldn't call Snowden a traitor, but I think the term is perfectly apt for Benedict Arnold. He was a general in one army who defected to the opposing army. That's pretty much the definition of traitor. That doesn't deny your point that all the rebelling colonials were traitors to the British.
I was protesting then, too. They didn't listen. I'm still protesting, but now a lot more people are aware of what's going on.
And, I'd like to point out: Not everything the NSA has been doing is legal, even according to the terrifyingly broad laws put in place during the panic after 9/11.
If you're going to wave around the "T" word...the traitors are in our government. They're the ones who would give up liberty for the illusion of safety. Also, Benedict Arnold is a silly comparison to make; read your history a bit more closely and think it through. Snowden may not be a hero in your eyes; I disagree, but I can't tell you how to feel about it. But, to compare him to Arnold doesn't even make sense.
I can completely understand your position if you are an American. And I'm sure you can understand us foreigners trying to show our appreciation for a man who uncovered this extensive evil intrusion into our lives.
Well, this is an interesting issue. I tend to stick to the viewpoint that if a disgusting person does something worthwhile, and gets praised for it, that praise is earned. A good deed doesn't become a bad deed just because it's done by a bad person.
Bottom line, he's a traitor. Beyond that, most of the laws that helped start this were set into effect years ago. Where were the people crying then?
Most people complain about having their privacy taken away when using free online services. All I see are a bunch of ignorant loud mouths who got angry too late.
It's arguably true that he betrayed the NSA to the people. The big questions here are: Why is the NSA at odds with the American people; and who, ultimately, deserves your loyalty?
If the government doesn't represent the people anymore, does it still deserve the loyalty of the people? A lot of people would say no.
Are you serious? You can question everything you want as an ordinary citizen. The moment you sign a contract, specially for the military, you agree to keep your word.
So, right, how dare the government hold someone to their word?
You're basically advocating lying and not honoring your promises.
BTW - I basically make a living honoring promises and contracts, otherwise we wouldn't have customers ;)
> You're basically advocating lying and not honoring your promises.
Yes, obviously. There are situations where you ought to lie. The typical example: "Are there any Jews in your basement?"
Decency is more than keeping to the words, sometimes it even requires you break them to keep the spirit of promise. We generally give promises contingent on implied good behaviour from the other parties. When others break their promises the stack built on that mutual honour collapses.
And I'm fine living in the world where that's the way people treat promises, I massively prefer it to the world where people can be tricked into promising something and then have to keep to it when it turns out to be abhorrent.
Yes, if you make two promises, and it later turns out that they were mutually exclusive, I advocate following the laws of physics and breaking one of them.
If you think he chose to break the wrong one, then that might be a valid point, but you seem to be implying that if you were in that position you'd keep both o_O
How far does this go for you? If, let's say, you witness wrongdoing performed by your employer, would you go along because, well, you promised to do a good job when you interviewed?
Well, the moment you become part of the state (government), you agree to FOLLOW the constitution. The question here is not who broke "promises", but who acted against the constitution.
How does him being a traitor or not affect whether or not his actions influenced the world? The vote isn't for nicest person in world or person I'd most like to have a beer with.
re: free services, a) they massively monitor and soak up data from the internet backbone. b) in addition to going through the ludicrous "proper channels" (secret courts and letters - arguably not compatible with democracy) they forcibly break in to said services to get more data - if you think they don't do this for paid and supposedly secure services you're delusional. But you don't. You just don't care.
re: getting angry too late.
Yes that is typically how it works. Not every person can be fully informed on every complex issue. At some point however a line was crossed on this issue and it became part of the public consciousness. To say these people don't deserve their privacy because they were too late to the party is disingenuous, unrealistic and frankly a really disturbing approach to take.
"You don't deserve your health because you weren't protesting when they _started_ to secretly dump chemicals in the waters - oh now that it's common knowlege you're pissed off? You got angry too late, you ignorant loudmouth."
re: traitor.
He's a traitor to the U.S. military. Treason is not a global binary thing. You can be a traitor to one person and a hero to another. In this case he has done far more good than harm to most people on this planet. You are at once short-sighted and narrow-minded for refusing to look beyond this fact.
I honestly cannot tell if you are trolling, but I will bite.
Free online services do not have a monopoly on force. The government does. My choice to use Google means that they will know more about me, but the Google SWAT team cannot kick down my door in the middle of the night and drag me to a black site for an indeterminate length of time because I said something that Larry Page did not like.
Go anywhere outside of the US and Europe and they would laugh at you. Our culture (hispanic) takes it as a sign of weakness and petty complaints. Most people are too worried trying to feed themselves or their families to even think about being depressed. Furthermore, with the little money they have they tend to go to doctors for diseases that directly affect their bodies or ability to earn.
We came across this issue as well, we'd been wasting too much time setting up Postgres. RDS seemed liked a good choice, except that MySQL is just that much worse than Postgres.
We had just used things like concurrent indexes.
We ended up going with Heroku's hosted Postgres solution.
It costs the exact same we were spending w/ two High CPU instances w/ provisioned IOPS volumes.
Now we get fully managed, same price, and all the features of Postgres.
We still host our full application on AWS, the only thing is that we have a managed database. While Postgres makes it easy to setup replication and what not, AWS hardware just sucks. It takes time to properly tune it.
Seems stupid and pretentious. Furthermore, the market is so hot that I can reach whoever is employing directly.
Convincing them to pay more because they don't have to spend anything on recruiters or silly agents.
No reason someone else should make money for me finding a job.
First, an office less world is a dream right now. If you plan to be hyper-competitive, there's no substitution to 'water-cooler' talk. Technology is nowhere near being able to reproduce that.
Second, why would they put the picture of a communist leader who used to shoot defectors and kill artists? Why is he any sort of hero?
At this point, the Che portrait is sort of the reverse story of the swastika. The swastika started out as a symbol of something good and got turned into a symbol of something monstrous; Che started out as something monstrous and got turned into a symbol of something good. That good being, I suppose, a consumerist, photogenic representation of rejecting consumerism.
Back in high school, kids would wear that image. One day while helping my friend at his family's coffee shop, his coffee supplier - who was making a delivery - told us about how Che's army butchered his entire family aside from him and his brother. I've never looked at that image the same.
I don't know that it's a really great idea to throw Che's image into a page related to your product, just because of how polarizing a figure he is, but I'm pretty sure it's only there as a casual reference to "the revolution isn't dead, by any means," and doesn't really have anything to do with glorifying Che or otherwise calling him a "hero."
I could think of far more deplorable historical figures someone could stick a picture up of other than Che.
While I don't necessarily agree with his ideals, I can respect certain aspects of his persona and drive.
Super sweet, good luck. I personally got started in High School and would have loved more advanced classes.
The issue was that they bundled people together into the same computer class. We used to have people who didn't even know how to turn on a computer, much less make a Pascal game.
Absolutely agree, and I personally use this as a potential red flag for new people we hire.
Legacy systems have gone through so many fixes and shifts that it's almost impossible to recreate them without deep understanding of the business demands it meets.
The business part, I would say, is critical to being able to maintain (or re-write) a project.
Not to be mean, but the author looks really young.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I find it really hard to take advice from such young people. My personal take is that they're bypassing a lot of the experience it takes to make a well rounded business person.
I personally feel like a douche trying to give advice to other people, particularly people older than me.
* Disclaimer - I wrote the post
Thanks for suggesting I look young :)
I have a hard time taking advice from young people too. Well ... until Brian Wong, schooled me during a tech conference we were both panelists for.
A lot of super smart valley entrepreneurs "bypass" what it takes to be a well rounded business person ... I guess. But I doubt that has anything to do with age, and more to do with the current frothy acquisition and funding environment.
Thinking about it, I'm sure they can be just as good. Regardless of age. I would guess it's like anything else. Constant exposure and practicing will breed excellence. I would just be scared of all the mistakes they haven't made yet.
It's funny you mention Brian Wong, his company is a competitor of the company i work for. He's a smart guy, from what i can tell, but he would actually be one of the examples i'd use to cite lack of experience.
In software development, lack of experience can be a really big issue. For example, with lack of experience you may choose core piece of technology based on hype. coughmongodb and kiipcough
But, I digress, thanks for the article. Learned a bit about the Canadian start up eco-system.
"In software development, lack of experience can be a really big issue" can you explain this one to me? I hope that someone who calls themselves a senior developer with 20 years experience will know a lot about different technologies. On the other hand if you are a co-founder who needs to code, design, network and do many many other things, software development has nothing to do with it. Your demo will not be using the right technologies.
Companies grow and new developers get hired. Code gets re-written and technologies you use, will be changed.
There's a lot to be said 20~something entrepreneurs that don't know life before there was internet. Yes ... they're romanticized in tech blogs, and the majority of successful entrepreneurs are > 30 ... but when a young smart entrepreneur like Brian who doesn't know what the world looked like before the internet speaks ... I listen.
BTW, just voted for Miley. She definitely made my year.