Tactic

Facebook has also recently started to require a Facebook account to use Oculus VR. It appears they are starting to crack down on the services they have acquired. I assume this more hardline approach of "give us your data or get out" will continue with any other current or future services created or purchased.

Counter-point; that was a one-way street. Data was potentially fed from Oculus to Facebook. Now, what you do on Facebook can impact your Oculus use. Get banned on Facebook and lose access to your purchased software on Oculus effectively making your device useless.

So now it is worse.

You can factory reset it.

My preference would be a flag that you can set per connection.

NULL = Undefined or No Data. Whereas a blank field can, in and of itself, be data. It may indicated something is intentionally left blank.

But for those times where you want to consider them the same, it would be nice to have a setting.

(Note that I admit the possibility that this may exist already, like most my great ideas.)

At larger companies they absolutely do this. And the digital video is stored with an overlay of what is ringing up with it's price as the cashier scans it. So it is easy to see if they are not scanning items for a partner or manually entering the wrong barcode.

Entirely feasible. Also reasonable for you to pay me for the service as it is taking my development efforts to meet your business model. The advantage to you is you have a defined interface that I won't prevent.

The issue here for some, if not many, is a matter of scale. It is one thing if an end-user, whom I am trying to service, comes to my site and gets my publicly available data. Maybe I monetize with ads, maybe not. It doesn't matter, that is the audience I am trying to service, regardless of size.

But when you scrape it my load goes up dramatically. A load I have to pay for.

It is analogous to the privacy debates going on with one said saying "hey, don't track everywhere I go and tag me with facial recognition" and the other side saying "hey, you are in public and people can see you." The issue is not complete privacy, but one of scale. And of intent.

I believe society is soon going to have to come to grips with the scale of things and legislate what are acceptable scales of action as it seems to be becoming a large issue in a growing number are areas.

While stated in what I interpret is a joking way, it is a very real concern. As the average life expectancy increases we either have to plan for a longer period of non-productivity (in the private sector) or work longer. A blend of the two seems to be what is occurring, but over my life time I have seen my expected retirement age continue to push slightly further away.

It depends upon how one defines success. If you mean Bill Gates or The Beatles level success, I will agree that luck plays an integral role.

If you just mean a successful career that takes care of your needs and much of your wants, provides for a comfortable life and a family, I would argue motivation, dedication and skill play far larger roles.

In fact I would say extreme success requires some extreme good luck, whereas a more "standard" success requires good luck less and is more about not having bad luck to counter your abilities.

Assuming that is a legitimate question: No. That data resides in many places... with the loan servicers, the NSLDS, the Guarantors... spread in locations around the country.

To summarize: write a spec for the crime, that way when you get to development it is consistent and focused.

This is true until the company changes the bug-tacking and project-management software without properly porting over everything because they use different identifiers.

I tend to put a link to the external system with a very brief explanation, allowing someone to quickly assess the what and why with the ability to dig elsewhere for more detail.

Somewhere along the line Google stopped being about finding a website and instead is about answering a question with the answer sometimes being a website.

One could argue they have always been an answer engine and they are just getting more direct and precise.

It depends on the group. Some deal with Malware. Most it really is just the draw of the community, the recognition and the fun. I say this from having (formerly) been on the inside.

Not really surprising when you look at how much non-monetary development goes into the open source community.