When the state spams their citizens, what shall we expect from criminals?

I just received offline spam from Fedict in the form of a letter without any postage marks and with the text on the envelope stating:

"An important message from the government".

The letter contained an invitation to buy a bundle of a PC with 12 months of free internet access for 422 EUR.

Update: Apparently, the same letter was distributed (not sent by post, but carried to the postbox by a spam delivery company) to a big share if not all belgian residents.

Квота на евреев в американских университетах

Читаю книжку Фейнмана What Do You Care What Other People Think? Он там упоминает, что не смог поступить в Колумбийский университет из-за квоты на евреев. Интересно, как там сейчас с дискриминацией евреев.

There is still room for standards in IT

Look at the summary of ISO activities.

Being one of the youngest, JTC1 it is by far the most prolific ISO committee that spit over a total of 2268 standards for Information Technology, leaving far behind the TC34 with 749 standards for Food Products and TC22 with 715 standards for Road Vehicles.

And as if this was not enough, JTC1 has 620 standards in the pipe, waiting to be published.

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How to force Drupal users into answering a poll

Here, the poll is hardcoded at node/38566 and the patch applies to index.php in the root of Drupal installation.

Tested on Drupal 6.14, but shall work on many other versions as well.

--- index-original.php      2007-12-26 09:46:48.000000000 +0100
+++ index.php   2009-11-23 16:12:11.000000000 +0100
@@ -33,6 +33,12 @@
 }
 elseif (isset($return)) {
   // Print any value (including an empty string) except NULL or undefined:
+  global $user;
+  $result = db_fetch_object(db_query('SELECT nid FROM {poll_votes} WHERE nid = 38566 AND uid = %d', $user->uid));
+  if ($user->uid > 0 && !$result && $_GET['q'] != 'node/38566') {
+    drupal_goto('node/38566', NULL, NULL, 301);
+  }
+
   print theme('page', $return);
 }
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The dual role of the middle management (do not underestimate the art of manipulating the boss)

There are three types of positions in an organizational hierarchy:

  • Top management, the decision makers;
  • middle management, those who detail and implement top management strategies, communicating execution plans to the people who do the real work that is,
  • employees and workers.

Note that only the middle managers communicate both with the top management and with the employees and workers. In a traditional enterprise, the communication is oriented top-down, with middle management only detailing and passing on the orders.

In IT, as probably in the other hi-tech industries, bottom-up communication is of a paramount importance as the problems arrive unexpected and are sometimes not only difficult to overcome, but even difficult to explain. However, managers are still evaluated mostly on their abilities to manage subordinates, not on the ability to channel information to the top management, guiding and orienting corporate decision-making.

My brief manager's career ended partly because my company could not avoid the usual problems of software development, the problems that I knew about, could forecast, but was unable to mitigate as they arrived, mostly because I could not guide the much less knowledgeable boss through the minefield of decision-making without hurting his ego.

A manager that can not influence the decisions of the boss is only a half-manager, I now see clearly which half I was. Being aware of this handicap in advance could have helped me. Reading this post and applying it to your situation will probably help you.

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