defeatedbycables

Gaydon

Gueydan - Creole French can be tricky. I used to duck hunt down there, beautiful place. Glad you got to experience a unique part of my home state :)

The US should adopt: Roundabouts, outdoor drinking, brown sauce

I LOVE Roundabouts in Europe. 4 way stop lights are way overused here. I'm from New Orleans, so I'm glad that you enjoyed your time here, and yes, outdoor drinking is awesome.

I don't know WTF brown sauce is, but it sounds like it tastes brown.

"CHU CHU!" whip crack

Not OP but I'd like to chime in on "coding bootcamps".

I have a degree in CS but I originally got a BA in Political Science so by way of what these bootcamps offer, I took the "long way".

Not to get into the holy war that rages across /r/programming nearly every day in nearly every thread but suffice it to say, some people don't need "formal training" and some people do. It's really a matter of how you learn and how self motivated you are.

My beef with code bootcamps is that they're basically snake oil salesmen, no better than Full Sail or Blue Cliff or ITT Tech. They will take your money, without any real evaluation of your competency to actually learn and tell you that you can get a job at Google/Amazon/Apple if you pay them $80k for a 12 week intensive training program.

They take the advertising tact of "Did you get a BA in Hebrew Lit from Harvard and now you can't find a job? Learn to code!" That's great since most Ivy Leaguers have a natural affinity for learning and problem solving - you don't get in to Harvard or Yale for having all A's in liberal arts classes and C's in STEM. So they prop up their program on stories of people who could have probably learned this without paying the money, to sucker in people who don't have the capacity or competency to do the real work.

It could be said that those who are being "taken for a ride" are at fault for not thinking it through but even though we need to fill a vast ocean of tech jobs in the next decade, that doesn't mean that "warm bodies" will help. I'd rather have 2 competent programmers working on my team than 20 mildly capable 'programmers'.

TL;DR: I don't like them, they're basically Community College for rich kids to make good after they get a useless degree from their already expensive top-tier schools.

I read Body of Secrets about 8 years ago and I've gone back to it from time to time. It's a really great book.

Can you say that the PRISM project is at all shocking given how much in depth knowledge you have about the NSA?

Also, Operation Northwoods was about the scariest thing I've ever read about - how would you compare that to this current scandal?