You don't consider it possible that police work might actually be interesting to some people, or that they might want to feel they're helping their community by catching criminals?
Such people are called idealists. They are enrolling into Police Academy classes thinking that their future job will be "helping their community by catching criminals." Those officers quickly become disgusted by the "catch and release" policy and quit in protest. A modern LEO is pretty helpless about crime-fighting. At best he is an annoyance to criminals (and a target.) Far more commonly he is a scarecrow that criminals have no difficulty working around.
LEOs who got used to the job have trained themselves to be emotionally detached from the "help the community" part. Instead they are focusing first on surviving the shift. They stop trusting that "community" very quickly - just as soon as they realize that everyone is lying to them, for one reason or another. Some become paranoid. Go to officer.com and read the forums there. Remember the joke "Be polite. Be professional. But, be ready to kill everyone you meet?" It's not a joke for many successful LEOs - it's now their method of operation, and it saved their lives more than once. But once you step into that groove you will not climb out; "civilians" will never be your friends, they will be only suspects.
anyone intelligent can only have the goal of working behind a desk making themselves lots of money.
I can accept that a 20 y/o starry-eyed idealist can join the ranks of police and work the beat for a while. However this is a thankless, heavily physical job with night shifts and with no prospects for a career. As you are getting older you need more money to support your mortgage, your children, and then education of their children (and your grandchildren, eventually.) You cannot do that on a fixed income of a police officer. Furthermore, as you are getting older you may have difficulty just being physically fit for the job. If you are unfit you will be reassigned to that very desk job that you are so derisively talking about. Now, with all other factors being equal, what desk job would a reasonable person prefer - of a middle manager in a good business or of a crime report writer in the 123th Precinct? Whose job has better future? Whose job pays better? Whose job doesn't get harder and harder as years go by? Whose job gives you better chances of surviving the day? It is not very pleasant to be cursed and spit upon all day long.
As I said, anyone who has an IQ well above average answers these questions not based on his feelings and childhood's dreams but based on rational reasoning and on facts. Police officers are janitors of the society. They are doing a necessary job, but that job, to most people, is not the most desirable one. But it does attract people who seek power over others.
The government may unleash ridiculous laws upon the citizen. It can force the citizen to obey those laws (or be jailed.) However it cannot make the citizen believe that those laws are fair (short of a massive brainwashing.) People are guided by moral norms far more than by laws. People don't even know about most laws; even lawyers can't claim to know them all.
Good. Good engineers are not necessarily good team members. I can teach people to be good engineers a lot more readily than I can teach them to be good team players.
You're either an amazing, incredible teacher, or you're delusional and have messed up priorities.
In my experience it is amazingly difficult to make a good engineer out of a bad one. It is possible, but it takes a long time. You have some chance with a young guy fresh from the university. But when you have a 40 y/o engineer who routinely fails to connect unused inputs of ICs or leaves important variables uninitialized, or writes a "thread-safe" code purely with globals, you have nearly zero chance of reeducating him before he retires (or you.)
On the other hand, the "team player" thing is entirely under your control. Let's say the guy is an antisocial lunatic, but a genius. What am I to do? Do I fix his brains or do I fix an isolated office for him? Clearly the former requires being a god, but the latter is within my power. He will be working all alone if that's the only way I can use him. If the guy is worth of keeping him around, he will be kept around. Of course he'd better be worth his weight in gold if he is such a nasty creature. But a manager should be able to deal with that.
How do I know that? I was never very amenable to stupid acts. I worked for a company many years ago as an embedded firmware developer. Not the easiest thing in the world to code for (you debug with an oscilloscope.) Then the topmost management sent down an edict that all engineers should be rounded up and herded into a weekly meeting on some stupid "feel-good" subject, like company values, or six sigma, whatever. I told my boss that I'm not coming because I have work to do. The boss said "No problem, I'll take care of that." And he did. I never set foot into that meeting; instead I was very productive doing real work; it was peace and quiet all around:-) You can say that I wasn't entirely social in that instance, but the manager did his job - which, in the end, is to ensure that the work is done and the workers are reasonably happy.
The real core of the problem seems to be that the police force is composed of morons.
You are looking at it from the wrong end. Think in reverse. What kind of people would willingly work as police officers? Will you, with IQ of 200, want to be in the street, in the middle of a ghetto, when it's freezing rain and 3am? If you have IQ of 200 you have better job opportunities, and you know that.
Note also that duties of police officers require them to be healthy and physically strong. How many smart people do you know who could meet that requirement? You don't get smart by bodybuilding; in fact, many smart persons would find a gym a waste of time.
And note that Sherlock Holmes did not work for the police. He actually worked against the police once (and performed poorly.) Police forces all over the world are not built for geniuses.
The intelligence agencies (foolishly) believe that with computers they can catch all the bad guys just by spying on everyone and letting the computers sort it all out.
Why do you think that intelligence agencies don't have enough intelligence to understand that? They do; they monitor everything they can not because they hope to find bad guys but because they want to deny use of the medium to the bad guys. Then they have to use more complex - and more error-prone - methods, like sending each other postal mail, or meeting in person.
They still can call each other and speak in code, but that's also a complication, and urgent, new information cannot be communicated if you don't have a code word set and remembered by every participant. This also increases the risk of misunderstanding; and if you speak extensively about meaningless things (as you have to do when speaking in code) you provide evidence against yourself. "There were thirty nine irons on the window sill. 'This safe house had been exposed,' realized Shtirlitz, 'three irons are missing.'" (link)
They had PDAs in 1989 that could actually fit in a pocket?!
They did. Casio was making a bunch. They were called "electronic notebooks" or something like that. They were clamshells with an LCD, a membrane keypad, and a small RAM, all powered by three Lithium batteries, IIRC. No computer interface, probably, except IRDA on some models (I guess.) They were pretty nice and I owned one.
I still have it, though I have no idea where it is:-) They became popular right around 1990; they got wiped out by Palm Pilot.
You are talking like good engineers are growing on trees. In reality they are very hard to find, and they *will* quit on the spot if you pull a stunt like that.
Besides, what is a good reason? A car broken down? A traffic jam? A child who was sick all night? A family problem? A developer who read an important technical book all night and overslept in the morning? A cell phone with a bad battery? Who is there to decide?
Performance of employees is a multi-edged graph, of course. One employee may be rude; another is always late; another's code is not even refactorable, let alone compilable. There could be all kinds of problems. Manager's job is quite messy. He has to deal with "human factor" more than he deals with hardware. Engineers will take care of the hardware; the manager's duty is to take care of engineers. Firing them left and right for disrespecting your meeting times will leave you all alone in the department. Who is going to do the job? You will be fired on the next day, and your fame in the industry will be far worse.
So why as a Linux user should I have to buy a locked down Sony computer plus TV, which costs the same as a PC anyway?
Linux exists for about 15 years now, and Slashdot - at least 10 years. We were around all that time (I was, at least, don't know about you specifically.) Young geeks with lots of free time and little money became into older geeks with little time and far more money (the job pays well.)
In this situation it does not make sense to waste time putting together a computer, Linux or Windows, to play a game. Some of those older geeks not only play themselves but have children who have their own needs. Can a young child sit in your chair and use keyboard/mouse? Do they even make PC games for children? I have no idea.
A PC is a general purpose computer. Yes, it can play games too. But when PS3 was released, with its 6 to 8 CPU cores it was a supercomputer - and it worked very, very well. I had all kinds of troubles with Far Cry on PC, starting with the ATI video bug. The Far Cry 2, which I got for PS3, had none of these issues. (Well, it's not bug-free either, but those bugs are in game scripts, like being unable to get into a hut.)
Yet another consideration is integration with your home environment. PS3 is a nice looking box that can be proudly placed onto a visible shelf, horizontally or vertically, and it will work fine (it has adequate cooling.) No wires are needed - Sixaxis controllers are wireless, except to charge. Several controllers can be used (up to 4) if the game supports such a mode. A PC is failing in all these areas; a gaming box will set you back twice, if not triple, the cost of PS3. You can't just go out, buy some eMachines clone for $300 and hope that it will play a modern game well. But a PS3, which is sold for about the same price, will play everything that is designed for it.
On top of that, PS3 is not just a gaming console. You can browse the Web with it (if you want to), you can play DVDs and BlueRay video, you can play audio, it can connect to your media server and stream music from it. It's a lot of functionality for mere $300.
I would rather buy a graphics card - which is cheap if you get a 100 watt model such as radeon 6770 - and go back to windows.
The whole PS3 takes less power than that one card:-) Can you imagine the noise that is produced by all these fans in that PC? Besides, the only way to keep games and your work environment separate is to have two different PCs. Otherwise your work software may interfere with gaming - and it will, if it runs in background. Antiviruses are among those; a PS3 doesn't waste any CPU cycles on that, but a general purpose computer usually has an antivirus. Interference between games is also possible if any shared files are involved.
Currently as the linux situation sucks, and Wine just cannot run a random game I throw at it, I just avoid gaming those days.
Of course it's your choice. However life is short, and you are missing on a lot of entertainment. It's not about Linux vs. Windows - nobody knows or cares about your political boycott of one or another platform. Ultimately it's your life, and by deciding to abandon gaming completely you change it in some way. Perhaps that change is minor; perhaps it's even advantageous - I don't know. But I don't allow external circumstances, such as Linux or Windows, dictate my actions, preferences or goals in life.
At this house both Windows games and Linux games are treated equally - such as not used anymore. Perhaps a decade ago I used to play a game or two on Windows (such as Thief, Deus Ex, Far Cry, etc.) But that was a hassle. General purpose computers are not designed for gaming; and if you go out and design them this way (by throwing wads of cash at Alienware, or by building your own box) then you are overpaying for your games a hundredfold.
I got myself a PS3 many years ago, and I never regretted that decision. The only major difference - keyboard/mouse vs. the controller - is solved by the Splitfish controller, for games that benefit from a mouse. Other games are actually just fine with two analog 2D sticks. The PS3 is an extremely deterministic system. Slide the BlueRay disk in and it plays - today just as good as yesterday. Patches, when released, are automatically installed. There is nothing to worry about. This was never the case with a PC.
IMO, what matters is not the platform that the game runs on but the game itself. Resistance is worth of getting a PS3, and if I want I can go out and buy Xbox if there is a game that is exclusive to it (a later Halo sequel, perhaps?) The cost of an appliance is relatively small, considering that new games are about $50 regardless of the platform.
Most game companies start with a great game, and then they release it on platforms of their choice. The game makes people want it, not the OS that it runs under. Linux games always had this political undertow. A few great Linux games that I saw were great not because of Linux but because of the game itself (Quake, obviously, perhaps Heretic, and a few other.)
There is also the DRM issue. As I understand, it does not exist on PS3 because it's part of the system. If you have the disk, it's your license. I have Assassin's Creed and I never even knew, until Slashdot told me, that it has some DRM. It just works. I suspect Xbox is similar in this aspect.
On top of all that, one fact certainly doesn't help Linux gaming - the fact that advanced functions of video cards were often denied to Linux driver developers, but Windows drivers were optimized all the way through and supported everything that the GPU had. There is no incentive to buy a Linux game and then fiddle with OpenGL settings if you can simply insert the CD into a Windows box and play right away. The unstoppable advance of DirectX is also a factor.
in every successive war (WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War) the amount of bullets it took to kill someone was INCREASING, that is (maybe) an average of 100 rounds was spent per soldier killed in WWI whereas by Vietnam it was maybe 10,000 possibly due to smarter tactics and better protection.
In part it's because these days bullets can be fired not to kill but to make sure the other side can't do anything.
In part it's also because, as you say, modern tactics and protective equipment make it hard to shoot and kill any specific enemy soldier. A sniper can do that, but snipers shoot at slow moving targets and they have all the time in the universe to make their shot - or not make it if conditions are unfavorable. A soldier at the front line has no such luxury, and so he can't and shouldn't aim. First, it will take him forever to find a moment when the enemy soldier is in motion and visible. Second, it will take him forever to hit the enemy soldier in those brief moments. While the defender is doing all that, selectively hunting that one soldier (and failing,) 99 other enemy soldiers can calmly walk up to his position and kill him. Because of that grunt's rifles are designed to be automatic, not too powerful, and not too accurate; and the goal of the soldier is simply to spray and pray.
This is also reflected in gradual migration to smaller calibers. Smaller ammo can be carried in large quantities, but even a.22LR round, if it hits the enemy, may take that enemy out of action. Science fiction is full of descriptions of future ammo which is presented as tiny steel or ceramic needles that are accelerated to great speeds with either a propellant (caseless) or with electromagnetic forces.
I come from long-lived families, and none of them ever resorted to crime after retirement
There is no point in comparing mature, retired people to brainless youngsters. Those groups have completely different urges.
Young people who have nothing to do *will* find something to do, and in most cases it will not be square dancing. The reason for that is pretty straightforward. Just as the Peter Principle defines a worker's rise within ranks, a similar principle governs a man's choice in hobbies. Einstein chose tensor calculus (and theoretical physics in general) as his hobby; that's what is afforded by nature to 0.01% of the population. The least capable people can only pick from the list of simpler entertainments - such as sex, drugs, and petty crime (no, a heist of Crown Jewels is not within their intellectual capacity.)
You can see proof of that in behavior of children. Most start out by running around, playing, and eventually getting into some minor trouble (as minor as a broken window; how'd they know that glass is so fragile?) The lure of being all-powerful (and that includes being free of constraints of the society) is huge - it's a major survival trait, after all. Eventually children understand that keying a stranger's car is not all they can be, and they move on. Most move on to the next level, to become smart, to work, and to build a family. Some, however, do not. They aren't very smart; they get stuck at the wolf pack level. If they are employed they will be doing work at their level of incompetence, and they will be happy enough (as good Deltas.) If they are not employed they will pick a hobby, whih will be necessarily simple enough - and what can be simpler than walking the streets, defacing property and beating up random people for drug money?
If we return to your argument we can already see that many young hoodlums just don't survive long enough to become old hoodlums. Even old gang members are not that common; it's a high risk, low reward occupation. Prisons also take care of a lot of older criminals; some stay there for a long time, other get released and sin no more. Anyone who survived to the retirement age is by definition capable of living in the society.
Why would anyone steal what was free? Crime comes from lack of needed goods.
There are many causes of crime. However "lack of needed goods" is on the bottom of the list. On top of the list you will see thrill, feeling of power, desire to become the top dog, intent to have (or not to have) a specific sexual partner, to gain respect among other gang members, and so on. Rarely a thief steals a loaf of bread; they usually aim for TVs and computers, and other high value stuff.
If you had no need for a job, you'd have plenty of time to learn the guitar, make that movie and write that book, and you wouldn't have any reason to need a salary for it.
There are plenty (20-30% by some estimates) people in the USA that have no need for a job. However "idle hands are the devil's workshop" and you don't even need to venture outside of a large city to find proof of that; experimentally even, if you are brave enough.
I have no need to believe in existence of gods of any kind. However this particular characteristic has an easy analogy right in front of you. Look at your browser's tabs. I have three open currently; they occupy the same space on the screen, but they are different.
I'm sure early theologians weren't thinking about higher dimensions; but a 3D cube has six combinations of edges when it is lowered onto the sheet of Flatland. Such a Flatlander would have six different bodies (four edges visible at any given time out of twelve) that all belong to the same person. Eight edges will be at all times outside of the dimensional perception of a 2D observer. Flatlanders would have a good reason to call a cube "god." The same would happen with a 4D being whenever their 3D projection is observed. The Christian god would, as minimum, need three quantized states along the axis W, and one of those states - "the holy spirit" orientation - doesn't even need to intersect our 3D plane at all (since the spirit has no body that we can see.) A Flatlander would note such a holy spirit when his god cube is standing on a corner, projecting into a single point, or when it is raised above the sheet of Flatland.
Everybody and their brothers are working on getting identifying information from users.
This is probably related to the US government starting to monitor what you are saying on the Internet.
In such conditions the only prudent thing to do is to use many different logins, and use one login for one site only. This still allows an observer to use your unique writing style to suspect authorship - but that would be far weaker than the certain knowledge that all these @posts are written by the same individual. Now all they need to do is to go and find him (by, for example, serving a National Security Letter to one of the blogs where he posts and getting his IP in real time.)
These days being paranoid is a synonym for being informed:-(
If I was the manufacturer of the device, she'd sign an NDA and get the code.
If I were the manufacturer, I'd tell her that the code can be reviewed inside of my SCIF, under supervision of one of my employees. If she pays for the costs incurred she can come and read the code all day long, every day. Of course nothing material leaves the SCIF, and she may not take notes.
Your job as a programmer is to write the code in as clean a fashion as possible, the compiler's job is to make the code as fast as possible.
Unfortunately that's not how it works in real life. A programmer needs to help the compiler help the programmer.
Besides, stack is a precious, limited, shared resource on embedded systems. Running out of stack is an instant crash. I use gotos in embedded code when practical - they translate into a single machine command; can't beat that.
It's because they are being polite. Stop being a cheap ass.
Nice reference to being polite there.
Anyhow, not everyone is a spendthrift. I have enough money to afford a few new routers when time comes; however I won't do it just for fun. The later I buy them the better and the cheaper they will be. Besides, investing $200 to have the same Internet as before is not very interesting.
I'm pretty sure that the future of the internet is hierarchically organized network with clear distinction who can serve and who can only consume content.
This is already the case; most consumer ISPs do not allow servers, and do not distribute static IPs by default. They may or may not actively monitor violations, and their DHCP may be pretty static, but the contract forbids servers, and your IP may be changed at any time without warning.
On the other hand, business class connections - which cost 200-300% more - come with static IPs and no filtering of any kind, and with techs on call to fix up your reverse DNS whenever you need it. That's the connection I have here (for a number of reasons.)
If consumer ISPs switch to IPv6 en masse they will most certainly try to differentiate the consumer connection and the business connection, lest they lose a lot of income. Which means that you may get an IPv6 address... one per computer, and you need to pay for each computer that you plug into your new shiny IPv6 firewall. Also that firewall will be provisioned to deny you a physical possibility of running any meaningful services, unless running a Web server on port 11742 is OK with you.
to the detriment of user's personal freedom
The freedom to publish on the Web is not a right; but your ability to pay the going rate and get that freedom is a right. So far nobody denies you that right; just don't expect it to be a "free beer."
You could either get into the 21st century and enable IPv6 on your network
Sorry, my ISP is IPv4 only, and I don't have a spare change to the tune of a few million dollars to buy enough shares in that ISP and order them to upgrade.
Besides, why should I bother? Everything works fine. I have a static IP, and immediately it gets NATed to 192.168.x.y... I have no need for IPv6, though I run it locally for a few years already. I was considering 6to4 and other solutions, but it is a large project that requires a separate box with FreeBSD on it (for pfsense) that would burn 100W per hour... I could possibly go for a small plastic box, like DD-WRT, that does the 6to4, the firewall, dhcp6 and the DNS... but I'm not aware of existence of such an animal.
If one day I have to switch to IPv6 I'm ready on my side. I only need a new router from the ISP. Once it is plugged in I will have to upgrade a few Linksys routers, but that should be tolerable. Unfortunately some of my hardware (video cameras, 802.11a bridges, Ethernet to RS485 and like boxes) are IPv4-only, which calls for keeping IPv4 around. But that's OK - as long as that ISP box offers that option as well. As I see there is an awful lot that the ISP router has to do...
So they can attempt to... I don't know... protect civilians from people that don't like the US or it's self loathing people?
They are constructing psychological portraits of millions of people. They are using specialized software that, presumably, can collect posts of users, collate them, and classify their posts based on various criteria (such as the level of literacy, the political orientation, etc.)
Now, why would anyone need that information? Under what circumstances it may become usable? What could possibly trigger the need for the government to sort citizenry into large groups? What would the government do with those groups once they are built?
The answers to that aren't pleasant. Unless you are the government, of course. Currently the government has no power to act on that knowledge. Perhaps they are planning to have that corrected?
If the preceding comments aren't suggesting, "The people who participate in CodeAcademy won't ever amount to anything, unlike *us*," then I guess I need to read with less beer in me.
They are elitist, in a way. However it's not that bad. Out of 100 graduates of Code Academy 90 will be lowly bit pushers, barely able to put together a "Hello, World" in the original BASIC.
However the other 10 will join the elite. There is no artificial "glass ceiling" that would forever tag all CA graduates as losers. As matter of fact, I knew someone who was a machinist of a TBM. One day he decided that he wants to become a programmer. A few months later I learn that he got a job at a bank to write MS Office macros (and they needed them by the ton.) Today he has a solid 15-year career in software.
Perhaps VBA is not as exciting as Ada or assembly (considering their typical uses) but it's a good job; and if you can code in one language you can code in all of them, with little learning. Most languages are conceptually alike, with a few exceptions (Forth, LISP, etc.) Even BF is only hard to read because of its alphabet. Underneath it's just like anything else. Even computed GOTOs of FORTRAN are harder to deal with.
It was always their target market. Do you think Google expected RMS and geeks like him to jump into social networking? How smart must be the user who wants to spend years of their life sending pointless "updates" and receiving the same from other people?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't consider it possible that police work might actually be interesting to some people, or that they might want to feel they're helping their community by catching criminals?
Such people are called idealists. They are enrolling into Police Academy classes thinking that their future job will be "helping their community by catching criminals." Those officers quickly become disgusted by the "catch and release" policy and quit in protest. A modern LEO is pretty helpless about crime-fighting. At best he is an annoyance to criminals (and a target.) Far more commonly he is a scarecrow that criminals have no difficulty working around.
LEOs who got used to the job have trained themselves to be emotionally detached from the "help the community" part. Instead they are focusing first on surviving the shift. They stop trusting that "community" very quickly - just as soon as they realize that everyone is lying to them, for one reason or another. Some become paranoid. Go to officer.com and read the forums there. Remember the joke "Be polite. Be professional. But, be ready to kill everyone you meet?" It's not a joke for many successful LEOs - it's now their method of operation, and it saved their lives more than once. But once you step into that groove you will not climb out; "civilians" will never be your friends, they will be only suspects.
anyone intelligent can only have the goal of working behind a desk making themselves lots of money.
I can accept that a 20 y/o starry-eyed idealist can join the ranks of police and work the beat for a while. However this is a thankless, heavily physical job with night shifts and with no prospects for a career. As you are getting older you need more money to support your mortgage, your children, and then education of their children (and your grandchildren, eventually.) You cannot do that on a fixed income of a police officer. Furthermore, as you are getting older you may have difficulty just being physically fit for the job. If you are unfit you will be reassigned to that very desk job that you are so derisively talking about. Now, with all other factors being equal, what desk job would a reasonable person prefer - of a middle manager in a good business or of a crime report writer in the 123th Precinct? Whose job has better future? Whose job pays better? Whose job doesn't get harder and harder as years go by? Whose job gives you better chances of surviving the day? It is not very pleasant to be cursed and spit upon all day long.
As I said, anyone who has an IQ well above average answers these questions not based on his feelings and childhood's dreams but based on rational reasoning and on facts. Police officers are janitors of the society. They are doing a necessary job, but that job, to most people, is not the most desirable one. But it does attract people who seek power over others.
The government may unleash ridiculous laws upon the citizen. It can force the citizen to obey those laws (or be jailed.) However it cannot make the citizen believe that those laws are fair (short of a massive brainwashing.) People are guided by moral norms far more than by laws. People don't even know about most laws; even lawyers can't claim to know them all.
You're either an amazing, incredible teacher, or you're delusional and have messed up priorities.
In my experience it is amazingly difficult to make a good engineer out of a bad one. It is possible, but it takes a long time. You have some chance with a young guy fresh from the university. But when you have a 40 y/o engineer who routinely fails to connect unused inputs of ICs or leaves important variables uninitialized, or writes a "thread-safe" code purely with globals, you have nearly zero chance of reeducating him before he retires (or you.)
On the other hand, the "team player" thing is entirely under your control. Let's say the guy is an antisocial lunatic, but a genius. What am I to do? Do I fix his brains or do I fix an isolated office for him? Clearly the former requires being a god, but the latter is within my power. He will be working all alone if that's the only way I can use him. If the guy is worth of keeping him around, he will be kept around. Of course he'd better be worth his weight in gold if he is such a nasty creature. But a manager should be able to deal with that.
How do I know that? I was never very amenable to stupid acts. I worked for a company many years ago as an embedded firmware developer. Not the easiest thing in the world to code for (you debug with an oscilloscope.) Then the topmost management sent down an edict that all engineers should be rounded up and herded into a weekly meeting on some stupid "feel-good" subject, like company values, or six sigma, whatever. I told my boss that I'm not coming because I have work to do. The boss said "No problem, I'll take care of that." And he did. I never set foot into that meeting; instead I was very productive doing real work; it was peace and quiet all around :-) You can say that I wasn't entirely social in that instance, but the manager did his job - which, in the end, is to ensure that the work is done and the workers are reasonably happy.
The real core of the problem seems to be that the police force is composed of morons.
You are looking at it from the wrong end. Think in reverse. What kind of people would willingly work as police officers? Will you, with IQ of 200, want to be in the street, in the middle of a ghetto, when it's freezing rain and 3am? If you have IQ of 200 you have better job opportunities, and you know that.
Note also that duties of police officers require them to be healthy and physically strong. How many smart people do you know who could meet that requirement? You don't get smart by bodybuilding; in fact, many smart persons would find a gym a waste of time.
And note that Sherlock Holmes did not work for the police. He actually worked against the police once (and performed poorly.) Police forces all over the world are not built for geniuses.
The intelligence agencies (foolishly) believe that with computers they can catch all the bad guys just by spying on everyone and letting the computers sort it all out.
Why do you think that intelligence agencies don't have enough intelligence to understand that? They do; they monitor everything they can not because they hope to find bad guys but because they want to deny use of the medium to the bad guys. Then they have to use more complex - and more error-prone - methods, like sending each other postal mail, or meeting in person.
They still can call each other and speak in code, but that's also a complication, and urgent, new information cannot be communicated if you don't have a code word set and remembered by every participant. This also increases the risk of misunderstanding; and if you speak extensively about meaningless things (as you have to do when speaking in code) you provide evidence against yourself. "There were thirty nine irons on the window sill. 'This safe house had been exposed,' realized Shtirlitz, 'three irons are missing.'" (link)
They had PDAs in 1989 that could actually fit in a pocket?!
They did. Casio was making a bunch. They were called "electronic notebooks" or something like that. They were clamshells with an LCD, a membrane keypad, and a small RAM, all powered by three Lithium batteries, IIRC. No computer interface, probably, except IRDA on some models (I guess.) They were pretty nice and I owned one. I still have it, though I have no idea where it is :-) They became popular right around 1990; they got wiped out by Palm Pilot.
You are late. Have a good reason? No? FIRED!
You are talking like good engineers are growing on trees. In reality they are very hard to find, and they *will* quit on the spot if you pull a stunt like that.
Besides, what is a good reason? A car broken down? A traffic jam? A child who was sick all night? A family problem? A developer who read an important technical book all night and overslept in the morning? A cell phone with a bad battery? Who is there to decide?
Performance of employees is a multi-edged graph, of course. One employee may be rude; another is always late; another's code is not even refactorable, let alone compilable. There could be all kinds of problems. Manager's job is quite messy. He has to deal with "human factor" more than he deals with hardware. Engineers will take care of the hardware; the manager's duty is to take care of engineers. Firing them left and right for disrespecting your meeting times will leave you all alone in the department. Who is going to do the job? You will be fired on the next day, and your fame in the industry will be far worse.
So why as a Linux user should I have to buy a locked down Sony computer plus TV, which costs the same as a PC anyway?
Linux exists for about 15 years now, and Slashdot - at least 10 years. We were around all that time (I was, at least, don't know about you specifically.) Young geeks with lots of free time and little money became into older geeks with little time and far more money (the job pays well.)
In this situation it does not make sense to waste time putting together a computer, Linux or Windows, to play a game. Some of those older geeks not only play themselves but have children who have their own needs. Can a young child sit in your chair and use keyboard/mouse? Do they even make PC games for children? I have no idea.
A PC is a general purpose computer. Yes, it can play games too. But when PS3 was released, with its 6 to 8 CPU cores it was a supercomputer - and it worked very, very well. I had all kinds of troubles with Far Cry on PC, starting with the ATI video bug. The Far Cry 2, which I got for PS3, had none of these issues. (Well, it's not bug-free either, but those bugs are in game scripts, like being unable to get into a hut.)
Yet another consideration is integration with your home environment. PS3 is a nice looking box that can be proudly placed onto a visible shelf, horizontally or vertically, and it will work fine (it has adequate cooling.) No wires are needed - Sixaxis controllers are wireless, except to charge. Several controllers can be used (up to 4) if the game supports such a mode. A PC is failing in all these areas; a gaming box will set you back twice, if not triple, the cost of PS3. You can't just go out, buy some eMachines clone for $300 and hope that it will play a modern game well. But a PS3, which is sold for about the same price, will play everything that is designed for it.
On top of that, PS3 is not just a gaming console. You can browse the Web with it (if you want to), you can play DVDs and BlueRay video, you can play audio, it can connect to your media server and stream music from it. It's a lot of functionality for mere $300.
I would rather buy a graphics card - which is cheap if you get a 100 watt model such as radeon 6770 - and go back to windows.
The whole PS3 takes less power than that one card :-) Can you imagine the noise that is produced by all these fans in that PC? Besides, the only way to keep games and your work environment separate is to have two different PCs. Otherwise your work software may interfere with gaming - and it will, if it runs in background. Antiviruses are among those; a PS3 doesn't waste any CPU cycles on that, but a general purpose computer usually has an antivirus. Interference between games is also possible if any shared files are involved.
Currently as the linux situation sucks, and Wine just cannot run a random game I throw at it, I just avoid gaming those days.
Of course it's your choice. However life is short, and you are missing on a lot of entertainment. It's not about Linux vs. Windows - nobody knows or cares about your political boycott of one or another platform. Ultimately it's your life, and by deciding to abandon gaming completely you change it in some way. Perhaps that change is minor; perhaps it's even advantageous - I don't know. But I don't allow external circumstances, such as Linux or Windows, dictate my actions, preferences or goals in life.
At this house both Windows games and Linux games are treated equally - such as not used anymore. Perhaps a decade ago I used to play a game or two on Windows (such as Thief, Deus Ex, Far Cry, etc.) But that was a hassle. General purpose computers are not designed for gaming; and if you go out and design them this way (by throwing wads of cash at Alienware, or by building your own box) then you are overpaying for your games a hundredfold.
I got myself a PS3 many years ago, and I never regretted that decision. The only major difference - keyboard/mouse vs. the controller - is solved by the Splitfish controller, for games that benefit from a mouse. Other games are actually just fine with two analog 2D sticks. The PS3 is an extremely deterministic system. Slide the BlueRay disk in and it plays - today just as good as yesterday. Patches, when released, are automatically installed. There is nothing to worry about. This was never the case with a PC.
IMO, what matters is not the platform that the game runs on but the game itself. Resistance is worth of getting a PS3, and if I want I can go out and buy Xbox if there is a game that is exclusive to it (a later Halo sequel, perhaps?) The cost of an appliance is relatively small, considering that new games are about $50 regardless of the platform.
Most game companies start with a great game, and then they release it on platforms of their choice. The game makes people want it, not the OS that it runs under. Linux games always had this political undertow. A few great Linux games that I saw were great not because of Linux but because of the game itself (Quake, obviously, perhaps Heretic, and a few other.)
There is also the DRM issue. As I understand, it does not exist on PS3 because it's part of the system. If you have the disk, it's your license. I have Assassin's Creed and I never even knew, until Slashdot told me, that it has some DRM. It just works. I suspect Xbox is similar in this aspect.
On top of all that, one fact certainly doesn't help Linux gaming - the fact that advanced functions of video cards were often denied to Linux driver developers, but Windows drivers were optimized all the way through and supported everything that the GPU had. There is no incentive to buy a Linux game and then fiddle with OpenGL settings if you can simply insert the CD into a Windows box and play right away. The unstoppable advance of DirectX is also a factor.
in every successive war (WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War) the amount of bullets it took to kill someone was INCREASING, that is (maybe) an average of 100 rounds was spent per soldier killed in WWI whereas by Vietnam it was maybe 10,000 possibly due to smarter tactics and better protection.
In part it's because these days bullets can be fired not to kill but to make sure the other side can't do anything.
In part it's also because, as you say, modern tactics and protective equipment make it hard to shoot and kill any specific enemy soldier. A sniper can do that, but snipers shoot at slow moving targets and they have all the time in the universe to make their shot - or not make it if conditions are unfavorable. A soldier at the front line has no such luxury, and so he can't and shouldn't aim. First, it will take him forever to find a moment when the enemy soldier is in motion and visible. Second, it will take him forever to hit the enemy soldier in those brief moments. While the defender is doing all that, selectively hunting that one soldier (and failing,) 99 other enemy soldiers can calmly walk up to his position and kill him. Because of that grunt's rifles are designed to be automatic, not too powerful, and not too accurate; and the goal of the soldier is simply to spray and pray.
This is also reflected in gradual migration to smaller calibers. Smaller ammo can be carried in large quantities, but even a .22LR round, if it hits the enemy, may take that enemy out of action. Science fiction is full of descriptions of future ammo which is presented as tiny steel or ceramic needles that are accelerated to great speeds with either a propellant (caseless) or with electromagnetic forces.
I come from long-lived families, and none of them ever resorted to crime after retirement
There is no point in comparing mature, retired people to brainless youngsters. Those groups have completely different urges.
Young people who have nothing to do *will* find something to do, and in most cases it will not be square dancing. The reason for that is pretty straightforward. Just as the Peter Principle defines a worker's rise within ranks, a similar principle governs a man's choice in hobbies. Einstein chose tensor calculus (and theoretical physics in general) as his hobby; that's what is afforded by nature to 0.01% of the population. The least capable people can only pick from the list of simpler entertainments - such as sex, drugs, and petty crime (no, a heist of Crown Jewels is not within their intellectual capacity.)
You can see proof of that in behavior of children. Most start out by running around, playing, and eventually getting into some minor trouble (as minor as a broken window; how'd they know that glass is so fragile?) The lure of being all-powerful (and that includes being free of constraints of the society) is huge - it's a major survival trait, after all. Eventually children understand that keying a stranger's car is not all they can be, and they move on. Most move on to the next level, to become smart, to work, and to build a family. Some, however, do not. They aren't very smart; they get stuck at the wolf pack level. If they are employed they will be doing work at their level of incompetence, and they will be happy enough (as good Deltas.) If they are not employed they will pick a hobby, whih will be necessarily simple enough - and what can be simpler than walking the streets, defacing property and beating up random people for drug money?
If we return to your argument we can already see that many young hoodlums just don't survive long enough to become old hoodlums. Even old gang members are not that common; it's a high risk, low reward occupation. Prisons also take care of a lot of older criminals; some stay there for a long time, other get released and sin no more. Anyone who survived to the retirement age is by definition capable of living in the society.
Why would anyone steal what was free? Crime comes from lack of needed goods.
There are many causes of crime. However "lack of needed goods" is on the bottom of the list. On top of the list you will see thrill, feeling of power, desire to become the top dog, intent to have (or not to have) a specific sexual partner, to gain respect among other gang members, and so on. Rarely a thief steals a loaf of bread; they usually aim for TVs and computers, and other high value stuff.
If you had no need for a job, you'd have plenty of time to learn the guitar, make that movie and write that book, and you wouldn't have any reason to need a salary for it.
There are plenty (20-30% by some estimates) people in the USA that have no need for a job. However "idle hands are the devil's workshop" and you don't even need to venture outside of a large city to find proof of that; experimentally even, if you are brave enough.
Perhaps; but it is a very popular illusion (it is made in .50 BMG and in .416 Barrett.)
I have no idea what that means
I have no need to believe in existence of gods of any kind. However this particular characteristic has an easy analogy right in front of you. Look at your browser's tabs. I have three open currently; they occupy the same space on the screen, but they are different.
I'm sure early theologians weren't thinking about higher dimensions; but a 3D cube has six combinations of edges when it is lowered onto the sheet of Flatland. Such a Flatlander would have six different bodies (four edges visible at any given time out of twelve) that all belong to the same person. Eight edges will be at all times outside of the dimensional perception of a 2D observer. Flatlanders would have a good reason to call a cube "god." The same would happen with a 4D being whenever their 3D projection is observed. The Christian god would, as minimum, need three quantized states along the axis W, and one of those states - "the holy spirit" orientation - doesn't even need to intersect our 3D plane at all (since the spirit has no body that we can see.) A Flatlander would note such a holy spirit when his god cube is standing on a corner, projecting into a single point, or when it is raised above the sheet of Flatland.
Everybody and their brothers are working on getting identifying information from users.
This is probably related to the US government starting to monitor what you are saying on the Internet.
In such conditions the only prudent thing to do is to use many different logins, and use one login for one site only. This still allows an observer to use your unique writing style to suspect authorship - but that would be far weaker than the certain knowledge that all these @posts are written by the same individual. Now all they need to do is to go and find him (by, for example, serving a National Security Letter to one of the blogs where he posts and getting his IP in real time.)
These days being paranoid is a synonym for being informed :-(
If I was the manufacturer of the device, she'd sign an NDA and get the code.
If I were the manufacturer, I'd tell her that the code can be reviewed inside of my SCIF, under supervision of one of my employees. If she pays for the costs incurred she can come and read the code all day long, every day. Of course nothing material leaves the SCIF, and she may not take notes.
Your job as a programmer is to write the code in as clean a fashion as possible, the compiler's job is to make the code as fast as possible.
Unfortunately that's not how it works in real life. A programmer needs to help the compiler help the programmer.
Besides, stack is a precious, limited, shared resource on embedded systems. Running out of stack is an instant crash. I use gotos in embedded code when practical - they translate into a single machine command; can't beat that.
It's because they are being polite. Stop being a cheap ass.
Nice reference to being polite there.
Anyhow, not everyone is a spendthrift. I have enough money to afford a few new routers when time comes; however I won't do it just for fun. The later I buy them the better and the cheaper they will be. Besides, investing $200 to have the same Internet as before is not very interesting.
I'm pretty sure that the future of the internet is hierarchically organized network with clear distinction who can serve and who can only consume content.
This is already the case; most consumer ISPs do not allow servers, and do not distribute static IPs by default. They may or may not actively monitor violations, and their DHCP may be pretty static, but the contract forbids servers, and your IP may be changed at any time without warning.
On the other hand, business class connections - which cost 200-300% more - come with static IPs and no filtering of any kind, and with techs on call to fix up your reverse DNS whenever you need it. That's the connection I have here (for a number of reasons.)
If consumer ISPs switch to IPv6 en masse they will most certainly try to differentiate the consumer connection and the business connection, lest they lose a lot of income. Which means that you may get an IPv6 address ... one per computer, and you need to pay for each computer that you plug into your new shiny IPv6 firewall. Also that firewall will be provisioned to deny you a physical possibility of running any meaningful services, unless running a Web server on port 11742 is OK with you.
to the detriment of user's personal freedom
The freedom to publish on the Web is not a right; but your ability to pay the going rate and get that freedom is a right. So far nobody denies you that right; just don't expect it to be a "free beer."
You could either get into the 21st century and enable IPv6 on your network
Sorry, my ISP is IPv4 only, and I don't have a spare change to the tune of a few million dollars to buy enough shares in that ISP and order them to upgrade.
Besides, why should I bother? Everything works fine. I have a static IP, and immediately it gets NATed to 192.168.x.y ... I have no need for IPv6, though I run it locally for a few years already. I was considering 6to4 and other solutions, but it is a large project that requires a separate box with FreeBSD on it (for pfsense) that would burn 100W per hour... I could possibly go for a small plastic box, like DD-WRT, that does the 6to4, the firewall, dhcp6 and the DNS... but I'm not aware of existence of such an animal.
If one day I have to switch to IPv6 I'm ready on my side. I only need a new router from the ISP. Once it is plugged in I will have to upgrade a few Linksys routers, but that should be tolerable. Unfortunately some of my hardware (video cameras, 802.11a bridges, Ethernet to RS485 and like boxes) are IPv4-only, which calls for keeping IPv4 around. But that's OK - as long as that ISP box offers that option as well. As I see there is an awful lot that the ISP router has to do...
Hey, you can figure out who I am!
Of course. You are an infrequent traveler.
So they can attempt to... I don't know... protect civilians from people that don't like the US or it's self loathing people?
They are constructing psychological portraits of millions of people. They are using specialized software that, presumably, can collect posts of users, collate them, and classify their posts based on various criteria (such as the level of literacy, the political orientation, etc.)
Now, why would anyone need that information? Under what circumstances it may become usable? What could possibly trigger the need for the government to sort citizenry into large groups? What would the government do with those groups once they are built?
The answers to that aren't pleasant. Unless you are the government, of course. Currently the government has no power to act on that knowledge. Perhaps they are planning to have that corrected?
last I checked a haircut was pretty non-invasive
Did you ask a girl, or it's your own opinion how girls should feel about a major haircut?
If the preceding comments aren't suggesting, "The people who participate in CodeAcademy won't ever amount to anything, unlike *us*," then I guess I need to read with less beer in me.
They are elitist, in a way. However it's not that bad. Out of 100 graduates of Code Academy 90 will be lowly bit pushers, barely able to put together a "Hello, World" in the original BASIC.
However the other 10 will join the elite. There is no artificial "glass ceiling" that would forever tag all CA graduates as losers. As matter of fact, I knew someone who was a machinist of a TBM. One day he decided that he wants to become a programmer. A few months later I learn that he got a job at a bank to write MS Office macros (and they needed them by the ton.) Today he has a solid 15-year career in software.
Perhaps VBA is not as exciting as Ada or assembly (considering their typical uses) but it's a good job; and if you can code in one language you can code in all of them, with little learning. Most languages are conceptually alike, with a few exceptions (Forth, LISP, etc.) Even BF is only hard to read because of its alphabet. Underneath it's just like anything else. Even computed GOTOs of FORTRAN are harder to deal with.
At least now we know who their target market is.
It was always their target market. Do you think Google expected RMS and geeks like him to jump into social networking? How smart must be the user who wants to spend years of their life sending pointless "updates" and receiving the same from other people?