You didn't happen to miss the myriad of shootings that happened over the past few years, did you? A disgruntled student knows when taking a firearm into school that there is a 100% guarantee that nobody else in that building has access to a firearm. It's like shooting fish in a barrel!
Let a few teachers pack a gun under their shirt, or on their ankle. We're talking about college educated people who have decided to pick a career to help children rise to their full potential here, not Joe Blow off the street. School's a friggen danger zone. Some nut job wants to pop a few children in the head, where's he gonna go? A school! You're guaranteed to have to wait for the police to get there before you can get taken down. You'd have time to reload your pistol over and over again as you mowed them all down.
I think we should allow guns in school for the safety of the children. Personally, any gun-free zone is a horribly unsafe place if you ask me. If you disagree I suggest you slap a sign in your front yard saying, "This is a gun free zone!". If any would-be criminals are casing for a place to rob, or murder, it's probably going to be yours.
I think you did a pretty good job of summarizing that one up. I'd like to clear up your point about the Web-based app though.
Personally, writing an "application" isn't engineering, and it really doesn't even require a computer scientist to do. I'm talking about bare-bones pithy little applications that don't have to take anything into account except one or maybe two different systems; like your database structure and your application layer. You can tier them up individually, but in the end somebody writing a product that snatches data from a DB that's located close (network wise) to your application is really writing a very simple system. I don't care if it's a web application, console app, or a VB app; it's the scope of the job that really matters. You did bring this up, so please don't think I'm trying to lambast you here.
There was a comment about the Indian outsourcing a few days ago where a poster stated that he thinks programmers really are plug-in plug-out now, as writing an application is just dragging some icons and slapping out some VB code here and there. This is true, there's a good market for such systems, but when you need something more complex than that, you need a computer scientist, or if things get really big, you need an Engineer. I'll try and make some sense out of all of this here.
I'm not degreed, as I jumped into the job market at an opportune time and was very dissatisfied with my education. There's a myriad of reasons for this, but I won't go into them. Perhaps it was sheer arrogance from being young, who knows.
Because of this I will not seriously consider myself an Engineer; however I do the work of an Engineer now. My previous job title was "Application Developer" -- a politically correct term for "code monkey". I hated that job's duties, but I stuck with it as it paid the bills until something fell into my lap that would bring me back into an engineering role. As code monkey you don't have any choice about what's going on, you just write components or applications that require pretty much zero-thought if you've got a basic understanding of how an application should be structured and sufficent experience. It's mind numbing work usually. It irked me to no end doing this job because I knew darned good and well it was no more advanced than the drivel I could crank out when I was 16 years old.
Now, where I'm at now I don't even write code most of the time. I'll hack up a system I've designed and fit it into our architecture if the developers are strapped for time, or if it would take too long to draw up a formal requirements spec for them though. What I'm doing now is fixing architectural problems related to a system we've purchased that just doesn't scale up well. It wasn't engineered -- it was code-monkey'ed out the door. To top it all off, it's a web-application that I'm fixing. The core product was well engineered, but the web application wasn't, probably because they figured any code monkey could do it. Boy, where they wrong.
A lot of this is mindset, as you mentioned earlier. A developer, when presented with the next-gen architecure of this application will usually just nod at the feature set and hope to hell they don't break existing API's. I, along with my team, are paid to find holes in this, and bring up the what-if's, and point out the impossiblity of some of their claims before we're knee deep in the next version withou a paddle.
Complex systems, with many layers (think multi-contentinal systems pointing back to a centralized database, or distributed databases replicating between them) need Engineers.
Complex problems, with large datasets and non-obvious algorithms to solve said problem require a computer scientist. How would one go about properly aggregating seperate datasets and pulling out meaningful stastical data from them and get the job done before the next century?
Fleshing out the code behind a UML diagram takes a code monkey.
I haven't followed the X-Box hacking projects out there, but if this is the first person to try a buffer-overflow on an existing certified game then I'll bet we're onto something here. With the plethora of games coming out that are coded under tight deadlines I'd imagine there's going to be a rather large number of buffer overflows found in stuff like this. The reading of a saved-game from the memory chip is a great one. I'd imagine you could do something similiar when games need to pull data from the hard drive too. On top of that, with things going online there's a high probability (in my mind) that buffer overflows will exist within the networking code.
Now, there are two ways MS can entirely prevent this. One is to re-structure the X-box OS so that buffer overflows just cannot occur. There are theoritical techniques for this if I'm not mistaken; but nobody's got a horribly good reason to do this. MS does now I guess.
Or, MS could do a security audit on all the code for a game before it comes out and verify that it's free of buffer overflows. Baahahaha!
Apparently it is legal to have a concealed weapon, but having a concealed cell phone or disabling caller ID violates the law.
I'll bite. I presume you're making a reference to Michigan relaxing it's handling of permits to Carry a Concealed Weapon (CCW) that occured about a year and a half ago from today. The media around here wasn't too for the idea, and they made it sound like every idiot out there could get one. I'm sure you looked up the legal rules behind getting one if this matter concerns you, but I'll repeat some of them here for other Slashdotter's that might not be from Michigan:
You must be 21 years old.
You must have a clean bill of mental health.
You must complete an 8 hour pistol safety course.
You must provide every adress you've lived at in the last 8 years.
You must be fingerprinted, on your dime.
You must provide them a photo with proper dimensions for your license.
You must have not commied a misdemeanor in the past 3 years.*
And there's a list of crimes that you cannot have commited in the last 8 years.
Once you meet all this criteria, you're subjected to a 30-90 day waiting period while they evaluate you, and before approval you must appear in front of a board so they can take a look at you and make sure you're not a total nut that talks to himself.
Now, my asterik after the 3 year misdemeanor thing. This means any type of misdemeanor, you know, like an expired license plate, fishing without a proper license (mistakes happen), getting caught with a beer when you're 20 years old.
On top of that, there's a slew of places that you cannot take one into. Namely schools (where they're probably needed most), any establishment that serves alcohol (Pizza Hut, Red Lobster), college classrooms or dorms, and religious worship buildings (unless you have permission). You can carry it to school though, if you stay in your car, and if the child you're dropping off is your own blood child. You can't drop off your step kids though, because people that drop off step kids at school are more likely to pull a gun and start firing that people dropping off their blood children. Or something.
Ah, and to go along with that rule about not taking it anywhere alcohol is served, you can't carry if you've got a BAC at or over 0.02 percent. That's less than a single beer. Come home from work still strapped, have a beer, and then take out the garbage and you'd better remember to remove your weapon before you step out of the house. You're in violation of the law if you don't. Wonderful.
So, if you really think Michigan's full of a bunch of gun toting conservatives you're wrong. It's full of a bunch of liberals who actually tightened the restricions on a CCW while making it look like every nutjob in Michigan could carry a pistol just to scare the snot out of people.
One more point, there's another segment of the population that can carry a gun: criminals. They don't have any of the restrictions the law abiding population does though. Nice that we gave them a list of places where they know good people CAN'T have guns now, isn't it?
You don't tax it when it comes in, you'd tax it when the money went out. If you send $100,000 seas for labor in making sofware you should pay a tax on that similar to what you'd be taxed if you spent $100,000 in labor for US employees. We're not worried about valueable software getting into this country duty-free like you would with a car, we're worried about US dollars heading out of the country to buy cheap labor.
It keeps the playing field level for US workers. It's unfair, agreed. Personally I'd rather see businesses go unregulated here to a much larger degree. If US consulting companies played by the same set of rules (tax systems) as Indian companies we'd probably be able to compete with them on a fair playing field. I don't know what income taxes are like in India, but I'd wager that they're lower than they are here.
Re:XML definitely does not suck, XSL does somewhat
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Why XML Doesn't Suck
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· Score: 1
I liked XSLT once I got used to it. It's a big step to make going from a functional programming language style to something that's more of a pattern matching state machine, so there' some initial confusion. In the end though, you can get some really powerful stuff with it. Probably doesn't lend itself to maintence very well though, as you have to "grok" the entire scheme of things to figure out how things got from point A to point B.
The simplest way to explain it is it's the difference in parsing strings with strtok(), for() loops, and character arrays vs regular expressions. Sure, the regexps can get hard to understand, but once you "get" it there's less mystery and less chance for odd things to occur. It's very concise, just like XSLT is.
This particular application was taking PDM data from an RDBMS and pulling it up into a set of Java objects. The objects handled manipulation of their structures, which wrote back to the DB, and all supported an interface with let them serialize themselves out to XML. You serlized the top-level object which would start serilizing children, and they serialized their children, etc. You got a nice XML tree when you were done to dump to disk and XSLT it over into HTML or XML:FO. Worked wonderfully if you asked me. I couldn't have imagined trying to do something so easily without the use of XML/XSLT.
Ah hem, but you're wrong. Well, a little bit right. No script should segfault the interpreter, but there's no good way I know of to keep the interpreter from segfaulting when the script makes calls to functions that drill down into shared libraries or.dll's. As long as something's in the same process it can take the whole thing down with an invalid memory access. I see it all the time in Java code using JNI to get at Win32.dll's. It sucks, yes, but it's not the interpreter's fault.
Now, today I'm running a Java application under a web application server and the server would just die -- with no error message. Nothing, not a single line of output. It just exited, logging nothing to a file nor to screen. -THAT- is horribly unacceptable.
What kinda stupid cops don't know their way around their own precinct?
That's funny... and something I didn't think about at first. I get lost around my own area of town, so it didn't occur to me. But when I'm paid to drive around it 8 hours a day every day of the week it'd be pretty hilarious for me to get lost in that area, or to not know how to get from point A to point B.
The only upshot I can see to that is giving officers a map with some logistical reasoning behind it. Granted, if you need to actually plan your officer's time from crime to crime with precision you've probably got an issue. Maybe it would be useful for high-speed chases if there's enough data pickup-up points ou there, but that's far fetched.
Yeah, every cop needs to know who they arrested last week. (You do know mugshots are taken AFTER they arrest you, right?)
Ah yes, because we all know that criminals only ever strike once in their life and learn their lesson from then on out.:) The majority of criminals out there have a prior of some sort. You can get your picture taken for all kinds of crimes out there, and once you're on file it's handy for the police to have that. Even if they're stopping you for a traffic ticket it would be nice for them to look your picture up and visually verify that the guy behind the wheel is who they're dealing with.
With your last point. I agree, it's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Ah yes. The highly sophisticated gang banger that can't hold his gun with two hands and keep it in an upright position while he "puts a cap in some mo-fo's ass" is going to be jamming 802.11b equipment so his homey's can run rampant.
What kind of shit do you people smoke around here? Seriously. I'll give you my address so you can send some over, becuase I'm obvioulsy a little to realistic at times.
Okay, we'll assume some gang banger with the techno know-how to jam EVERY possible signal they have at their disposal actually exists. What the hell do you think a police officer would do when riding around and his radio and computer suddenly stop functioning? Hit high-alert mode and seek out the first suspicious human being.
You think they're going to sit there while their shit crackles and say, "Oh, must be low-crime, our radio's on the fritz."
You show me a person that's actualy jamming police transmission and I'll show you somebody's got that's more the the local PD after them.
You show me a cop that's dumb enough to rely on electronics to let him know when there's bad shit around and I'll show you somebody with a very short career.
Hi, I'm the Slashdotter that LEAVES MY HOUSE NOW AND AGAIN.
If you READ the article you'd see that they police would be using this largely for mug shots, Amber Alerts, and getting quick maps of where they need to go as they pass the station. It's a time saver. Consider it the equivalent of the drive-through donught shop. It keeps the men out the road more; period. Jamming this is no more beneficial than causing a big line at the local Dunkin' Donuts with your buddies to keep the bacon out of their cars for longer.
Well, given that I'm sitting here with a radio scanner dropping in on the local police department's communications I can hardly think that WiFi is really going to be a huge reason for them to finally get secure.
Radio shack scanner to hit current air waves: $100 USD, maybe less.
802.11b capable laptop: $1000 USD, perhaps less, but nowhere near 100 dollars.
They didn't get with the program when it was cheap to eaves drop... and at long range. Why the snot would they start eavesdropping on the police only a few hundred yards away with expensive equipment?
Police don't do anything horribly sensitive. They're marginally better than a group of 30 guys with nothing to do on their time (depending on the size of your town) that go out and wrangle up trouble makers.
I appreciate what they do, but this is no CIA, FBI, or Navy Seals team we're talking about. They really don't have any information that is all that too valuable. I don't worry in the least bit that somebody might snoop on the communications. The drunk guy trying to beat up his wife, the crazy guy jumping up and down at cars on the side of the road, and the wreckless driver on the road don't really want to invest the time in snooping in on their business.
Dirty Larry already knows when to stay low. He committed a crime, so stay low for a while and keep out of sight. You don't need an 802.11bb served webpage with your mugshot on it to show yourself that you're a suspect.
For crying out loud, go out and commit a few small crimes. You'll find out how stupid you have to actually be to get caught doing shit.
I've given this some though over the years, trying to figure out why we have fossil records that just don't seem to match up. It seems as though we find tropical stuff everywhere.
This might be a bit too far out there for most Slashdotters, but what if the idea of Pangenea (or whatever the original single continent is thought all land came from) really did exist, and that a sudden dramatic change in the Earth's climate caused plates to move in massive strides over a very short period of time? It would take something unlike the modern world has ever seen to do this, but...
I'm a firm beleiver that there was a massive flood early on in man's history. One that covered the entire earth. Now, for this to happen the world's oceans would have had to have been vaporized rather quickly and then recondensed causing it to rain for a substantial period of time. Magma breaching the earth's crust and heading into the oceans or something would be needed to do this. As the world was covered in water the plates shifted violently under the stress and we ended up with the 7 continents we have now. From that time they've only been drifting rather slowly, still trying to settle down.
Call me crazy, but it's sound enough to calm my curiosity.
I'm seeing way too many of these posts. It's a non-issue folks. If you read the article (I skimmed it) you'll see they see it being used for:
Sending mug-shots over the air.
Sending maps.
Sending Amber Alert pictures.
They need it for -- pictures. None of which are sensitive information. Mug shots can be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Amber Alert pictures are intended to be public, and last I knew maps of your local town weren't a closely guarded government secret.
Besides, do you really want police having information that's too secret for you? I sure don't.
The project started in 1968, with the first book hitting print in 1973 if I'm not mistaken. I don't see them ever not being a corner of the computer scientists collection though.
I can see justifications for removing Hussein. I'm not a total isolationist. But armies are much more effective at killing other armies, and civilian populace, then they are at killing specified individuals.
You're right... armies aren't good at removing specific individuals. Perhaps you'd like to take a team of buddies out there with some sniper rifles and try and remove Saddam personally? After all, that's the most effective, efficient, and humane solution.
You might have a bit of trouble though getting through the army he has setup though, and getting people around him to buckle and reveal his position would be a bit hard with a team of 5 guys, but that'd be the proper thing to do.
It's simple really. You march in, take the country, and watch people fold. Saddam and his family will try and hold out, but eventually their position will be revealed. I pray to God that it takes a few casualties as possible for this to happen, but when it does it's just a couple of more cruise missles, bunker bombs or well placed.308's to the head of some individuals and it's all over and Iraq can be rebuilt.
As much as I'd like to think a single Special Forces team could do this on their own I realize it's just not a possibility.
Re:You just validated terrorism (Was Re:Perspectiv
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Updates on War in Iraq
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Forget for a moment arguments of right and wrong, takelook at the potential consequences of this action. If enlightened self interest does not show that this invasion serves only a very few people and not the majority of the US (or the rest of the world) then I am truly talking to a fanatic.
*bonk* You're right. What possible bad could come to to the world by letting a known mass murderer who's attempted the takeover of neighboring countries -POSSIBLY- come about? I don't know about you, but if we had never pissed Hitler off maybe WWII would never have happened. Maybe if we just let these maniacs run loose for a while they'll get their fill on their own turf and never both anybody else.
We tried that for a number of years. It failed. Miserably. Millions of lives were lost in WWI and WWII. We, and Britain, won't make that mistake again. You do realize that Saddam is a bad boy playing with toys that the UN has declared he shouldn't have right?
Then again, if you think Saddam should have all these weapons around, and it's okay for him to hang onto them and dipose of them on his own free time you're probably okay with violent convicts with felonys on their record in the US slowly disposing of their firearms for a 12 year period. After all, it's only fair. Just send a probation officer to their door every now and again to make sure that they got rid of one gun every so often.
Regarding your first setence that I quoted; forgetting the difference between "right and wrong" is the most assinine argument I could think of in this time. The difference between right and wrong is, well, central to this whole argument.
The second part of your first sentence, regarding the consequences of the US's actions, I think is a moot point. We're doing the right thing; and when you do the right think you accept the consequences of that. I'm fine with that. Many of us are. The fourth plane on Sept 11 realized quickly how to deal with terrorism. Just thank your lucky stars that there's a few of us here in the US that still know passiveness is a thing of the past.
Us fanatics keep the enemy scared and keep you safe. If you don't like that, go to Iraq.
No, it's one nation's army going in to assasinate 3 men in the same family. There's a chance that the Iraqi army will stand in the way though and protect their leader. This is not a nation vs nation "war" or "conflict". It's a nation vs "group of nutjobs located in Iraq" conflict with the ultimate goal of taking out 3 men.
This will be about as challenging as the US military going after 3 prized bucks in Montana with PETA standing in the way. I hope to God that PETA knows enough not to shoot back and knows when to duck when we take our kill shots at the bucks.
I grew up in a world where the U.S. was the good guys, and we were happy to be good guys too. Now this war has proven that America is a bully. Funny how sometimes the bullied kids fight back. Does the word 'Columbine' mean anything to you?
Bully my ass. I'm sorry, but this is just nuts. That son of a bitch launched four missles into Kuwait today that he's been forbidden to own by the UN for 12 years. You think he found them under his couch and decided to lob them over just to see if they went "boom"? You think he "forgot" they were there? He knew he had them, and they should have been destroyed. He was ordered to do so diplomatically by the UN 12 years ago. He didn't.
Can you really come up with a good reason as to -WHY- that's acceptable? He disobeyed UN orders. He's on his own. We disobeyed UN ordera and have now got 40 countries giving us the "OK Nod" for the operation. Nobody, aside form the USA and the Brits were willing to take a stand against him.
You think Saddam's a nice diplomatic fellow that desrves a few more years? Fine. Go fucking live there.
Iraq -was- disarming? They had 12 yeard to do it! Saddam has, and has never had, the intention of disarming. Do you really honestly think that it takes a country as small as theirs to disarm themselves of their long range weapons?
The idea that diplomacy was working is pure and utter bullshit.
Aside from that, we've got a humanitarian point to this whole thing. I was watching CNN tonight as they interviewed a group of Iraqi immigrants to the USA today in Dearborn Michigan. They were happy and smiling that Saddam was the target of this war. In fact, they had interviewed an Iraqi man who's house was hit by a US missle in 1991 -- and he had no qualms about it, he was just a casulty of an anti-Saddam war.
To see the look of joy on their faces to know that the USA is doing something about the horrid circumstances in their country is enough reason for me to support this "war".... and it's not a war. Think about that... there are Iraqi's in this country that are -glad- to see their homeland bombed by the USA if that means getting Saddam out of power. That's our goal -- to get this nutjob and his sons out of the country. They chose death over exile; and so be it. At one point an Iraqi man asked his fellow's how many wanted to see Saddam gone.. they all raised their hands. He asked how many had lost a family member because of Saddam and nearly all of them left their hands up. That's plain fucked up.
Raise your hand if you lost a loved one from Bush... we'll get less than 100% return on that one.
I'd chalk it all up to propoganda, as I'm not a pro federal government type of guy, but frankly seeing Iraqi's cheering on the war just shows me how much this needs to be done. It's not a very popular opinion, but it's mine. Lets take theese three sons of bitches out.
Yes, this country will see an increase in terrorism for our actions. I have no qualms about that at all though. If a bunch of radical Muslims want to take out their anger on us on our homeland that's fine by me -- they'll soon find out why no country has ever tried attacking us on our home land.
If you're against this campaign so be it. But, if you are, head to Dearborne where there's a group of Iraqi's watching an Al Jazera satelite feed and explain to them why their leader is deserving of another chance, and that you think he's a good guy. If you make it out of there alive my hat's off to you.
This man's own people want him dead. I will show zero remorse when it happens too.
Re:I'm Sorry...
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But I feel bad for the United States troops in this ordeal, as well as the Iraqi people. Yeah, Saddam might be a dick, but Bush is being no better at this point.
Be careful what you say there. The US has not been ordered by an International community to disarm. The US community has not disobeyed orders after being defeated in a war to disarm. The US government hasn't gassed thousands of rebels. Bush's children haven't tortuted and killed citizens to strike fear in others to never go against the government.
We have a president in office right now that didn't even get a majority of the popular vote. I like Bush more than Gore, but quite frankly, the fact that Bush is in office right now shows just how different we are from Iraq. Remember Iraq's last election? Saddam got 100% of the vote. You can't honestly think that's realistic, can you? It's a dicatorship -- and a horrid one at that.
Bush has ordered thousands of men into the line of fire; which one could equate to being a poor decision, but these are all men and women that signed up for the task. They aren't random people being executed arbitarily for their beleifs. I have one friend already in Kuwait, and more on the way one they're through basic training. They signed up -AFTER- the shit hit the fan. Heck, I'm giving a guy firearms training before he signs up for the Air Force because he's never fired a gun in his life. We got done with session #2 today, went to the pub and found out that the war has started already.
To equate Bush to Saddam is insane to me. The fact that you can do that, assuming you're a US citizen, and get away with it is proof that Bush, and the US, is far better than Saddam. You'd be dead or tortured in short order had you said the same thing in Iraq. Don't forget that.
Aside from that, remember, that while I disagree whole heartdly with your statement, and it disgusts me to think that somebody in the US would make such a comparision; I'd still fight for YOUR right to say that.
Make no mistake... this is not a war against Iraq. This is an assasination attempt. Period. We want Saddam's regime out of control which means the assisination of him and his sons. Nothing more. As far as I'm concerned NOBODY in Iraq is being targetted except them. The soliders that wish to fight for Saddam have every opportunity to get out and quit. Some will stay and fight, and they will die. That's their choice.
Your opinion disgusts me, but living in a nation where your opinion would get you killed would disgust me far more. Be thankful for what you've got.
3)In the first movie he was upside down for some shots. try that with back pain.
I don't care what kind of back pain I'm in. String me upside down in the rain and give me an on screen kiss with Kirsten Dunst and I'm there. Oh poor pitiful me! The agony!
For the record, when in back pain I prefer being suspended or upside down. I've had periods where I couldn't actually walk and I'd grab ahold of something taller than I and pick my feet up, and just hang there for 20 minutes. It doesn't help long term a whole lot, but sure as snot makes your back feel better while you're suspended. If my arms could have held out for 4 hours or so I'd have probably achived some sort of rehabilitation. Laying on a the floor with your feet on a coffee table and legs (knee to hip to back) at a 90 degree angle helps too.
I still say having a red-headed woman smooching you while in suspension is the best cure though. It does wonders.
That's defective, though I've seen my Glock 21 do that from time to time. I can slap in a mag real hard when it's slide is locked open and from the little vibration that creates the mag locks in and the slide drops forward. It would be horribly awesome if a gun was designed to do that from the get-go in my opinion.
It's certainly not the worst defect you can have in your springs... it's even a nice bonus to me. That's kind of got me geeked though.. what if Glock or H&K could design a gun that would slap the slide forward as soon as the mag was inserted and secured? Holy poop... I'd get one!
After all, PostgreSQL has triggers, stored-procedures, functions, referential integrity, and tons of other features to make your life easier. You may not need all of these features now, but can you honestly say your app won't expand and require advanced features?
Gimmie a break dude. I'm sick of hearing all this stuff about triggers, sub selects, and stored procedures. I can honestly say that no database really needs these things.
In my 6 months of professional development at a 3 man shop I think I'm perfectly well qualified to say that no RDBMS will ever need these futures. I can't possibly imagine a design so fubar that it would EVER have to rely on the RDBMS to enforce such rules. That's what application level code is for! Sheesh!
Well, maybe such things would be useful if you had more than one application pointing at the same database... or if you planned to maintain the DB's integrity over any length of time. But that kind of shit never happens in the real world. It's a made up story of Slashdot posts and database classes.
Given that text doesn't relay voice inflection very well: The above is sarcasim.
Shortly after I moved out of the home my mother called me up once to ask me...
For my phone number.
I gave it to her, and chit-chatted, lettting her know I was okay. I don't know if it was just a really bad execuse or if she was just a bit off her rocker that day. Mental illness -does- run in the family:)
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't happen to miss the myriad of shootings that happened over the past few years, did you? A disgruntled student knows when taking a firearm into school that there is a 100% guarantee that nobody else in that building has access to a firearm. It's like shooting fish in a barrel!
Let a few teachers pack a gun under their shirt, or on their ankle. We're talking about college educated people who have decided to pick a career to help children rise to their full potential here, not Joe Blow off the street. School's a friggen danger zone. Some nut job wants to pop a few children in the head, where's he gonna go? A school! You're guaranteed to have to wait for the police to get there before you can get taken down. You'd have time to reload your pistol over and over again as you mowed them all down.
I think we should allow guns in school for the safety of the children. Personally, any gun-free zone is a horribly unsafe place if you ask me. If you disagree I suggest you slap a sign in your front yard saying, "This is a gun free zone!". If any would-be criminals are casing for a place to rob, or murder, it's probably going to be yours.
Think about the children!
I think you did a pretty good job of summarizing that one up. I'd like to clear up your point about the Web-based app though.
Personally, writing an "application" isn't engineering, and it really doesn't even require a computer scientist to do. I'm talking about bare-bones pithy little applications that don't have to take anything into account except one or maybe two different systems; like your database structure and your application layer. You can tier them up individually, but in the end somebody writing a product that snatches data from a DB that's located close (network wise) to your application is really writing a very simple system. I don't care if it's a web application, console app, or a VB app; it's the scope of the job that really matters. You did bring this up, so please don't think I'm trying to lambast you here.
There was a comment about the Indian outsourcing a few days ago where a poster stated that he thinks programmers really are plug-in plug-out now, as writing an application is just dragging some icons and slapping out some VB code here and there. This is true, there's a good market for such systems, but when you need something more complex than that, you need a computer scientist, or if things get really big, you need an Engineer. I'll try and make some sense out of all of this here.
I'm not degreed, as I jumped into the job market at an opportune time and was very dissatisfied with my education. There's a myriad of reasons for this, but I won't go into them. Perhaps it was sheer arrogance from being young, who knows.
Because of this I will not seriously consider myself an Engineer; however I do the work of an Engineer now. My previous job title was "Application Developer" -- a politically correct term for "code monkey". I hated that job's duties, but I stuck with it as it paid the bills until something fell into my lap that would bring me back into an engineering role. As code monkey you don't have any choice about what's going on, you just write components or applications that require pretty much zero-thought if you've got a basic understanding of how an application should be structured and sufficent experience. It's mind numbing work usually. It irked me to no end doing this job because I knew darned good and well it was no more advanced than the drivel I could crank out when I was 16 years old.
Now, where I'm at now I don't even write code most of the time. I'll hack up a system I've designed and fit it into our architecture if the developers are strapped for time, or if it would take too long to draw up a formal requirements spec for them though. What I'm doing now is fixing architectural problems related to a system we've purchased that just doesn't scale up well. It wasn't engineered -- it was code-monkey'ed out the door. To top it all off, it's a web-application that I'm fixing. The core product was well engineered, but the web application wasn't, probably because they figured any code monkey could do it. Boy, where they wrong.
A lot of this is mindset, as you mentioned earlier. A developer, when presented with the next-gen architecure of this application will usually just nod at the feature set and hope to hell they don't break existing API's. I, along with my team, are paid to find holes in this, and bring up the what-if's, and point out the impossiblity of some of their claims before we're knee deep in the next version withou a paddle.
Complex systems, with many layers (think multi-contentinal systems pointing back to a centralized database, or distributed databases replicating between them) need Engineers.
Complex problems, with large datasets and non-obvious algorithms to solve said problem require a computer scientist. How would one go about properly aggregating seperate datasets and pulling out meaningful stastical data from them and get the job done before the next century?
Fleshing out the code behind a UML diagram takes a code monkey.
Summary:
You need a big system? Find an
I haven't followed the X-Box hacking projects out there, but if this is the first person to try a buffer-overflow on an existing certified game then I'll bet we're onto something here. With the plethora of games coming out that are coded under tight deadlines I'd imagine there's going to be a rather large number of buffer overflows found in stuff like this. The reading of a saved-game from the memory chip is a great one. I'd imagine you could do something similiar when games need to pull data from the hard drive too. On top of that, with things going online there's a high probability (in my mind) that buffer overflows will exist within the networking code.
Now, there are two ways MS can entirely prevent this. One is to re-structure the X-box OS so that buffer overflows just cannot occur. There are theoritical techniques for this if I'm not mistaken; but nobody's got a horribly good reason to do this. MS does now I guess.
Or, MS could do a security audit on all the code for a game before it comes out and verify that it's free of buffer overflows. Baahahaha!
I'll bite. I presume you're making a reference to Michigan relaxing it's handling of permits to Carry a Concealed Weapon (CCW) that occured about a year and a half ago from today. The media around here wasn't too for the idea, and they made it sound like every idiot out there could get one. I'm sure you looked up the legal rules behind getting one if this matter concerns you, but I'll repeat some of them here for other Slashdotter's that might not be from Michigan:
Once you meet all this criteria, you're subjected to a 30-90 day waiting period while they evaluate you, and before approval you must appear in front of a board so they can take a look at you and make sure you're not a total nut that talks to himself.
Now, my asterik after the 3 year misdemeanor thing. This means any type of misdemeanor, you know, like an expired license plate, fishing without a proper license (mistakes happen), getting caught with a beer when you're 20 years old.
On top of that, there's a slew of places that you cannot take one into. Namely schools (where they're probably needed most), any establishment that serves alcohol (Pizza Hut, Red Lobster), college classrooms or dorms, and religious worship buildings (unless you have permission). You can carry it to school though, if you stay in your car, and if the child you're dropping off is your own blood child. You can't drop off your step kids though, because people that drop off step kids at school are more likely to pull a gun and start firing that people dropping off their blood children. Or something.
Ah, and to go along with that rule about not taking it anywhere alcohol is served, you can't carry if you've got a BAC at or over 0.02 percent. That's less than a single beer. Come home from work still strapped, have a beer, and then take out the garbage and you'd better remember to remove your weapon before you step out of the house. You're in violation of the law if you don't. Wonderful.
So, if you really think Michigan's full of a bunch of gun toting conservatives you're wrong. It's full of a bunch of liberals who actually tightened the restricions on a CCW while making it look like every nutjob in Michigan could carry a pistol just to scare the snot out of people.
One more point, there's another segment of the population that can carry a gun: criminals. They don't have any of the restrictions the law abiding population does though. Nice that we gave them a list of places where they know good people CAN'T have guns now, isn't it?
You don't tax it when it comes in, you'd tax it when the money went out. If you send $100,000 seas for labor in making sofware you should pay a tax on that similar to what you'd be taxed if you spent $100,000 in labor for US employees. We're not worried about valueable software getting into this country duty-free like you would with a car, we're worried about US dollars heading out of the country to buy cheap labor.
It keeps the playing field level for US workers. It's unfair, agreed. Personally I'd rather see businesses go unregulated here to a much larger degree. If US consulting companies played by the same set of rules (tax systems) as Indian companies we'd probably be able to compete with them on a fair playing field. I don't know what income taxes are like in India, but I'd wager that they're lower than they are here.
I liked XSLT once I got used to it. It's a big step to make going from a functional programming language style to something that's more of a pattern matching state machine, so there' some initial confusion. In the end though, you can get some really powerful stuff with it. Probably doesn't lend itself to maintence very well though, as you have to "grok" the entire scheme of things to figure out how things got from point A to point B.
The simplest way to explain it is it's the difference in parsing strings with strtok(), for() loops, and character arrays vs regular expressions. Sure, the regexps can get hard to understand, but once you "get" it there's less mystery and less chance for odd things to occur. It's very concise, just like XSLT is.
This particular application was taking PDM data from an RDBMS and pulling it up into a set of Java objects. The objects handled manipulation of their structures, which wrote back to the DB, and all supported an interface with let them serialize themselves out to XML. You serlized the top-level object which would start serilizing children, and they serialized their children, etc. You got a nice XML tree when you were done to dump to disk and XSLT it over into HTML or XML:FO. Worked wonderfully if you asked me. I couldn't have imagined trying to do something so easily without the use of XML/XSLT.
Ah hem, but you're wrong. Well, a little bit right. No script should segfault the interpreter, but there's no good way I know of to keep the interpreter from segfaulting when the script makes calls to functions that drill down into shared libraries or .dll's. As long as something's in the same process it can take the whole thing down with an invalid memory access. I see it all the time in Java code using JNI to get at Win32 .dll's. It sucks, yes, but it's not the interpreter's fault.
Now, today I'm running a Java application under a web application server and the server would just die -- with no error message. Nothing, not a single line of output. It just exited, logging nothing to a file nor to screen. -THAT- is horribly unacceptable.
What kinda stupid cops don't know their way around their own precinct?
That's funny... and something I didn't think about at first. I get lost around my own area of town, so it didn't occur to me. But when I'm paid to drive around it 8 hours a day every day of the week it'd be pretty hilarious for me to get lost in that area, or to not know how to get from point A to point B.
The only upshot I can see to that is giving officers a map with some logistical reasoning behind it. Granted, if you need to actually plan your officer's time from crime to crime with precision you've probably got an issue. Maybe it would be useful for high-speed chases if there's enough data pickup-up points ou there, but that's far fetched.
Yeah, every cop needs to know who they arrested last week. (You do know mugshots are taken AFTER they arrest you, right?)
Ah yes, because we all know that criminals only ever strike once in their life and learn their lesson from then on out.
With your last point. I agree, it's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Ah yes. The highly sophisticated gang banger that can't hold his gun with two hands and keep it in an upright position while he "puts a cap in some mo-fo's ass" is going to be jamming 802.11b equipment so his homey's can run rampant.
What kind of shit do you people smoke around here? Seriously. I'll give you my address so you can send some over, becuase I'm obvioulsy a little to realistic at times.
Okay, we'll assume some gang banger with the techno know-how to jam EVERY possible signal they have at their disposal actually exists. What the hell do you think a police officer would do when riding around and his radio and computer suddenly stop functioning? Hit high-alert mode and seek out the first suspicious human being.
You think they're going to sit there while their shit crackles and say, "Oh, must be low-crime, our radio's on the fritz."
You show me a person that's actualy jamming police transmission and I'll show you somebody's got that's more the the local PD after them.
You show me a cop that's dumb enough to rely on electronics to let him know when there's bad shit around and I'll show you somebody with a very short career.
Hi, I'm the Slashdotter that LEAVES MY HOUSE NOW AND AGAIN.
If you READ the article you'd see that they police would be using this largely for mug shots, Amber Alerts, and getting quick maps of where they need to go as they pass the station. It's a time saver. Consider it the equivalent of the drive-through donught shop. It keeps the men out the road more; period. Jamming this is no more beneficial than causing a big line at the local Dunkin' Donuts with your buddies to keep the bacon out of their cars for longer.
Well, given that I'm sitting here with a radio scanner dropping in on the local police department's communications I can hardly think that WiFi is really going to be a huge reason for them to finally get secure.
Radio shack scanner to hit current air waves: $100 USD, maybe less.
802.11b capable laptop: $1000 USD, perhaps less, but nowhere near 100 dollars.
They didn't get with the program when it was cheap to eaves drop... and at long range. Why the snot would they start eavesdropping on the police only a few hundred yards away with expensive equipment?
Police don't do anything horribly sensitive. They're marginally better than a group of 30 guys with nothing to do on their time (depending on the size of your town) that go out and wrangle up trouble makers.
I appreciate what they do, but this is no CIA, FBI, or Navy Seals team we're talking about. They really don't have any information that is all that too valuable. I don't worry in the least bit that somebody might snoop on the communications. The drunk guy trying to beat up his wife, the crazy guy jumping up and down at cars on the side of the road, and the wreckless driver on the road don't really want to invest the time in snooping in on their business.
Dirty Larry already knows when to stay low. He committed a crime, so stay low for a while and keep out of sight. You don't need an 802.11bb served webpage with your mugshot on it to show yourself that you're a suspect.
For crying out loud, go out and commit a few small crimes. You'll find out how stupid you have to actually be to get caught doing shit.
You're familiar with the idea that an infinite number of monkeys & typewriters would eventually compose the works of Shakespeare?
Yeah, some butt puppet decided it was a valid theory and has left my team with implementing a Pandora's box of software in the real world.
Beware, monkeys... I know where your office is....
<comical snarly face here>
I've given this some though over the years, trying to figure out why we have fossil records that just don't seem to match up. It seems as though we find tropical stuff everywhere.
This might be a bit too far out there for most Slashdotters, but what if the idea of Pangenea (or whatever the original single continent is thought all land came from) really did exist, and that a sudden dramatic change in the Earth's climate caused plates to move in massive strides over a very short period of time? It would take something unlike the modern world has ever seen to do this, but...
I'm a firm beleiver that there was a massive flood early on in man's history. One that covered the entire earth. Now, for this to happen the world's oceans would have had to have been vaporized rather quickly and then recondensed causing it to rain for a substantial period of time. Magma breaching the earth's crust and heading into the oceans or something would be needed to do this. As the world was covered in water the plates shifted violently under the stress and we ended up with the 7 continents we have now. From that time they've only been drifting rather slowly, still trying to settle down.
Call me crazy, but it's sound enough to calm my curiosity.
They need it for -- pictures. None of which are sensitive information. Mug shots can be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Amber Alert pictures are intended to be public, and last I knew maps of your local town weren't a closely guarded government secret.
Besides, do you really want police having information that's too secret for you? I sure don't.
The project started in 1968, with the first book hitting print in 1973 if I'm not mistaken. I don't see them ever not being a corner of the computer scientists collection though.
I can see justifications for removing Hussein. I'm not a total isolationist. But armies are much more effective at killing other armies, and civilian populace, then they are at killing specified individuals.
.308's to the head of some individuals and it's all over and Iraq can be rebuilt.
You're right... armies aren't good at removing specific individuals. Perhaps you'd like to take a team of buddies out there with some sniper rifles and try and remove Saddam personally? After all, that's the most effective, efficient, and humane solution.
You might have a bit of trouble though getting through the army he has setup though, and getting people around him to buckle and reveal his position would be a bit hard with a team of 5 guys, but that'd be the proper thing to do.
It's simple really. You march in, take the country, and watch people fold. Saddam and his family will try and hold out, but eventually their position will be revealed. I pray to God that it takes a few casualties as possible for this to happen, but when it does it's just a couple of more cruise missles, bunker bombs or well placed
As much as I'd like to think a single Special Forces team could do this on their own I realize it's just not a possibility.
Forget for a moment arguments of right and wrong, takelook at the potential consequences of this action. If enlightened self interest does not show that this invasion serves only a very few people and not the majority of the US (or the rest of the world) then I am truly talking to a fanatic.
*bonk* You're right. What possible bad could come to to the world by letting a known mass murderer who's attempted the takeover of neighboring countries -POSSIBLY- come about? I don't know about you, but if we had never pissed Hitler off maybe WWII would never have happened. Maybe if we just let these maniacs run loose for a while they'll get their fill on their own turf and never both anybody else.
We tried that for a number of years. It failed. Miserably. Millions of lives were lost in WWI and WWII. We, and Britain, won't make that mistake again. You do realize that Saddam is a bad boy playing with toys that the UN has declared he shouldn't have right?
Then again, if you think Saddam should have all these weapons around, and it's okay for him to hang onto them and dipose of them on his own free time you're probably okay with violent convicts with felonys on their record in the US slowly disposing of their firearms for a 12 year period. After all, it's only fair. Just send a probation officer to their door every now and again to make sure that they got rid of one gun every so often.
Regarding your first setence that I quoted; forgetting the difference between "right and wrong" is the most assinine argument I could think of in this time. The difference between right and wrong is, well, central to this whole argument.
The second part of your first sentence, regarding the consequences of the US's actions, I think is a moot point. We're doing the right thing; and when you do the right think you accept the consequences of that. I'm fine with that. Many of us are. The fourth plane on Sept 11 realized quickly how to deal with terrorism. Just thank your lucky stars that there's a few of us here in the US that still know passiveness is a thing of the past.
Us fanatics keep the enemy scared and keep you safe. If you don't like that, go to Iraq.
No, it's one nation's army going in to assasinate 3 men in the same family. There's a chance that the Iraqi army will stand in the way though and protect their leader. This is not a nation vs nation "war" or "conflict". It's a nation vs "group of nutjobs located in Iraq" conflict with the ultimate goal of taking out 3 men.
This will be about as challenging as the US military going after 3 prized bucks in Montana with PETA standing in the way. I hope to God that PETA knows enough not to shoot back and knows when to duck when we take our kill shots at the bucks.
I grew up in a world where the U.S. was the good guys, and we were happy to be good guys too. Now this war has proven that America is a bully. Funny how sometimes the bullied kids fight back. Does the word 'Columbine' mean anything to you?
Bully my ass. I'm sorry, but this is just nuts. That son of a bitch launched four missles into Kuwait today that he's been forbidden to own by the UN for 12 years. You think he found them under his couch and decided to lob them over just to see if they went "boom"? You think he "forgot" they were there? He knew he had them, and they should have been destroyed. He was ordered to do so diplomatically by the UN 12 years ago. He didn't.
Can you really come up with a good reason as to -WHY- that's acceptable? He disobeyed UN orders. He's on his own. We disobeyed UN ordera and have now got 40 countries giving us the "OK Nod" for the operation. Nobody, aside form the USA and the Brits were willing to take a stand against him.
You think Saddam's a nice diplomatic fellow that desrves a few more years? Fine. Go fucking live there.
Iraq -was- disarming? They had 12 yeard to do it! Saddam has, and has never had, the intention of disarming. Do you really honestly think that it takes a country as small as theirs to disarm themselves of their long range weapons?
The idea that diplomacy was working is pure and utter bullshit.
Aside from that, we've got a humanitarian point to this whole thing. I was watching CNN tonight as they interviewed a group of Iraqi immigrants to the USA today in Dearborn Michigan. They were happy and smiling that Saddam was the target of this war. In fact, they had interviewed an Iraqi man who's house was hit by a US missle in 1991 -- and he had no qualms about it, he was just a casulty of an anti-Saddam war.
To see the look of joy on their faces to know that the USA is doing something about the horrid circumstances in their country is enough reason for me to support this "war".... and it's not a war. Think about that... there are Iraqi's in this country that are -glad- to see their homeland bombed by the USA if that means getting Saddam out of power. That's our goal -- to get this nutjob and his sons out of the country. They chose death over exile; and so be it. At one point an Iraqi man asked his fellow's how many wanted to see Saddam gone.. they all raised their hands. He asked how many had lost a family member because of Saddam and nearly all of them left their hands up. That's plain fucked up.
Raise your hand if you lost a loved one from Bush... we'll get less than 100% return on that one.
I'd chalk it all up to propoganda, as I'm not a pro federal government type of guy, but frankly seeing Iraqi's cheering on the war just shows me how much this needs to be done. It's not a very popular opinion, but it's mine. Lets take theese three sons of bitches out.
Yes, this country will see an increase in terrorism for our actions. I have no qualms about that at all though. If a bunch of radical Muslims want to take out their anger on us on our homeland that's fine by me -- they'll soon find out why no country has ever tried attacking us on our home land.
If you're against this campaign so be it. But, if you are, head to Dearborne where there's a group of Iraqi's watching an Al Jazera satelite feed and explain to them why their leader is deserving of another chance, and that you think he's a good guy. If you make it out of there alive my hat's off to you.
This man's own people want him dead. I will show zero remorse when it happens too.
But I feel bad for the United States troops in this ordeal, as well as the Iraqi people. Yeah, Saddam might be a dick, but Bush is being no better at this point.
Be careful what you say there. The US has not been ordered by an International community to disarm. The US community has not disobeyed orders after being defeated in a war to disarm. The US government hasn't gassed thousands of rebels. Bush's children haven't tortuted and killed citizens to strike fear in others to never go against the government.
We have a president in office right now that didn't even get a majority of the popular vote. I like Bush more than Gore, but quite frankly, the fact that Bush is in office right now shows just how different we are from Iraq. Remember Iraq's last election? Saddam got 100% of the vote. You can't honestly think that's realistic, can you? It's a dicatorship -- and a horrid one at that.
Bush has ordered thousands of men into the line of fire; which one could equate to being a poor decision, but these are all men and women that signed up for the task. They aren't random people being executed arbitarily for their beleifs. I have one friend already in Kuwait, and more on the way one they're through basic training. They signed up -AFTER- the shit hit the fan. Heck, I'm giving a guy firearms training before he signs up for the Air Force because he's never fired a gun in his life. We got done with session #2 today, went to the pub and found out that the war has started already.
To equate Bush to Saddam is insane to me. The fact that you can do that, assuming you're a US citizen, and get away with it is proof that Bush, and the US, is far better than Saddam. You'd be dead or tortured in short order had you said the same thing in Iraq. Don't forget that.
Aside from that, remember, that while I disagree whole heartdly with your statement, and it disgusts me to think that somebody in the US would make such a comparision; I'd still fight for YOUR right to say that.
Make no mistake... this is not a war against Iraq. This is an assasination attempt. Period. We want Saddam's regime out of control which means the assisination of him and his sons. Nothing more. As far as I'm concerned NOBODY in Iraq is being targetted except them. The soliders that wish to fight for Saddam have every opportunity to get out and quit. Some will stay and fight, and they will die. That's their choice.
Your opinion disgusts me, but living in a nation where your opinion would get you killed would disgust me far more. Be thankful for what you've got.
Wasn't that part of the whole basis of spider man?
He decided one night not to stop a theif even though he had the power to, and that guy ended up killing his uncle.
?!?!? Gaahh! You gave away the whole movie you insensitive clod! My life is ruined!
3)In the first movie he was upside down for some shots. try that with back pain.
I don't care what kind of back pain I'm in. String me upside down in the rain and give me an on screen kiss with Kirsten Dunst and I'm there. Oh poor pitiful me! The agony!
For the record, when in back pain I prefer being suspended or upside down. I've had periods where I couldn't actually walk and I'd grab ahold of something taller than I and pick my feet up, and just hang there for 20 minutes. It doesn't help long term a whole lot, but sure as snot makes your back feel better while you're suspended. If my arms could have held out for 4 hours or so I'd have probably achived some sort of rehabilitation. Laying on a the floor with your feet on a coffee table and legs (knee to hip to back) at a 90 degree angle helps too.
I still say having a red-headed woman smooching you while in suspension is the best cure though. It does wonders.
That's defective, though I've seen my Glock 21 do that from time to time. I can slap in a mag real hard when it's slide is locked open and from the little vibration that creates the mag locks in and the slide drops forward. It would be horribly awesome if a gun was designed to do that from the get-go in my opinion.
It's certainly not the worst defect you can have in your springs... it's even a nice bonus to me. That's kind of got me geeked though.. what if Glock or H&K could design a gun that would slap the slide forward as soon as the mag was inserted and secured? Holy poop... I'd get one!
After all, PostgreSQL has triggers, stored-procedures, functions, referential integrity, and tons of other features to make your life easier. You may not need all of these features now, but can you honestly say your app won't expand and require advanced features?
Gimmie a break dude. I'm sick of hearing all this stuff about triggers, sub selects, and stored procedures. I can honestly say that no database really needs these things.
In my 6 months of professional development at a 3 man shop I think I'm perfectly well qualified to say that no RDBMS will ever need these futures. I can't possibly imagine a design so fubar that it would EVER have to rely on the RDBMS to enforce such rules. That's what application level code is for! Sheesh!
Well, maybe such things would be useful if you had more than one application pointing at the same database... or if you planned to maintain the DB's integrity over any length of time. But that kind of shit never happens in the real world. It's a made up story of Slashdot posts and database classes.
Given that text doesn't relay voice inflection very well: The above is sarcasim.
Shortly after I moved out of the home my mother called me up once to ask me...
:)
For my phone number.
I gave it to her, and chit-chatted, lettting her know I was okay. I don't know if it was just a really bad execuse or if she was just a bit off her rocker that day. Mental illness -does- run in the family