I live in Pittsburgh - well, 30 minutes outside of the city proper. On a 60-acre farm with a 3BR farmhouse that cost a half of what you'd pay for a condo in SoCal. Cost of living is fantastic compared to SoCal, and still pretty good compared to Seattle. I have a family of 5, and we live very comfortably off of my salary alone.
There are plenty of larger, "safe" companies to work for, along with a host of smaller venues if your tastes run in that direction. Want some names? Google, Intel, Apple, Seagate, Netapp, Westinghouse, Panasas, IBM, American Eagle, Alcoa, USX, Mellon Bank, UPMC, Wellspring, Vocollect, TechRx, Suma, Laurel, CMU Robotics Institute, Software Engineering Institute. Robotics companies in particular seem to be springing up like daisies lately.
If you like the culture in Seattle or SoCal better than Pittsburgh, fine - but let me ask you: how much do you really do where you are right now that you couldn't possibly do elsewhere? Movies, theater, symphony - check. Museums, libraries - check. Regatta, arts festival, ethnic food festivals of all types - check. Major sports teams (please, ignore the Pirates, though) - check. OK, so maybe you won't be able to find ten different Ethiopian restaurants. There are a couple, though - so it's not like you're dying for lack of choice.
For example, if you declare even one virtual member function, you HAVE to declare your destructor virtual.
I don't know where you got this idea. If you have virtual member functions, you probably want a virtual destructor, but it's neither a requirement, nor a given.
I'm an embedded systems developer, located in Pittsburgh, PA.
I've managed to find acceptable, well-paying work with good benefits, over and over - without having to leave the area, or even change residences.
If I can do that in Pittsburgh, I have to think that, say, doing the same in SoCal, Chicago, NY, DC, Atlanta, or any other major metro area would certainly be doable.
Its worth noting, however, that the Linux kernel as it stands simply doesn't work with any compiler other than GCC.
May have been true once, but it hasn't been for a long time. I recall seeing news about using Intel's compiler to build a Linux kernel years ago. More recently, Rob Landley's been doing some work with tinycc to get it up to snuff for kernel compiles, with the goal of generating a system that can "...completely rebuild itself, under itself, without any gnu code on the hard drive."
Perhaps tomorrow's embedded developers are programming today's desktops.
Amen!
I more or less drifted into embedded systems work from a desktop/server background. I frequently point out to people that there's a lot of confusion about what an "embedded" system is. Some people use the term to refer to 8-bit mircocontrollers that have a whopping 4K of memory and no persistent storage. Others use the term to refer to 32-bit devices with 2-4 MB of memory and 256 MB of flash for storage. There's yet another camp that's really talking about dedicated-purpose desktop systems in a compact form factor.
The point is... there used to be a pretty well defined spectrum of what "embedded" meant. Economies of scale and new technologies have started introducing gaps into that spectrum, so there's not a single continuous spread of processors, memory and storage that qualifies as "embedded". When you can take a desktop system from 1995 and shrink it down into something like a Hammer board or a Gumstix... it may be small, it may be compact, it may be used for a dedicated purpose; but practically, you're developing on something that has massively superior capabilities when compared to the traditional idea of an embedded system. You are, in fact, developing for a desktop system - albeit a desktop system in a small package with some unusual constraints.
Sigh. I had mod points yesterday, but none today - otherwise you'd be getting them right now, sir.
Of course, I'd have to give you a "+1 - Ironic" for managing to turn a discussion of Hollywood accounting around to a discussion of why love is an action, not an emotion...
It aways makes me feel kinda bad for the Microsoft developers that worked for years on Vista...
Interviewer: Did you happen to bring a copy of your resume with you?
Developer: Sure - why do you ask?
Interviewer: Well, the one you sent us looks really good, but there's a page missing.
Developer: Page missing?
Interviewer: Yes - your employment history cuts off with Microsoft in 2002. We're missing the last page.
Developer: Um. Oh.
Interviewer: It's an outstanding resume, though. Really strong.
Developer: Great... great... it's just, you see...
Interviewer: Yes?
Developer: Um. This is really hard to say. It's really... embarrassing.
Interviewer: Oh! I think I see. You were, er, out of the workforce for a while, then? No need to worry abou-
Developer: No, no, not that. I was just - you know - I was just - um. Working on -
Interviewer: <laughs> Not Vista, I hope?
Developer: No! No! Of course not!
Interviewer: <angrily> Honestly? Come on, if you were on the Vista team...
Developer: I'd tell you. See, the thing is...
Interviewer: <presses button on desk> Uh-huh?
Developer: I was... an unemployed, drug addled wreck from 2002-2007. I earned drug money running guns for local gangs.
Interviewer:...
Developer: And selling myself on the streets. You know, that sorta... stuff.
Interviewer: Really?
Developer: <downcast> Yeah. That's.... that's what I did then.
Interviewer: That's... candid of you.
Developer: <relieved> Well, I didn't want to bring it up. But you mentioned... that thing...
Interviewer: Vista?
Developer: Ugh. I didn't want you thinking I was... you know. A bad person.
Interviewer: <waves away security guard> No, it's OK, Ben - he's fine. We won't need to escort him out. My mistake.
Interviewer: So, let me tell you about our health plan's recovery support options...
I'll agree with you that most of the original poster's points don't really make his case. However, I still think his main premise - that government is the biggest roadblock to IT development - stands, but for other reasons:
Copyright "innovations"
DRM regulations (DMCA)
Software patents (and patent trolls)
Business model patents (more trolls!)
You can come up with your own list, I'm sure. There's a cost of doing business that is directly related to government regulation, which is fine and acceptable - if the government says that you need to inspect your product before it ships or follow a prescribed process to produce it, then that's a direct cost. You can figure it into your business plan, allocated resources to meet the requirements, and so on.
There is also a cost of doing business that is indirectly related to government regulation. This is caused by overly vague, inefficient, and misapplied laws that have made the exploitation of the legal system a business model in and of itself. There is no way to say "At this point, we have complied with all the regulations, and we're in the clear" - everything needs to be taken to court and decided in front of a jury. The best you can do, even if you haven't broken any laws, is hope that you never run into someone with a grudge and more money than you. That is a business killer.
(To further make my point - while I was writing this, I got a notice that a company has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project... over "illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes". Does the case have merit? Who knows? Until the judge rules - or the suing company suggests a modest out-of-court settlement - it's like the Magic Eight Ball says: "Future hazy, try again later".)
The problem is we simply do not have the foresight to know what will happen thousands of generations after the epoch of our genetic manipulations: Not only to the plants, but to those who consume them.
I may be going out on a limb here, but if you're speaking in terms of "thousands of generations", then I'm going to guess that the vast majority of "those who consume them" will be deader than the proverbial doornail.
Of course, that's the same thing I'd expect from someone who consumed non-gentically altered plants, but hey - you've made your paoint. Over 1000 years, just about everybody who consumes a GMO will die, die, DIE!!!
Don operates the second-largest detective agency in the world, and he sometimes finds me useful because I do not exist. I do not exist now because I existed once at the time and the place where we attempted to begin scoring the wild ditty of our times. I refer to the World Central Data bank project and the fact that I had a significant part in that effort to construct a working model of the real world, accounting for everyone and everything in it. How well we succeeded, and whether possession of the world's likeness does indeed provide its custodians with a greater measure of control over its functions, are questions my former colleagues still debate as the music grows more shrill and you can't see the maps for the pins. I made my decision back then and saw to it I did not receive citizenship in that second world, a place that may now have become more important than the first.
-- Roger Zelazny, "Home is the Hangman" (1975)
Re:Captcha effectiveness isn't related to difficul
on
Evolution of the 'Captcha'
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· Score: 2, Informative
Custom solutions tend to work. At least for some time. For popular OSS project this is usually not an option and not all users of the popular OSS software are capable or willing to write a custom solution.
If you read Shamus' blog post, he's not using a custom solution - he's using a standard Wordpress plugin that is configured to only offer up a single captcha phrase. Presumably, if he were to run into issues with using just the single phrase, he could update his configuration to use additional captcha phrases, without having to do any custom development.
Captcha effectiveness isn't related to difficulty
on
Evolution of the 'Captcha'
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Shamus Young (the creator of the "DM of the Rings") recently introduced a captcha on his site to deal with comment spam. In his post about using a captcha on his site, he notes that:
... I used to get many hundreds of spam a day. Traffic here has jumped up since then, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find I'm getting a couple of thousand a day by this point. But all of them bounce off the CAPTCHA, and I never even see them. I only see a spam make it through about once every other week, and I'm betting the ones that do make it though are entered manually... In any case, these are really impressive results for a CAPTCHA with only one short phrase that never changes.
Emphasis mine. He's running a fairly popular site, and using a captcha based off of a single, unchanging, three-character phrase. Just the presence of the captcha was enough to effectively eliminate his spam problem. The indication seems to be that just the presence of a captcha is enough to keep spam off of even a moderately popular site.
Just think if the Romans decided to tear down the Colleseum when they were finished with it...
Bah. The only reason that anything like the Colosseum survived was because (a) it was extremely well-built and (b) it would have cost too much to tear it down and replace it with something else. If either one of these hadn't been true, then it would have been destroyed in one of the periodic conflagarations that Rome seemed to enjoy, or it would have been razed by an emperor who would then have gone on to build something bigger and better. The fact that it's an interesting piece of architecture is just a bonus for us. The Romans of the time would have gladly demolished the thing if it were to their advantage to do so for some reason.
That's just the way it is. Buildings getting torn down is something that happens, time after time, regardless of race, culture, or geographic happenstance. Someone builds something, and if it lasts at all, in a few hundred years it's just another building to be pulled down before the latest and greatest marvel goes up.
In this case, the internet provides an example of how to deal with problems like this: you route around it.
Cygwin introduced managed mounts specifically to enable developers to deal with issues like this. Using managed mounts can be a bother, but isn't nearly as annoying as not being able to cross-compile at all.
I stand by my statement - you're both wrong (Marxist Hacker more blatantly so, but still...) In your original post, you wrote:
Overstaying a visa (which is how about 40% of illegal immigrants get here) is not even a criminal offense, not even a misdemeanor, just a civil offense like a speeding ticket. The guys who sneak across the border without ever getting a visa in the first place are only guilty of a misdemeanor.
The last part of your initial argument there (which I've emphasized) is incorrect. I pointed that out using the references you cited. Entering the country illegally is a criminal offense, and it's classification as misdemeanor or felony depends on the circumstances. As the NYAG document points out, "Federal and local enforcement have identical purposes--the prevention of the misdemeanor or felony of illegal entry." Entering the US without a visa may be a misdemeanor, or it may be a felony. I'm personally not aware of what the difference is, but obviously, the NYAG thought that it was important to point out to NY law enforcement that being in the country illegally does not automatically mean that an individual is a felon.
Next time you want to prove someone wrong, you should actually check your facts by posting them in your rebuttal. Otherwise you end up wasting everyone's time.
And next tome you want to cite something, please don't yank a phrase out of context to prove your point. The full text of the conclusion of the "Opinion of the NY Attorney General" that you cited states (emphasis mine):
New York State law enforcement officials may make arrests without warrants for criminal violations of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. However, mere status as an alien, or even as an illegal alien, may only be a civil violation of the Act and thus would not be a sufficient basis for an arrest. For a valid arrest, the officer must have probable cause to believe that the person has committed a criminal violation of the INA, such as illegal entry into the United States, and not merely a civil violation, such as illegal presence in the country.
So both you, and the original poster, are wrong. There are INA violations that are a criminal offense; the opinion makes one of those situations (illegal entry into the US) explicitly clear. If you had bothered to cite the full conclusion, that much would have been obvious. However, the conclusion makes the point that (as far as the NYAG is concerned, at least), there are INA violations that may only be considered a civil offense. Based on the opinion, this seems to include the "Sorry, my visa expired" category.
So the presence of a foreign national in the US may either be permitted, or it may be a civil offense, or it may be a criminal offense, depending on the circumstances. Clear?
How does this compare to other agencies and companies?
I'd also like to know what their usage pattern is. I suspect that a lot of FBI employees have laptops because they're, you know, pilferable... I mean, portable. An FBI special agent hauling a laptop around the state from crime scene to crime scene is a little bit different from me hauling my laptop from work to home and back. Not to mention that my job doesn't require me to be in the vicinity of known and suspected criminals on daily basis. All told, I suspect that the FBI probably has a more difficult situation to deal with than your average company.
But I wonder when they use the term "sensitive" exactly what that means?
Don't know. Some agencies use the term to refer to sensitive but unclassified data, but the FBI doesn't appear to be on the list. This might be any number of things - information on agents in the local office (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.), data about ongoing investigations, any information that might jeopardize prosecution of a case, or even just internal documents on policies and procedures. They might even be thinking of cached versions of internal web sites. I have any number of "corporate confidential" documents on my laptop, and that's without me (a low-level code monkey in the scheme of things) really even trying. I suspect your average FBI agent can rack up a lot of "sensitive" information in the same way, just as a matter of course in carrying out their duties.
I spent the last 5 years working for TimeSys, and we did a lot of work to adapt various Fedora Core packages for embedded systems use.
One of the tools we developed along the way was something called tsrpm, a set of wrappers for RPM that makes cross-compiling RPMs a relatively painless process. It's open source (GPL), has support for a number of different processor architectures (x86, various flavors of ARM and PPC, etc.), and can be used to compile packages using a glibc or uclibc based tool chains. It's non-intrusive, and uses a hint file (standard bash shell script) to conditionally control various phases of the RPM and source code build process. It's even capable of building a cross-development tool chain from source RPMs, though that process can be a little hairy.
When I left, IIRC, we had over 300 RPMs, mostly from FC5, that we could build for a good 9-10 distros (variations of architecture/libc combinations). That was the result of myself and the tsrpm author (Chris Faylor) spending about 2-3 months on the whole thing... and that included the time it took for Chris to get new gcc-4.x based tool chains building for most of the architectures.
If anyone's curious, you can see the free-as-in-[beer,speech] releases of tsrpm and some whet-your-appetite FC5-based distros here.
If you are looking for benefits specifically, most starups and small companies can not afford top-tier health insurance and dental insurance, and usually you have to kick in a whole lot for your percentage.
That hasn't been my experience here in Pittsburgh. Yeah, I know. Not exactly what you think of as a high-tech Mecca, do you? Yet we've got a really strong expert base around robotics, networking, file systems and search; and the resources of several major universities and corporations to draw on. On top of all that - and more to the point - there's an organization here called the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Aside from other things, the PTC offers member companies some really good deals on medical and dental benefits. I've worked for four startups here over the past 10 years, and quite frankly, the benefits they've been able to snag through the PTC have been equal to or better than those available from larger corporations.
I'd be really surprised if similar organizations don't exist in other cities. Don't write off working for a smaller company before you check them out and see what they have to offer. You might be pleasantly surprised.
The Koran was compiled around ~650AD (about 20 years after the death of Mohammad).
The New Testament wasn't canonized until the 16th & 17th centuries.
The date of compilation/cannonization for either work is irrelevant. Neither of those terms have anything to do with when a work was written. Every book in the NT was definitely written well before 650 AD. The conservative view is that they were all written before 100 AD, and even more liberal scholars have trouble pushing authorship past 200-300 AD. In any case - the NT books were certainly written well before the Koran, and so are "closer" to the OT.
Oh, and in any case, you're comparing apples and oranges; compilation and cannonization are not the same thing. One could certainly argue that the Koran was "cannonized" around 650 AD, but that was essentially simultaneous compilation/cannonization ("This is the only approved copy. Burn everything else.") The process was nothing at all like the compilation/cannonization of the NT, so you're still not really making any sort of reasonable comparison.
The cannonicity of certain books in the NT was certainly questioned by some Christian groups well into the 16th century. However, there was widespread agreement within Christianity on the traditional cannon (gospels, Acts, Paul's epistles, Peter's epistles, John's epistles) much earlier than that - so even that argument falls flat. Wikipedia points out that the traditional cannon was certainly accepted by 400 AD, and possibly even earlier:
The New Testament canon as it is now was first listed by St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in 367, in a letter written to his churches in Egypt, Festal Letter 39. Also cited is the Council of Rome, but not without controversy. That canon gained wider and wider recognition until it was accepted at the Third Council of Carthage in 397.
Finally, for the record - no, I am not a biblical scholar (yet.... I'm about 2/3 of the way through picking up a bachelor's degree in pastoral theology). Even without that background, I'm reasonably comfortable in saying your argument just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
We currently build something like 70 releases per night... None of this is as complex as a Linux distribution; we're only a small company which is why we've automated the process.
At my previous company, we did something very similar - and there, we were building (embedded) linux distributions. Take a look at LinuxLink for a public view. Still not as hairy as a full Fedora distro, but still something pretty hard to coordinate. IIRC, we had the capability to do incremental builds on something like 30-40 distros per night, and could manage about a dozen full rebuilds per day if we needed to do so. When I left, they were working on a board farm that would enable automated testing on native (not emulated) systems.
All in all, it was an interesting problem to work on. The build system wasn't the real bottleneck... once you figure out how to do what you want to do, and then how to do it effeciently, you end up with a build system that scales to handle whatever hardware you throw at it. If we had wanted to build 70 distros per night, for example, we would have just had to double the number of build machines in our build pool. The really interesting part (at least for the embedded stuff) was figuring out how to generate those 70 projects in the first place:-) A lot of that knowledge ended up in tsrpm, a tool specifically designed for for cross-compiling source RPMs.
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Hey... here's a thought: how about Pittsburgh.
No - I'm serious.
I live in Pittsburgh - well, 30 minutes outside of the city proper. On a 60-acre farm with a 3BR farmhouse that cost a half of what you'd pay for a condo in SoCal. Cost of living is fantastic compared to SoCal, and still pretty good compared to Seattle. I have a family of 5, and we live very comfortably off of my salary alone.
There are plenty of larger, "safe" companies to work for, along with a host of smaller venues if your tastes run in that direction. Want some names? Google, Intel, Apple, Seagate, Netapp, Westinghouse, Panasas, IBM, American Eagle, Alcoa, USX, Mellon Bank, UPMC, Wellspring, Vocollect, TechRx, Suma, Laurel, CMU Robotics Institute, Software Engineering Institute. Robotics companies in particular seem to be springing up like daisies lately.
If you like the culture in Seattle or SoCal better than Pittsburgh, fine - but let me ask you: how much do you really do where you are right now that you couldn't possibly do elsewhere? Movies, theater, symphony - check. Museums, libraries - check. Regatta, arts festival, ethnic food festivals of all types - check. Major sports teams (please, ignore the Pirates, though) - check. OK, so maybe you won't be able to find ten different Ethiopian restaurants. There are a couple, though - so it's not like you're dying for lack of choice.
Give it some thought.
I don't know where you got this idea. If you have virtual member functions, you probably want a virtual destructor, but it's neither a requirement, nor a given.
From the C++ FAQ lite, read [20.7] When should my destructor be virtual?
I'm an embedded systems developer, located in Pittsburgh, PA.
I've managed to find acceptable, well-paying work with good benefits, over and over - without having to leave the area, or even change residences.
If I can do that in Pittsburgh, I have to think that, say, doing the same in SoCal, Chicago, NY, DC, Atlanta, or any other major metro area would certainly be doable.
May have been true once, but it hasn't been for a long time. I recall seeing news about using Intel's compiler to build a Linux kernel years ago. More recently, Rob Landley's been doing some work with tinycc to get it up to snuff for kernel compiles, with the goal of generating a system that can "...completely rebuild itself, under itself, without any gnu code on the hard drive."
So... you're saying we're all doomed, then?
Amen!
I more or less drifted into embedded systems work from a desktop/server background. I frequently point out to people that there's a lot of confusion about what an "embedded" system is. Some people use the term to refer to 8-bit mircocontrollers that have a whopping 4K of memory and no persistent storage. Others use the term to refer to 32-bit devices with 2-4 MB of memory and 256 MB of flash for storage. There's yet another camp that's really talking about dedicated-purpose desktop systems in a compact form factor.
The point is... there used to be a pretty well defined spectrum of what "embedded" meant. Economies of scale and new technologies have started introducing gaps into that spectrum, so there's not a single continuous spread of processors, memory and storage that qualifies as "embedded". When you can take a desktop system from 1995 and shrink it down into something like a Hammer board or a Gumstix... it may be small, it may be compact, it may be used for a dedicated purpose; but practically, you're developing on something that has massively superior capabilities when compared to the traditional idea of an embedded system. You are, in fact, developing for a desktop system - albeit a desktop system in a small package with some unusual constraints.
Sigh. I had mod points yesterday, but none today - otherwise you'd be getting them right now, sir.
Of course, I'd have to give you a "+1 - Ironic" for managing to turn a discussion of Hollywood accounting around to a discussion of why love is an action, not an emotion...
Interviewer: Did you happen to bring a copy of your resume with you?
Developer: Sure - why do you ask?
Interviewer: Well, the one you sent us looks really good, but there's a page missing.
Developer: Page missing?
Interviewer: Yes - your employment history cuts off with Microsoft in 2002. We're missing the last page.
Developer: Um. Oh.
Interviewer: It's an outstanding resume, though. Really strong.
Developer: Great... great... it's just, you see...
Interviewer: Yes?
Developer: Um. This is really hard to say. It's really... embarrassing.
Interviewer: Oh! I think I see. You were, er, out of the workforce for a while, then? No need to worry abou-
Developer: No, no, not that. I was just - you know - I was just - um. Working on -
Interviewer: <laughs> Not Vista, I hope?
Developer: No! No! Of course not!
Interviewer: <angrily> Honestly? Come on, if you were on the Vista team...
Developer: I'd tell you. See, the thing is...
Interviewer: <presses button on desk> Uh-huh?
Developer: I was... an unemployed, drug addled wreck from 2002-2007. I earned drug money running guns for local gangs.
Interviewer:
Developer: And selling myself on the streets. You know, that sorta... stuff.
Interviewer: Really?
Developer: <downcast> Yeah. That's.... that's what I did then.
Interviewer: That's... candid of you.
Developer: <relieved> Well, I didn't want to bring it up. But you mentioned... that thing...
Interviewer: Vista?
Developer: Ugh. I didn't want you thinking I was... you know. A bad person.
Interviewer: <waves away security guard> No, it's OK, Ben - he's fine. We won't need to escort him out. My mistake.
Interviewer: So, let me tell you about our health plan's recovery support options...
I'll agree with you that most of the original poster's points don't really make his case. However, I still think his main premise - that government is the biggest roadblock to IT development - stands, but for other reasons:
You can come up with your own list, I'm sure. There's a cost of doing business that is directly related to government regulation, which is fine and acceptable - if the government says that you need to inspect your product before it ships or follow a prescribed process to produce it, then that's a direct cost. You can figure it into your business plan, allocated resources to meet the requirements, and so on.
There is also a cost of doing business that is indirectly related to government regulation. This is caused by overly vague, inefficient, and misapplied laws that have made the exploitation of the legal system a business model in and of itself. There is no way to say "At this point, we have complied with all the regulations, and we're in the clear" - everything needs to be taken to court and decided in front of a jury. The best you can do, even if you haven't broken any laws, is hope that you never run into someone with a grudge and more money than you. That is a business killer.
(To further make my point - while I was writing this, I got a notice that a company has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project... over "illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes". Does the case have merit? Who knows? Until the judge rules - or the suing company suggests a modest out-of-court settlement - it's like the Magic Eight Ball says: "Future hazy, try again later".)
I may be going out on a limb here, but if you're speaking in terms of "thousands of generations", then I'm going to guess that the vast majority of "those who consume them" will be deader than the proverbial doornail.
Of course, that's the same thing I'd expect from someone who consumed non-gentically altered plants, but hey - you've made your paoint. Over 1000 years, just about everybody who consumes a GMO will die, die , DIE!!!
-- Roger Zelazny, "Home is the Hangman" (1975)
If you read Shamus' blog post, he's not using a custom solution - he's using a standard Wordpress plugin that is configured to only offer up a single captcha phrase. Presumably, if he were to run into issues with using just the single phrase, he could update his configuration to use additional captcha phrases, without having to do any custom development.
Shamus Young (the creator of the "DM of the Rings") recently introduced a captcha on his site to deal with comment spam. In his post about using a captcha on his site, he notes that:
Emphasis mine. He's running a fairly popular site, and using a captcha based off of a single, unchanging, three-character phrase. Just the presence of the captcha was enough to effectively eliminate his spam problem. The indication seems to be that just the presence of a captcha is enough to keep spam off of even a moderately popular site.
Bah. The only reason that anything like the Colosseum survived was because (a) it was extremely well-built and (b) it would have cost too much to tear it down and replace it with something else. If either one of these hadn't been true, then it would have been destroyed in one of the periodic conflagarations that Rome seemed to enjoy, or it would have been razed by an emperor who would then have gone on to build something bigger and better. The fact that it's an interesting piece of architecture is just a bonus for us. The Romans of the time would have gladly demolished the thing if it were to their advantage to do so for some reason.
That's just the way it is. Buildings getting torn down is something that happens, time after time, regardless of race, culture, or geographic happenstance. Someone builds something, and if it lasts at all, in a few hundred years it's just another building to be pulled down before the latest and greatest marvel goes up.
In this case, the internet provides an example of how to deal with problems like this: you route around it.
Cygwin introduced managed mounts specifically to enable developers to deal with issues like this. Using managed mounts can be a bother, but isn't nearly as annoying as not being able to cross-compile at all.
http://www.applegeeks.com/lite/index.php?aglitecom ic=2006-04-26
I stand by my statement - you're both wrong (Marxist Hacker more blatantly so, but still...) In your original post, you wrote:
The last part of your initial argument there (which I've emphasized) is incorrect. I pointed that out using the references you cited. Entering the country illegally is a criminal offense, and it's classification as misdemeanor or felony depends on the circumstances. As the NYAG document points out, "Federal and local enforcement have identical purposes--the prevention of the misdemeanor or felony of illegal entry." Entering the US without a visa may be a misdemeanor, or it may be a felony. I'm personally not aware of what the difference is, but obviously, the NYAG thought that it was important to point out to NY law enforcement that being in the country illegally does not automatically mean that an individual is a felon.
And next tome you want to cite something, please don't yank a phrase out of context to prove your point. The full text of the conclusion of the "Opinion of the NY Attorney General" that you cited states (emphasis mine):
So both you, and the original poster, are wrong. There are INA violations that are a criminal offense; the opinion makes one of those situations (illegal entry into the US) explicitly clear. If you had bothered to cite the full conclusion, that much would have been obvious. However, the conclusion makes the point that (as far as the NYAG is concerned, at least), there are INA violations that may only be considered a civil offense. Based on the opinion, this seems to include the "Sorry, my visa expired" category.
So the presence of a foreign national in the US may either be permitted, or it may be a civil offense, or it may be a criminal offense, depending on the circumstances. Clear?
I'd also like to know what their usage pattern is. I suspect that a lot of FBI employees have laptops because they're, you know, pilferable... I mean, portable. An FBI special agent hauling a laptop around the state from crime scene to crime scene is a little bit different from me hauling my laptop from work to home and back. Not to mention that my job doesn't require me to be in the vicinity of known and suspected criminals on daily basis. All told, I suspect that the FBI probably has a more difficult situation to deal with than your average company.
Don't know. Some agencies use the term to refer to sensitive but unclassified data, but the FBI doesn't appear to be on the list. This might be any number of things - information on agents in the local office (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.), data about ongoing investigations, any information that might jeopardize prosecution of a case, or even just internal documents on policies and procedures. They might even be thinking of cached versions of internal web sites. I have any number of "corporate confidential" documents on my laptop, and that's without me (a low-level code monkey in the scheme of things) really even trying. I suspect your average FBI agent can rack up a lot of "sensitive" information in the same way, just as a matter of course in carrying out their duties.
Seriously.
I spent the last 5 years working for TimeSys, and we did a lot of work to adapt various Fedora Core packages for embedded systems use.
One of the tools we developed along the way was something called tsrpm, a set of wrappers for RPM that makes cross-compiling RPMs a relatively painless process. It's open source (GPL), has support for a number of different processor architectures (x86, various flavors of ARM and PPC, etc.), and can be used to compile packages using a glibc or uclibc based tool chains. It's non-intrusive, and uses a hint file (standard bash shell script) to conditionally control various phases of the RPM and source code build process. It's even capable of building a cross-development tool chain from source RPMs, though that process can be a little hairy.
When I left, IIRC, we had over 300 RPMs, mostly from FC5, that we could build for a good 9-10 distros (variations of architecture/libc combinations). That was the result of myself and the tsrpm author (Chris Faylor) spending about 2-3 months on the whole thing... and that included the time it took for Chris to get new gcc-4.x based tool chains building for most of the architectures.
If anyone's curious, you can see the free-as-in-[beer,speech] releases of tsrpm and some whet-your-appetite FC5-based distros here.
That hasn't been my experience here in Pittsburgh. Yeah, I know. Not exactly what you think of as a high-tech Mecca, do you? Yet we've got a really strong expert base around robotics, networking, file systems and search; and the resources of several major universities and corporations to draw on. On top of all that - and more to the point - there's an organization here called the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Aside from other things, the PTC offers member companies some really good deals on medical and dental benefits. I've worked for four startups here over the past 10 years, and quite frankly, the benefits they've been able to snag through the PTC have been equal to or better than those available from larger corporations.
I'd be really surprised if similar organizations don't exist in other cities. Don't write off working for a smaller company before you check them out and see what they have to offer. You might be pleasantly surprised.
The date of compilation/cannonization for either work is irrelevant. Neither of those terms have anything to do with when a work was written. Every book in the NT was definitely written well before 650 AD. The conservative view is that they were all written before 100 AD, and even more liberal scholars have trouble pushing authorship past 200-300 AD. In any case - the NT books were certainly written well before the Koran, and so are "closer" to the OT.
Oh, and in any case, you're comparing apples and oranges; compilation and cannonization are not the same thing. One could certainly argue that the Koran was "cannonized" around 650 AD, but that was essentially simultaneous compilation/cannonization ("This is the only approved copy. Burn everything else.") The process was nothing at all like the compilation/cannonization of the NT, so you're still not really making any sort of reasonable comparison.
The cannonicity of certain books in the NT was certainly questioned by some Christian groups well into the 16th century. However, there was widespread agreement within Christianity on the traditional cannon (gospels, Acts, Paul's epistles, Peter's epistles, John's epistles) much earlier than that - so even that argument falls flat. Wikipedia points out that the traditional cannon was certainly accepted by 400 AD, and possibly even earlier:
Finally, for the record - no, I am not a biblical scholar (yet.... I'm about 2/3 of the way through picking up a bachelor's degree in pastoral theology). Even without that background, I'm reasonably comfortable in saying your argument just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
At my previous company, we did something very similar - and there, we were building (embedded) linux distributions. Take a look at LinuxLink for a public view. Still not as hairy as a full Fedora distro, but still something pretty hard to coordinate. IIRC, we had the capability to do incremental builds on something like 30-40 distros per night, and could manage about a dozen full rebuilds per day if we needed to do so. When I left, they were working on a board farm that would enable automated testing on native (not emulated) systems.
All in all, it was an interesting problem to work on. The build system wasn't the real bottleneck... once you figure out how to do what you want to do, and then how to do it effeciently, you end up with a build system that scales to handle whatever hardware you throw at it. If we had wanted to build 70 distros per night, for example, we would have just had to double the number of build machines in our build pool. The really interesting part (at least for the embedded stuff) was figuring out how to generate those 70 projects in the first place :-) A lot of that knowledge ended up in tsrpm, a tool specifically designed for for cross-compiling source RPMs.
And the answer is: "As soon as it is politically profitable".
"ZFS On Leopard: How Cool Is That?"
You can probably guess the author's opinion about the move from the title of the post