To build on your point, the companies referenced as contrasts here (Apple, Google, Facebook) are all hugely successful. Whereas Yahoo, under the current CEO, isn't. In the real world, being successful gets you a lot of latitude. There's less tolerance for things like dishonesty if you don't at least get results (for those who would judge you) while lying.
You clearly haven't done business in India. "Manufacture the product" is where things went off the rails here, even as stated by the summary: "but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold." Corruption is most often found in the implementation phase of things, because at that point you're committed to the bridge/road/product/building/whatever and the person demanding a bribe understands this. It's far easier to simply give back money during a fundraising period than it is to cancel a project halfway through. And when you really think about it, this is a manifestation of 'taking the high road,' by not doing whatever you can to come up with extra cash to pay off the corrupt, but instead canceling the project. Not the nicest high road to take, but such is life.
Before you blame post-9/11 security paranoia, this law was made to cover spacecraft in good ol' 1998. Dumb government bureaucracy can happen even in peaceful, profitable times.
No it wasn't. ITAR was enacted in 1976, in the midst of the Cold War, and it's always included far more than just anything related to spacecraft. It was originally meant to restrict a lot of different technologies, and has since been expanded to even cover software and algorithms of certain sorts. It covers both technology and goods, and the list of what is covered is enough to make you want to put a gun in your mouth and "export" your brains all over the wall. It's a truly nightmarish thing to comply with in today's world, if you handle any interesting technology development whatsoever.
ITAR serves an important purpose by stating what technologies/goods should not be given to other countries because they comprise munitions or technologies related to them. But the trick is that controlling information is a problematic thing, especially when you get into esoteric aspects of technology. It gets even worse with "dual-use" technologies. A while back, Toshiba fell afoul of similar rules when they shared technology they use in their washing machines with a company in the USSR. Unfortunately, that same technology is also used to make quieter screws (propellers, for you land-loving sorts) for ships, and thus, submarines. At one point, the 128-bit encryption-capable version of Internet Explorer was equally prohibited for export.
The rules also seem totally nuts when you see how they play out. You can discuss things with US Citizens, but only if you're in the US. Unless you're abroad, but in a place the US controls. But not if you're in the US and there's a person here on a visa nearby.
I don't get it. You ask the question, and post a link to the answer? A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. This (what the Slashdot post refers to) is a more normal black hole that happens to be next to a star, and is going 'NOM NOM NOM' on it.
Funny how it is. When a young-looking woman poses as an underage girl online and 40-year old men get arrested for trying to have sex with her, it's catching predators. But when the FBI pretends to be terrorists selling explosives, Stinger missiles or other such things, it's wrong. Ask yourself this: if a man offered you the materials and capabilities to (blow up/shoot down/shoot up) a (building/plane/event), what would you say? You'd freak out and say no at the very least, right? I know I would. I'd also call the authorities. These are people who did the opposite...who took them up on the offer. That isn't exactly the behavior of an innocent person. I don't see how it's any different from a 'young girl' who acts a little flirty in a chat room and then gets asked by a pedophile to meet for the purpose of having sex. If a young girl flirts with me, I'm going to pat her on the head kindly, and then keep walking. Her flirting isn't exactly all that tempting to me that I'm going to just casually follow her cues and commit a felony. Same thing here.
Dude, if you think the future of connectivity is fiber, you need to leave the 90s and come join us here in 2012. I'm not sure what's so 'future proof' about a relatively temperamental connectivity media that is supported by exactly *no* household devices, and very few wifi access points. As for the "future," I would point out that every high-speed LAN technology started as fiber and then became copper...because fiber is a colossal pain in the ass compared to copper. When something consistently goes from one thing to another, this is called a "trend," and trends tell you about the future. It ain't fiber.
There are reasons why racks are set up the way they are, with space around them, the back accessible, and so on. Follow that example. And don't ask the construction company how to essentially build a small data center...they don't know. Don't wall-mount, but do anchor whatever rack you install to the floor. Have some space around it, and be able to vaccuum out dust (since you'll have a bigger problem with that than most data centers). Also, if you put it in the basement, make sure you have all power a decent distance up off the floor. I don't know your environment or climate, but minor flooding does happen in basements, and what would normally just be a bit of a mess can become a disaster if you have a PDU low enough to get wet. I don't agree at all with the idea of fiber for everything...whatever that guy is smoking, I'm sure I won't keep my job if I have any myself. (Yeah, for that guy...how many household electronics come with fiber interfaces? Or, for that matter, wifi access points with fiber connections?)
Look at any holy trinity of a server room, and scale to your liking. Patch panel, networking gear, server space. A half-height rack should do you just fine, and still be quality enough that the whole thing will look nice and sanitary. Velcro strips for cable management will be your friend as well, to keep it all super-sano, especially the cable bundles coming out of the rack. Oh, and if you're really interested in making some things easier to trace, there are now ethernet cables that light up at both ends, so that you hit a button on one end and can see the other end light up. The light stays on for about 30 seconds, and it's a godsend if you have a significant cabling area.
Wake up. Almost all corporations do this. HP does this. IBM does this. Dell does this. It's not called 'hating America,' it's called 'loopholes.' If you were beholden to shareholders and you were in charge of a corporation, you would do it too, I bet. And if not...you would never be in charge of a corporation for long.
1, "Potential" daughter, because she was adopting the girl. Maternity is not a factor here; it's an adoption. I'm assuming it's pretty rare for maternity tests on adopted children to come back positive, but maybe I'm just stupid that way...so I figured we'd pass on the test. 2, It doesn't matter where the daughter was during the phone call. My point is that the phone call happened (to quote myself) "after I've already come back to the United States," which is the problem. If you go to a third world country and pick up a disease, look into it before you walk around the main terminal, eh? 3, No, it doesn't. But someone doesn't go all the way to Uganda NOT to see the child they are thinking of adopting there. I don't think I'm reading too much into it by assuming there was contact of some form, especially since she knew the daughter's symptoms, ya know? 4, The problem is that a person who had been exposed a disease in a third world (and, if the term existed, fourth world) country was already walking around in public when they first started questioning it, AND they were fuzzy on the details of the symptoms. This is, as epidemiologists, say "very bad."
But hey, maybe you're right...maybe it's not the adopting mother who is stupid here. There is something odd about posting a comment that amounts to "why don't you read it first" without really understanding the comment you were referring to.
"Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport."
Can we start imprisoning people for being idiots yet? Please?
I'm asking before I decide how I feel about the idea of Watson as my mayor. I live in Washington, DC, so I need to make an informed decision considering the context of what the word 'mayor' means around here.
If ten pounds of anything can get onto a plane by the simple expedient of bribery, please explain again why adult travelers, but not children, must remove their shoes as they stand massed in an unsecured part of a typical U.S. aiport.
Because the "simple expedient of bribery" is WAY more risky than simply putting something in your pocket and getting on a plane with it. I'm not saying that TSA isn't a runaway agency that's gone way beyond their intended mandate. But there's huge risk in attempting to bribe someone, and further risk in the event that things don't go as planned...as this slashdot post points out.
The real problem is not that we have a fundamental concern about creating derivative works or in distribution, but in the intended purpose of such actions. Legal language is typically devoid of intent, since intent is a difficult thing to quantify effectively. As a result, legal documents focus on actions, regardless of whether they are good or bad. A derivative work could be, as stated above, creating a thumbnail of a picture (harmless and necessary for many functions, including showing you thumbnails in PicasaWeb, for example). It could also be something else, like taking your codebase in Google Code and just freely incorporating it into a product of their own (not harmless, and intellectual property theft). What I see is that as far as I can tell, Google has yet to commit any gross abuse of such things, nor have they seemed inclined to do so.
Google's next challenge is to find a way to delineate between the types of intent they have and the ones they do not have, in a way which is legally binding and thus will hold credibility with groups like EPIC. I do think EPIC is going a little overboard on their language. For example, Rotenberg says "After the unilateral changes on March 1, I don’t understand why users would trust Google to stand by its terms of service," which seems a bit odd to me. He's using the phrase "unilateral changes" as if there was any other way to change terms of service, or like it is a bad thing. What is he implying...that Google should have crowdsourced the ToS that protects their business, and given up control over what the ToS would end up as? That doesn't seem very realistic, and I'd think someone like Rotenberg would already understand how infeasible that is.
So one part of this is the fact that Google could abuse their users while remaining within the Terms of Service because legal verbiage is bad at distinguishing good intent from bad, and another part is that EPIC is fearmongering a bit. I don't see the real problem, myself, especially since it's possible for their Privacy Policy (which is also in effect) to constrain the actions in the ToS, reducing the amount they could do that's actually "bad".
Look for "Samsung" on the stock exchange. No, not NYSE or NASDAQ; they are only traded in Korea. And there's only one of them on KOSPI (the Korean stock exchange), under the identifier "005930". The rest is all wholly owned subsidiaries, all of whom belong entirely to the same master corporation and report to the same single CEO and Board of Directors. It's one company. All major multinational corporations work this way, and a lot of smaller ones do too. For example, most power companies work like this...there'll be a company that handles fossil-based (aka, coal oil and gas) power generation, another for nuclear generation (if applicable), another still for transmission and distribution...but they all roll up under the main organization.
And yet, both got the technology to produce weapons-grade uranium from the same Pakistani, A.Q. Khan. Don't assume that differing political systems and ideologies is an absolute block against cooperation. I think it's ridiculous that they'd have this guy in North Korea; Iran isn't exactly a country with a need to offshore their state security apparatus, nor do they have some fanatical devotion to not saying anything that is technically untrue.
The Apple ][+ (please, people, use the right characters for it) on which I learned to code back in 1980 in school, thanks to the incredible forward vision of a man I only knew as "Mr. McAniff." All good things in my life...and there are so, so many of them...came from that. Rest in peace, Mr. McAniff, I bow to you now and for all time.
I was finally able to build a machine that could run the original at full graphics...it'll be nice to have a game that can't possibly be played with current hardware again.
Comcast did it with bittorrent...so why wouldn't they with Netflix?
But honestly...when I see the commercials for Comcast, Dish, Time Warner, Verizon...to me, it's all like a group of pedophiles arguing over who would make a better kindergarden teacher. None of them innovate any more than they have to, and have all in one way or another shown poor faith in how they serve the customer base. Home data connectivity in the US is slower than in most other industrialized countries, and the industry has shown no interest in trying to catch up. Last year at the FCC, when called out on the carpet, they started to describe a plan to bring the US up to the same levels as current-day, 2011 Europe...by 2025. I mean, really?
I fail to see how these companies could validate with 100% certainty that the device reported stolen actually belong to the owners that claimed to own them. This is important; because if you can't validate the owner with 100% certainty, then you open the door to situations where person A falsly reports persons B's phone stolen and gets it bricked. This would be a denial of service prank/attach and I'm sure it would be a much larger liability for AT&T than simply letting theives reactivate a device that was obtained nefariously. Are they going to make everyone that claims to have a phone stolen produce a receipt to validate ownersihp? To requre AT&T to get involved would be a disaster. When you require/allow corporations to get involved in things that should ONLY be law enforcement investigations, then you open a whole new can of worms.
It's been done in just about every other country in the world for some time now. The process works, and it also cuts WAY down on smartphone theft. In Washington, DC (where I live) there has been a rash of armed holdups for smartphones for some time now, and the chief of police has been begging AT&T (because iPhones are the prime target...sorry Android users) to do this. Police departments in cities all over the country have been calling for this to be done.
Yes, it's possible to cause trouble for someone else by filing a false police report. It's also a felony, and quite certain to get you caught. I could cause trouble for you by claiming you stole my phone. But then, AT&T would happen to have that phone associated with your name, SSN, credit card, address, and blood type...and would have had that association for quite some time. So, I would go to jail instead. Following your logic, we shouldn't allow people to say that their cars were stolen, either, because I could just walk up to you in your car and say "THIEF!" and send you to prison while I drive away in your vehicle.
I think they already have been...but part of the problem is that a lot of these beliefs seem to be getting less accepting of others. It doesn't do a lot for the argument that religion fosters intolerance when an athiest gets up in someone's face for believing in God. Me, I'm a huge fan of freedom of religion...I found my own faith that works for me but I don't think any one faith has it quite right. One of the most universal notions about a higher power or powers is that they are beyond our ability to entirely comprehend. So why would anyone believe that a faith system that is comprehensible by us would be an exact fit?
Java - Good because it's C-like, but more directly useful and without the challenges of memory handling that few computer languages have to worry about these days. If he ends up writing in C++ later, he can learn how. Also in use in a lot of places. C# - Good because it's also in widespread use, and again, lacks some of the pitfalls of lower-level languages. Much like Java in construction as well, and useful for both native executables and website development. It's also a bit easier and cheaper to get hosting space that will run C# than a Tomcat server for JSPs. PHP - If he wants to just play with web application development, this is a great place to start. Lots of documentation and examples, and the hosting is super-easy to come by. Ruby on Rails - Good for putting together apps in a hurry, and will teach him about frameworks early on as well, which will probably turn out to be very useful.
Another thing...once he gets started, he's going to have trouble finding problems to solve. That's another way you can help him. I had the exact same problem when I was younger (I, too, learned to code when I was 11...back then it was Applesoft BASIC). So that's one way that web apps might be better...he can actually produce an app with a functional purpose for the family. Just make sure that you either restrict access to it, or that you ensure that he uses secure coding methods. Sanitizing inputs takes you a long, long way and is pretty easy to do.
Slashdot Mirror
To build on your point, the companies referenced as contrasts here (Apple, Google, Facebook) are all hugely successful. Whereas Yahoo, under the current CEO, isn't. In the real world, being successful gets you a lot of latitude. There's less tolerance for things like dishonesty if you don't at least get results (for those who would judge you) while lying.
You clearly haven't done business in India. "Manufacture the product" is where things went off the rails here, even as stated by the summary: "but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold." Corruption is most often found in the implementation phase of things, because at that point you're committed to the bridge/road/product/building/whatever and the person demanding a bribe understands this. It's far easier to simply give back money during a fundraising period than it is to cancel a project halfway through. And when you really think about it, this is a manifestation of 'taking the high road,' by not doing whatever you can to come up with extra cash to pay off the corrupt, but instead canceling the project. Not the nicest high road to take, but such is life.
(Insert obligatory joke about mental capacity of high school jocks/college atheletes here)
Before you blame post-9/11 security paranoia, this law was made to cover spacecraft in good ol' 1998. Dumb government bureaucracy can happen even in peaceful, profitable times.
No it wasn't. ITAR was enacted in 1976, in the midst of the Cold War, and it's always included far more than just anything related to spacecraft. It was originally meant to restrict a lot of different technologies, and has since been expanded to even cover software and algorithms of certain sorts. It covers both technology and goods, and the list of what is covered is enough to make you want to put a gun in your mouth and "export" your brains all over the wall. It's a truly nightmarish thing to comply with in today's world, if you handle any interesting technology development whatsoever.
ITAR serves an important purpose by stating what technologies/goods should not be given to other countries because they comprise munitions or technologies related to them. But the trick is that controlling information is a problematic thing, especially when you get into esoteric aspects of technology. It gets even worse with "dual-use" technologies. A while back, Toshiba fell afoul of similar rules when they shared technology they use in their washing machines with a company in the USSR. Unfortunately, that same technology is also used to make quieter screws (propellers, for you land-loving sorts) for ships, and thus, submarines. At one point, the 128-bit encryption-capable version of Internet Explorer was equally prohibited for export.
The rules also seem totally nuts when you see how they play out. You can discuss things with US Citizens, but only if you're in the US. Unless you're abroad, but in a place the US controls. But not if you're in the US and there's a person here on a visa nearby.
I don't get it. You ask the question, and post a link to the answer? A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. This (what the Slashdot post refers to) is a more normal black hole that happens to be next to a star, and is going 'NOM NOM NOM' on it.
Which star is Courtney Love dating now, then?
Funny how it is. When a young-looking woman poses as an underage girl online and 40-year old men get arrested for trying to have sex with her, it's catching predators. But when the FBI pretends to be terrorists selling explosives, Stinger missiles or other such things, it's wrong. Ask yourself this: if a man offered you the materials and capabilities to (blow up/shoot down/shoot up) a (building/plane/event), what would you say? You'd freak out and say no at the very least, right? I know I would. I'd also call the authorities. These are people who did the opposite...who took them up on the offer. That isn't exactly the behavior of an innocent person. I don't see how it's any different from a 'young girl' who acts a little flirty in a chat room and then gets asked by a pedophile to meet for the purpose of having sex. If a young girl flirts with me, I'm going to pat her on the head kindly, and then keep walking. Her flirting isn't exactly all that tempting to me that I'm going to just casually follow her cues and commit a felony. Same thing here.
Dude, if you think the future of connectivity is fiber, you need to leave the 90s and come join us here in 2012. I'm not sure what's so 'future proof' about a relatively temperamental connectivity media that is supported by exactly *no* household devices, and very few wifi access points. As for the "future," I would point out that every high-speed LAN technology started as fiber and then became copper...because fiber is a colossal pain in the ass compared to copper. When something consistently goes from one thing to another, this is called a "trend," and trends tell you about the future. It ain't fiber.
There are reasons why racks are set up the way they are, with space around them, the back accessible, and so on. Follow that example. And don't ask the construction company how to essentially build a small data center...they don't know. Don't wall-mount, but do anchor whatever rack you install to the floor. Have some space around it, and be able to vaccuum out dust (since you'll have a bigger problem with that than most data centers). Also, if you put it in the basement, make sure you have all power a decent distance up off the floor. I don't know your environment or climate, but minor flooding does happen in basements, and what would normally just be a bit of a mess can become a disaster if you have a PDU low enough to get wet. I don't agree at all with the idea of fiber for everything...whatever that guy is smoking, I'm sure I won't keep my job if I have any myself. (Yeah, for that guy...how many household electronics come with fiber interfaces? Or, for that matter, wifi access points with fiber connections?)
Look at any holy trinity of a server room, and scale to your liking. Patch panel, networking gear, server space. A half-height rack should do you just fine, and still be quality enough that the whole thing will look nice and sanitary. Velcro strips for cable management will be your friend as well, to keep it all super-sano, especially the cable bundles coming out of the rack. Oh, and if you're really interested in making some things easier to trace, there are now ethernet cables that light up at both ends, so that you hit a button on one end and can see the other end light up. The light stays on for about 30 seconds, and it's a godsend if you have a significant cabling area.
Wake up. Almost all corporations do this. HP does this. IBM does this. Dell does this. It's not called 'hating America,' it's called 'loopholes.' If you were beholden to shareholders and you were in charge of a corporation, you would do it too, I bet. And if not...you would never be in charge of a corporation for long.
Addressing the points you raised...
1, "Potential" daughter, because she was adopting the girl. Maternity is not a factor here; it's an adoption. I'm assuming it's pretty rare for maternity tests on adopted children to come back positive, but maybe I'm just stupid that way...so I figured we'd pass on the test.
2, It doesn't matter where the daughter was during the phone call. My point is that the phone call happened (to quote myself) "after I've already come back to the United States," which is the problem. If you go to a third world country and pick up a disease, look into it before you walk around the main terminal, eh?
3, No, it doesn't. But someone doesn't go all the way to Uganda NOT to see the child they are thinking of adopting there. I don't think I'm reading too much into it by assuming there was contact of some form, especially since she knew the daughter's symptoms, ya know?
4, The problem is that a person who had been exposed a disease in a third world (and, if the term existed, fourth world) country was already walking around in public when they first started questioning it, AND they were fuzzy on the details of the symptoms. This is, as epidemiologists, say "very bad."
But hey, maybe you're right...maybe it's not the adopting mother who is stupid here. There is something odd about posting a comment that amounts to "why don't you read it first" without really understanding the comment you were referring to.
"Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport."
Can we start imprisoning people for being idiots yet? Please?
I'm asking before I decide how I feel about the idea of Watson as my mayor. I live in Washington, DC, so I need to make an informed decision considering the context of what the word 'mayor' means around here.
Because the "simple expedient of bribery" is WAY more risky than simply putting something in your pocket and getting on a plane with it. I'm not saying that TSA isn't a runaway agency that's gone way beyond their intended mandate. But there's huge risk in attempting to bribe someone, and further risk in the event that things don't go as planned...as this slashdot post points out.
The real problem is not that we have a fundamental concern about creating derivative works or in distribution, but in the intended purpose of such actions. Legal language is typically devoid of intent, since intent is a difficult thing to quantify effectively. As a result, legal documents focus on actions, regardless of whether they are good or bad. A derivative work could be, as stated above, creating a thumbnail of a picture (harmless and necessary for many functions, including showing you thumbnails in PicasaWeb, for example). It could also be something else, like taking your codebase in Google Code and just freely incorporating it into a product of their own (not harmless, and intellectual property theft). What I see is that as far as I can tell, Google has yet to commit any gross abuse of such things, nor have they seemed inclined to do so.
Google's next challenge is to find a way to delineate between the types of intent they have and the ones they do not have, in a way which is legally binding and thus will hold credibility with groups like EPIC. I do think EPIC is going a little overboard on their language. For example, Rotenberg says "After the unilateral changes on March 1, I don’t understand why users would trust Google to stand by its terms of service," which seems a bit odd to me. He's using the phrase "unilateral changes" as if there was any other way to change terms of service, or like it is a bad thing. What is he implying...that Google should have crowdsourced the ToS that protects their business, and given up control over what the ToS would end up as? That doesn't seem very realistic, and I'd think someone like Rotenberg would already understand how infeasible that is.
So one part of this is the fact that Google could abuse their users while remaining within the Terms of Service because legal verbiage is bad at distinguishing good intent from bad, and another part is that EPIC is fearmongering a bit. I don't see the real problem, myself, especially since it's possible for their Privacy Policy (which is also in effect) to constrain the actions in the ToS, reducing the amount they could do that's actually "bad".
Look for "Samsung" on the stock exchange. No, not NYSE or NASDAQ; they are only traded in Korea. And there's only one of them on KOSPI (the Korean stock exchange), under the identifier "005930". The rest is all wholly owned subsidiaries, all of whom belong entirely to the same master corporation and report to the same single CEO and Board of Directors. It's one company. All major multinational corporations work this way, and a lot of smaller ones do too. For example, most power companies work like this...there'll be a company that handles fossil-based (aka, coal oil and gas) power generation, another for nuclear generation (if applicable), another still for transmission and distribution...but they all roll up under the main organization.
And yet, both got the technology to produce weapons-grade uranium from the same Pakistani, A.Q. Khan. Don't assume that differing political systems and ideologies is an absolute block against cooperation. I think it's ridiculous that they'd have this guy in North Korea; Iran isn't exactly a country with a need to offshore their state security apparatus, nor do they have some fanatical devotion to not saying anything that is technically untrue.
The Apple ][+ (please, people, use the right characters for it) on which I learned to code back in 1980 in school, thanks to the incredible forward vision of a man I only knew as "Mr. McAniff." All good things in my life...and there are so, so many of them...came from that. Rest in peace, Mr. McAniff, I bow to you now and for all time.
I was finally able to build a machine that could run the original at full graphics...it'll be nice to have a game that can't possibly be played with current hardware again.
Comcast did it with bittorrent...so why wouldn't they with Netflix?
But honestly...when I see the commercials for Comcast, Dish, Time Warner, Verizon...to me, it's all like a group of pedophiles arguing over who would make a better kindergarden teacher. None of them innovate any more than they have to, and have all in one way or another shown poor faith in how they serve the customer base. Home data connectivity in the US is slower than in most other industrialized countries, and the industry has shown no interest in trying to catch up. Last year at the FCC, when called out on the carpet, they started to describe a plan to bring the US up to the same levels as current-day, 2011 Europe...by 2025. I mean, really?
I fail to see how these companies could validate with 100% certainty that the device reported stolen actually belong to the owners that claimed to own them. This is important; because if you can't validate the owner with 100% certainty, then you open the door to situations where person A falsly reports persons B's phone stolen and gets it bricked. This would be a denial of service prank/attach and I'm sure it would be a much larger liability for AT&T than simply letting theives reactivate a device that was obtained nefariously. Are they going to make everyone that claims to have a phone stolen produce a receipt to validate ownersihp? To requre AT&T to get involved would be a disaster. When you require/allow corporations to get involved in things that should ONLY be law enforcement investigations, then you open a whole new can of worms.
It's been done in just about every other country in the world for some time now. The process works, and it also cuts WAY down on smartphone theft. In Washington, DC (where I live) there has been a rash of armed holdups for smartphones for some time now, and the chief of police has been begging AT&T (because iPhones are the prime target...sorry Android users) to do this. Police departments in cities all over the country have been calling for this to be done.
Yes, it's possible to cause trouble for someone else by filing a false police report. It's also a felony, and quite certain to get you caught. I could cause trouble for you by claiming you stole my phone. But then, AT&T would happen to have that phone associated with your name, SSN, credit card, address, and blood type...and would have had that association for quite some time. So, I would go to jail instead. Following your logic, we shouldn't allow people to say that their cars were stolen, either, because I could just walk up to you in your car and say "THIEF!" and send you to prison while I drive away in your vehicle.
I think they already have been...but part of the problem is that a lot of these beliefs seem to be getting less accepting of others. It doesn't do a lot for the argument that religion fosters intolerance when an athiest gets up in someone's face for believing in God. Me, I'm a huge fan of freedom of religion...I found my own faith that works for me but I don't think any one faith has it quite right. One of the most universal notions about a higher power or powers is that they are beyond our ability to entirely comprehend. So why would anyone believe that a faith system that is comprehensible by us would be an exact fit?
Here's an idea. Stand up, in your cubicle, and ask out loud 'does anyone here know how to perform a formal investigation?'
You laugh, but at Fox News they apparently do!
Java - Good because it's C-like, but more directly useful and without the challenges of memory handling that few computer languages have to worry about these days. If he ends up writing in C++ later, he can learn how. Also in use in a lot of places.
C# - Good because it's also in widespread use, and again, lacks some of the pitfalls of lower-level languages. Much like Java in construction as well, and useful for both native executables and website development. It's also a bit easier and cheaper to get hosting space that will run C# than a Tomcat server for JSPs.
PHP - If he wants to just play with web application development, this is a great place to start. Lots of documentation and examples, and the hosting is super-easy to come by.
Ruby on Rails - Good for putting together apps in a hurry, and will teach him about frameworks early on as well, which will probably turn out to be very useful.
Another thing...once he gets started, he's going to have trouble finding problems to solve. That's another way you can help him. I had the exact same problem when I was younger (I, too, learned to code when I was 11...back then it was Applesoft BASIC). So that's one way that web apps might be better...he can actually produce an app with a functional purpose for the family. Just make sure that you either restrict access to it, or that you ensure that he uses secure coding methods. Sanitizing inputs takes you a long, long way and is pretty easy to do.