"Geeks" latch on to new technology almost without hesitation. We are attracted to the novel sensations of playing with new gizmos or new algorithms.
Well the European geeks I know are more technology-critical than most american geeks. For us is no contradiction to be a technophile and to be critical. A typical point are the genetically modified foods you mention. Many geeks here like good (=cooked, not engineered, from fresh ingredients) food. Some of them are quite good cooks - as many creative persons.
In Germany every person gets a chipcard from their health insurance company (health insurance is required by law here). These cards comply to a certain standard. Without my card, the medical personnel has no access to my records, except for special purposes where only certain partial aspects are important, e.g. billing.
I know that since my chipcard went broke after 5 years of use and my dentist could not enter the services he had made until my next visit.
I think that that is an interesting model for your problem: One part of the system at the doctors side (reader) and one part at the patients (card).
But from my point of view this covers only a part of the problem (the german solution is several years old). What you really need is a complete security infrastructure.
You have to ensure data integrity (against tampering), access control, authentication, digital signature, etc. From the network architects view this cries for a public key infrastructure solution (PKIX). You might want to look at this page at securityportal.com. Its a good starting point on PKIX.
If you are negotiating for your salary: You were to low, if your opposite accepts without hesitation. This applies especially for serious interlocutors (the unserious protest always).
Just one additional remark: the trend goes towards unpaid overtime. Beside that, overtime is nearly mandatory, especially if milestones/releases/whatever are ahead.
Your friend made the mistake to start at 2/3 of a normal salary I think.
There is an arti cle in the German IT-Newspaper Computerwoche about German IT salaries. From my experience as an IT Consultant the salaries in that paper seem to be quite low, though.
A typical post-degree starter salary is 75kDM per year. A junior consultant with some experience gets about 90kDM.
Please keep in mind that we have very high income taxes in Germany. We have progessive taxation (the percentage grows with the income), up to 53% for a high income.
The IT center of Germany is just around München (English speaking people like to mis-spell that "Munich"). For IT people in finance, Frankfurt (we call it "Bankfurt" somtimes) is the place. Smaller IT cities are Hamburg and Bremen in the north, a little bit in the Hannover area. More and more service companies are moving to Berlin now, thus there are some jobs there.
A very good starting point for searching job adverts (sorry, all in German) are the pages of the newspaper DIE ZEIT. They use a crawler to collect information from many other job sites. They have a page for international jobs too.
How about the right to carry a pocket knife? I used to have a pocket knife with me since the age of eight (I still do now, 28 years later). I dont see anything uncommon with that. Here in Europe it is even possible to attend a audience of the pope with a swiss army knife in the pocket.
...how much like their idea of a dangerous person you are...
(emphasis by me)
This is the main problem that I have with the whole system. Remember, the purpose of mosaic2k is to filter out the people who fit to a certain profile. How this profile looks, is defined by analyzing the habits of "proven" violent people. As many contributors have written, there is much "unproven" violence in US schools, unproven in the sense that the administration doesnt notice it.
Here in Germany we had what the government called Rasterfahndung ("raster screenings") for terrorists in the late 70ies. They analyzed the habits of terrorists (lives in anomyous building blocks without facing building, pays rent and electricity/heating bill in cash, rents cars etc.) and did a computerized search for such people. the result was that several hundreds of innocent people got spied for months, only because some of their habits matched with those of the terrorists. Not one single terrorist was found due to Rasterfahndung.
I expect similar results with mosaic2k. What will be worse then is the public pressure to pass these tests (Rasterfahndung happened secretly).
You forget that people are going to be deciding what to put into the machine.
I think the real problem is that paranoid people will feed the machine. Thus the whole system will be couloured by their prejudices. And these prejudices will then be applied on the kids. The result will be called "objective", since it come from an object, not from a person.
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Well the European geeks I know are more technology-critical than most american geeks. For us is no contradiction to be a technophile and to be critical.
A typical point are the genetically modified foods you mention. Many geeks here like good (=cooked, not engineered, from fresh ingredients) food. Some of them are quite good cooks - as many creative persons.
In Germany every person gets a chipcard from their health insurance company (health insurance is required by law here).
These cards comply to a certain standard. Without my card, the medical personnel has no access to my records, except for special purposes where only certain partial aspects are important, e.g. billing.
I know that since my chipcard went broke after 5 years of use and my dentist could not enter the services he had made until my next visit.
I think that that is an interesting model for your problem:
One part of the system at the doctors side (reader) and one part at the patients (card).
But from my point of view this covers only a part of the problem (the german solution is several years old).
What you really need is a complete security infrastructure.
You have to ensure data integrity (against tampering), access control, authentication, digital signature, etc. From the network architects view this cries for a public key infrastructure solution (PKIX).
You might want to look at this page at securityportal.com. Its a good starting point on PKIX.
If you are negotiating for your salary:
You were to low, if your opposite accepts without hesitation. This applies especially for serious interlocutors (the unserious protest always).
Just one additional remark: the trend goes towards unpaid overtime. Beside that, overtime is nearly mandatory, especially if milestones/releases/whatever are ahead.
Your friend made the mistake to start at 2/3 of a normal salary I think.
There is an arti cle in the German IT-Newspaper Computerwoche about German IT salaries. From my experience as an IT Consultant the salaries in that paper seem to be quite low, though.
A typical post-degree starter salary is 75kDM per year.
A junior consultant with some experience gets about 90kDM.
Please keep in mind that we have very high income taxes in Germany. We have progessive taxation (the percentage grows with the income), up to 53% for a high income.
The IT center of Germany is just around München (English speaking people like to mis-spell that "Munich"). For IT people in finance, Frankfurt (we call it "Bankfurt" somtimes) is the place. Smaller IT cities are Hamburg and Bremen in the north, a little bit in the Hannover area. More and more service companies are moving to Berlin now, thus there are some jobs there.
A very good starting point for searching job adverts (sorry, all in German) are the pages of the newspaper DIE ZEIT. They use a crawler to collect information from many other job sites. They have a page for international jobs too.
Probably because you dont know shit.
The Columbine shooters were alleged to be goth.
They werent.
How about the right to carry a pocket knife? I used to have a pocket knife with me since the age of eight (I still do now, 28 years later). I dont see anything uncommon with that. Here in Europe it is even possible to attend a audience of the pope with a swiss army knife in the pocket.
AC makes a good point:
(emphasis by me)This is the main problem that I have with the whole system. Remember, the purpose of mosaic2k is to filter out the people who fit to a certain profile. How this profile looks, is defined by analyzing the habits of "proven" violent people. As many contributors have written, there is much "unproven" violence in US schools, unproven in the sense that the administration doesnt notice it.
Here in Germany we had what the government called Rasterfahndung ("raster screenings") for terrorists in the late 70ies. They analyzed the habits of terrorists (lives in anomyous building blocks without facing building, pays rent and electricity/heating bill in cash, rents cars etc.) and did a computerized search for such people. the result was that several hundreds of innocent people got spied for months, only because some of their habits matched with those of the terrorists. Not one single terrorist was found due to Rasterfahndung.
I expect similar results with mosaic2k. What will be worse then is the public pressure to pass these tests (Rasterfahndung happened secretly).
I think the real problem is that paranoid people will feed the machine. Thus the whole system will be couloured by their prejudices. And these prejudices will then be applied on the kids. The result will be called "objective", since it come from an object, not from a person.
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