Yeah! Let's take from those who have worked hard their whole lives and give it to those that haven't! Why again does the government have a right to tax the same money twice? And of course you'd rather have someone else taxed instead of you. I'd rather pay no taxes, but have all the people in the state of Georgia, who I will never meet, taxed at twice the normal rate!
You must listen to a lot of right-wing talk radio. Explain to me how this money is "being taxed twice". By the "logic" that right-wingers use to justify lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, that is to say the statement that this money is being taxed twice, could be used to justify tax free status for Bill Gates chauffeur, after all, Bill already paid taxes on the money he's using to pay the chauffeur, so why should the chauffeur pay taxes on that money?
The logic of having lower rates for capital gains and dividends is pretty friggin weak if you ask me. We tell someone who earns their money by going to work every day that they will pay taxes at X%, we tell someone who gets their money from a stock sale or from corporate dividends that they will pay taxes at some fraction of X%. This is justified by saying that higher taxes on income derived from investments will discourage those investments, but the flip side of this equation, that having higher taxes on income derived from going to work apparently does not apply.
I see no reason why a dollar earned from going to work at your job as a software engineer, WalMart greeter or jizz mopper at the Lusty Lady should be taxed at a different rate than a dollar earned from interest income, dividends or capital gains. Different taxation rates for different types of income are inherently discriminatory and set up a system where some are more privileged than others by virtue of the tax rates they pay.
As far as stifling the economy goes we had a pretty good economy back in the 1990s after taxes were raised by Bill Clinton in 1993, I liked that economy a lot better than the one we have now where taxes have been lowered (but deficits raised) by George W. Bush. Sure, I like the 15 percent that I paid on the capital gains from my stock sales last year, but I liked living in a society with low unemployment and decent jobs even better.
But they didn't. They made this yet another link in their iPod/iTunes/IMTS media lock-in scheme. You are only to use it with iTunes.
And why is this such a problem? Apple gives iTunes away for free for Macs and XP boxen and they do a pretty good job keeping it updated. You can use iTunes without ever going near the iTunes music store and downloading files with Apple's DRM. iTunes will take your CDs and make perfectly good MP3s out of them.
OK, you're screwed if you use Linux and want to use this product, but personally I think using Linux for anything other than server apps is just too painful for words, so why bother? Oh, and it doesn't support Ogg, but who cares outside of the three guys without girlfriends who use Ogg? If you have a Macintosh this is a pretty good deal, if you need more features then the Squeezebox with the built-in 802.11 is the way to go.
It seems to me that if you had properly configured firewalls built into all cable modems (at the very least having NAT and some packet inspection) that you could largely avoid the problem of having home PCs recruited into BotNets, turned into Zombies, et al. Also if Windows wasn't so bad from a security standpoint it would be a lot harder to infect/recruit Doze boxes. I keep my systems behind a firewall and keep my patches up to date and I do the same for my parents, so what is a reverse firewall going to do for us? And how long would it be before the hackers and script kiddies figure out how to game the reverse firewall rules and set up new phishing networks?
What kind of other cool stuff will us iPod owners have access to? Perhaps a file containing the URLs of porn sites! Perhaps a text file containing the phone numbers of our friends! Perhaps another text file that contains the numbers and addresses of such geek friendly information as the location of the nearest comic book store, Fry's or Thai restaurant. Wow! Isn't it amazing how dull and pedestrian information is somehow transformed by putting it on an iPod!?
"...Perhaps the best question to ask in this situation is why these labs are still using removable data storage devices to store sensitive information."
I worked on projects that collected classified data and spec'd systems with removable storage. The reason we used removable storage was because it was easier to get DISCO (Defense Industrial Security Clearance Organization, yes, that really is the acronym courtesy of the Department of Defense Overly Contrived Acronym Certification Agency (DODOCACA)) to certify a system for classified use if we could show that all of the storage could be removed from the system and securely stored. Of course this relies upon having people who aren't going to lose the secure storage, which is another thing entirely. Given advances in storage since the 1990s when I was administering such systems I'd be surprised if any classified system wasn't built around removable storage systems. You can get a 320Gb firewire disk for $350. Of course you could also do your work on laptops and then lock them in your classified safe at the end of the day too.
Where to start with this bullshit? Well why not here:
They got a tip that a dark-skinned person was taking pictures and notes. If they had *not* followed up and those locks were bombed next month, would you want their heads? I bet you'd be outraged.
It's worth noting that those locks are a military installation run by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Ballard Locks a military installation. Yeah, I guess that those Sockeye salmon are really valuable to our national security, as is the ability for those boat owners on Lake Washington and Lake Union to get their boats to and from Puget Sound. My God! The whole country would collapse if the locks were damaged! Quick! Suspend the Constitution!
So what if people calling in tips to the DHS use profiling? I don't recall any WHITE people bombing us. When someone says the word terrorist, you know, like when we're at a heightened security alert, what mental image do YOU form? Thought so.
You don't recall any WHITE people bombing us? Do you have memory problems as well as being completely stupid? I guess that you don't recall the bombing of the Murrah federal building in April of 1995, which was done by a couple of white guys, one of whom, Timothy McVeigh, was executed for it. I guess you don't recall the bombings of abortion clinics that were done by WHITE right-to-lifers. I guess you don't recall the bombings of churches in the south by WHITE KKK members.
The mental image I form is of the Department of Homeland Security crying wolf again and again and again. The terrorist alerts, which weren't that great of an idea to begin with, have been so overblown as to become meaningless. I'm also beginning to form an image of Homeland Security releasing these to distract our attention from other events, and so are a lot of other people. Witness the latest Homeland Security alert which contained no new info and was a rehash of information from several months ago.
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, lieutenant Taco? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Spiers, and you curse the Department of Homeland Security. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Spier's questioning, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
If fucking retards such as yourself are the only thing standing between me and Osama Bin Laden then I'm fucked. Oh BTW dickhead, I spent 13 years in the National Guard as an M60 and M1 tanker, what are your credentials? A four digit/. ID number? A high score playing America's Army, a John Ashcroft Junior G-man badge? Sitting through all 24 episodes of 24 without having to get up and go to the bathroom?
Quite frankly your existence is grotesque and incomprehensible to me. Why didn't your mother abort you? Why didn't your dad drown you in a bathtub? Why don't you shoot yourself in the head?
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.
You provide me with my freedom? Did you write the Constitution? Did you fight in WWII, Korea, Afghanistan? Were you a first responder on 9/11? If not then you haven't done shit, pigfucker. You're either some sort of fucktard poseur who has spent too much time playing with his George W. Bush flight suit action figure or you actually do work for one of the idiot bureaucracies that is concerned with "homeland security". If it's the latter then I have news for you old son, you and your buddies haven't done jack fucking shit for our security. Osama Bin Laden is still out there, so is Mullah Omar and Zarqawi. What have you fucktards achieved other than harrassing US Citizens and trashing the Constitut
' I don't know about you, but I'd kinda like to see public disclosure on what happened if my cellphone/Internet access is down for an extended period."
That sounds like something a terrorist would say! Quick! Call John Ashcroft, this man is hiding something! What exactly would you do with this information you Amurrika hatin' terrorist you!
Actually though if you want to see how useless, stupid and ridiculous our "war on terrorism" has become (hope this one goes better than the "war on drugs" cuz last time I checked drugs were winning big time), check out the story of Ian Spiers. Here is the link to his website describing his run-in with Homeland Security types or you can read this story from the Seattle Times or this column from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. For those of you who don't want to read the articles Spiers was harrassed by the local police and Homeland Security types because he was taking pictures of the Ballard Locks, oh, and he's kind of not-white looking, but that never figures into the actions of our Homeland Security Overlords.
By experimenting with implanting things into John Ashcroft. I know that many/. readers would like to implant their foot in his ass, but what else could we install in our attorney general? An ID microchip, a FastPass, a blender, a rice-cooker? We could build ourselves a really cool bionic attorney general. Sure, it would be somewhat risky for Mr. Ashcroft, but I think I speak for a lot of/. 'ers here that that's a sacrifice we would be prepared to make to advance the field of implantable AG technology and to maintain America's lead in this important field!
Actually the Bush administration will be working on a plan to suspend the elections in case of a sudden magnetic pole shift. For our own good of course.
Of the 220 people who worked on location, 91 contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died of it -- including Wayne, co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. Statistically, only 30 people out of a group that size should have gotten cancer in their lifetimes.
Yes, and of course none of those people were heavy smokers. No, not a one of them (that's sarcasm by the way). Dick Powell used to advertise cigarettes, Wayne was a five pack a day smoker and even Agnes Moorehead (now this would be the name of a porno star, interesting how times change, isn't it?) was known to light up now and then. Of course killing yourself with a pack-a-day habit isn't as interesting as a conspiracy theory. Here's a nice picture of Dick Powell advertising Camels. Here's a nice clip of a TV commercial featuring the Duke peddling Camels. And Moorehead was 74 when she died of lung cancer. Oh wait, another google search reveals this picture of Susan Hayward hawking Chesterfields. Of course this could be a coincidence, perhaps none of these stars smoked at all, perhaps they were just pretending to smoke lots of cigarettes to get money from the tobacco companies. Perhaps they smoked cigarettes but never inhaled! Yes, that's it! It must have been that evil radiation!
Pity him. Other countries have seen how vital software is and will be to their economies, some people in those countries are smart enough to realize that having such a critical sector of their economy controlled by the gnomes of Redmond is a bad idea. OSS and licenses such as the GPL offer you a way to get in on the ground floor of software development and if you have a stable of talented coders rapidly progress in the direction you need by leveraging the talents of other coders.
Then of course there's the cost issue. Who the fuck can afford Microsoft licenses? Even American businesses, who have a lot more cash than Asian consumers have been bitching about the cost of MIcrosoft licensing, especially when it has become blatantly obvious to even the dimmest of PHBs that most new Microsoft products add little in the way of useful functionality but do succeed in introducing incompatible file formats and siphoning cash off to Redmond.
Then of course there's Microsoft's arrogance in offering crippleware such as XP starter edition and XP home. Explain to me what the differences are between these products and XP pro again (other than registry hacks to turn features off, missing DLLs and different packaging). Explain to me why I can't buy a CD with an installable image at retail and have to purchase OEM copies of the OS or deal with Microsoft's fucking annoying upgrade copies. Explain to me what the new version of Office does that I couldn't do with Office 98. Fortunately for me my step-bro works at Microsoft, so I can get the software through him for cheap, other than this, or getting educational discounts I can't see how anyone affords buying Microsoft products or why anyone would continue to do so.
The Powells, Michael and Colin are a couple of porch monkeys for white corporate conservatives. Colin Powell has sacrificed whatever integrity he might have once possessed pushing Bush's war in Iraq, and if you really want to see how far Colin has fallen you can check out this link:
For those of you who don't have or want to install Real Media on your systems this is a BBC news clip that shows Colin Powell dressed up as the construction worker from the Village People performing a skit at the ASEAN meeting in Indonesia. Yes, there's nothing like dressing up as a gay icon in a nation threatened by radical Islamic fundamentalism and performing a song sung to the tune of another song that is about the joys of anonymous gay sex in public showers.
Michael is even more of a fuckup than his dad, I have to wonder if the only reason that Colin Powell has become such an ass-licker is to make sure that Michael doesn't get fired from his job at the FCC and end up having to move back in with mom and dad.
You should probably have learned in your degree program that laws differ from state to state. Also the rigorousness of the Bar may differ from state to state. This is clearly to protect the clients, consumer, etc.
I'll respect you in the morning, the check is in the mail and I won't come in your mouth. What do these three statements have to do with what you wrote? Well, they're bullshit, state licensing has very little to do with protecting consumers and much, much more to do with protecting professionals. For more information on this I refer you to Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations
You keep bashing on his formal education all the way through your post yet he didn't indicate that should be the main criteria for certification. He didn't propose any specific certification method. He just said there should be some.
I'm not bashing on his formal education. I'm bashing on the fact that he apparently feels that his formal education is some sort of magic talisman that guarantees him a job instead of all of those "para-engineers" that he complains about. This guy comes off like one of the dickheads I used to interview who thought that he should get a salary of 75k a year and a company car even though they had no experience and nothing other than a shiny diploma from some educational institution. I wonder if he got that sense of entitlement while he was getting all of his formal education or if it's genetic or something.
And of course we all know how well certification works. Look at all of the brilliant MCSEs out there. Yessirree, Microsoft's certification program sure has weeded out the idiots and poseurs there. Why everyone who works on Windows boxes with these credentials is now a genius with godlike powers. And then of course there's teacher certification. Thanks to teacher certification we have the best education system in the world, and thanks to MBA programs the finest management. Yessirree, certification, it's the be-all, end-all.
You are one person claiming to be a successful migration to software engineering. But there really are a lot of hacks out there.
No, I'm not claiming a successful migration to software engineering. I'm claiming a successful migration to systems engineering dumbass, UNIX, networks and Oracle databases. I write some code but only for my own amusement or to hack together system stuff, I don't consider myself a programmer, excuse me, software engineer. I'm a systems guy, hardware gives me a chubby.
Also, CS people don't call it CompSci. That's just something that dumbass PoliSci people came up with. This leads me to believe you don't actually deal with CS people or do real software engineering. You probably maintain a webpage or something.
This coming from someone who posts AC. Posting AC leads me to believe that you're a tool.
The Bar exam is a way to protect us from those who slipped through the cracks at law school. Why wouldn't you also want to protect yourself from some hack who slipped through a CS program?
LMHOWIDYMITA (that stands for "Laughing My Head Off While I Dick Your Mom In The Ass). I'll share that with my lawyer friends, I'm sure they'll find it amusing. You fail to ask the question of what protects you from the hacks who slip through the Bar, or this hypothetical software engineering certification we're discussing. You can protect yourself from hacks who slipped through CS programs, or any other discipline if you interview properly, I have found that it's generally the clueless HR fucks who are impressed by shiny certificates and diplomas. Let those guys get into the real interviews with the engineers and programmers and you can quickly find out, if you're worth a shit, whether or not those degrees mean anything. The fact is that a lot of the "para-engineers" that the original poster was whining about are probably as well qualified, if not better qualified to be software engineers than he is, despite his formal education, and given that he dropped a bunch of money and time on getting shiny diplomas that really pisses him off.
used to write about these in his stories in the 1970s and also wrote about them in his book A Step Farther Out. You can probably go to his website, http://www.jerrypournelle.com, browse around and find more information, or send Dr. Pournelle an e-mail.
someone who holds both a bachelors and masters in computer science from the school of engineering from U.C. Berkeley, one huge problem is too many "para-engineers."
Well, bully for you, what do you want, a fucking pony or something?
As someone who holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Washington I can say that categorically you're full of shit. Licensing doesn't exist to protect consumers, it exists to protect the class of people being licensed, as an example look at the Bar, you can be admitted to the Bar in one state but not in another, does this protect people seeking legal counsel? Well, not really, but it does protect lawyers from too much competition, which leads to such things as judges in the state of Texas attempting to ban software from Nolo press because it allows people to write wills without consulting a lawyer (See http://www.nolo.com/texas/index.cfm for more on this)
If you had taken a couple of basic political economy classes insetead of wanking your way through some of formal education that you got in CompSci (hint: no one uses Scheme or Eiffel in the real world) you would have learned about how these state sanctioned monopolies work.
Oh, by the way, another reason that your whine really pisses me off, aside from the obvious chip on your shoulder and the snivelling sense of entitlement you carry around because of your degrees (notice that I didn't say "education") is because I consider myself a systems engineer, despite my lack of formal training (well I took courses at the U of Wa, but they were mostly a waste of time, my best training was OJT working in a lab there). Why do I consider myself an engineer? Well, because I designed, procured and managed large scale systems that came in on time on budget and worked in high intensity production environments for years. I worked with a lot of other people who did similar things without any benefit of this formal education that you speak of (What does that consist of anyways? showing up for class, sitting up front, kissing your professor's ass whenever possible?)
Of course if I had a dollar for every piece of shit code that had been written by a CSci graduate who called himself a software engineer, and which burned CPU cycles, leaked memory and hammered my systems into the ground I wouldn't ever have to work again. Formal education is no guarantee of quality in computer code, I'll testify to that from experience, and it's not much of a guarantee of quality in medicine or law either, if it were malpractice wouldn't be the problem it is in those fields.
You write The problem in computer science is too many hacks are being paid and labeled as engineers when they are not. well if you had ever worked in the real world you'd realize that a lot of those hacks have CSci degrees and have studied software engineering, and despite this their codes still sucks ass. Let's face it, if the only way you can get and hold a job is to have the government artificially lock out competition then you're a worthless piece of shit.
Of course there's also the interesting question of what the Professsional Engineer's exam would look like for software engineering. Given the way government works you'd probably have lots of questions about the best way to manage loading data from tapes when programming in Cobol and Fortran. If we had the kind of government regulation that you want to protect your worthless ass then we wouldn't have a computer industry, Hell, it would still be the early 1970s with a bunch of geeks wearing clip-on ties and birth control glassesloading tapes into IBM 360s and entering instructions in assembler via a TTY.
Of course if you don't like it here in the US of A you could always move to Germany and work there, the Germans are really credential happy (I speak from experience having worked there for a year) and might give you the adulation that you think you deserve for getting those shiny Berkeley degrees, and if they don't you can always go on welfare there, which given the obvious welfare mentality that you manifest in your post wouldn't be too hard for you.
And by the way, I'm a cybersecurity consultant, so I know what I'm talking about.
Could we get some corollary to Godwin's law on/., we could call it Multiplexo's law but that's kind of egotistical of me. The law would be that as a thread on/. continues the probability of someone claiming great knowledge of the topic, without providing any proof of such knowledge and while posting as Anonymous Coward will approach unity.
with constants. You could have pre-release versions that were.618034 (1 over phi),.707 (sqrt 2 over 2), and then once the software was released 1.414 (sqrt 2), 1.618 (phi), 2.818 (e), 3.14 (pi), etc, etc, etc. Makes sense to me and geeks will love it.
How about combining two popular initiatives, hard time for repeat offenders and term limits. It could be called "Three Terms and You're Out" where anyone serving three terms in Congress is assumed to be guilty of enough stuff to put them away for life.
Is this the perfect/. post or what? Someone posting as AC, saying that another poster is wrong, claiming experience and then not providing any further information. It's as if this is the Jungian archetype of a/. post, the Platonic ideal, the ne plus ultra.
If you're referring to the fact that Ashcroft as AG might be revenge on the Democrats for playing dirty and getting Jean Carnahan to replace her husband Mel then you're probably right, although he seems like revenge on the rest of us as well. So much for Democratic perfidy, although what if Ashcroft, who is detested by all liberals and a lot of conservatives helps to drag Bush down in 2004? Could this be construed as part of a Democratic ueber-master strategy?
You're missing my point though, any incumbent senator who's worth a shit should be able to crush a competitor like a bug in a vise, especially a dead one, even the dead one's widow trying to get into office on a sympathy vote. Hell, look at senators such as Scoop Jackson, Strom Thurmond, Lyndon Johnson or Jesse Helms. Those guys wouldn't have had any problem smacking Jean Carnahan down, despite whatever sympathy vote her dead husband was worth. Lyndon Johnson probably would have ended up winning the election and fucking her. Scoop Jackson would have won that election and sold Boeing aircraft to the state of Missouri and Thurmond or Helms could have won that election and gotten the MIssouri schools resegregated (which wouldn't take that much work, but still).
John Ashcroft is the biggest fucktard to ever hold the post of Attorney General, he's even managing to make Janet Reno look good. Look at Ashcroft's record, he's from Missouri, the "Show me how" state, he's an incumbent senator and he loses to a dead Democratic challenger. Think about this, the citizens of Missouri decided that they would rather vote for a dead guy than Ashcroft. How the fuck does any incumbent senator lose to a dead challenger? Jesus Christ, how much fucking paste did Ashcroft eat in second grade anyways? Was he nibbling the lead paint chips off the walls? Do they even allow him to have regular scissors at DoJ? Or do they just give him those left-handed kindergarten ones so he doesn't hurt himself?
I'm sure the state of New Jersey will legislate a higher speed of light to get around this problem, but that's not going to fix it for the rest of us...
Now if we could just get them to legislate pi to be 3.0, hell, while they're at it they could round up the value of e to 3.0 to. It would make life a lot easier, fewer constants that are easier to remember.
Hey come on, in a few years we'll all have 64 Gigabytes of RAM on our systems to run Longhorn (128Gb recommended). What would the numbers be like on this with IPv6?
You spend a lot of time on FreeRepublic.net don't you? Hey, has your copy of Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy Theory Quarterly arrived yet? Mine hasn't. I blame aliens, or the jews, or Bill Clinton, or maybe all three.
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You must listen to a lot of right-wing talk radio. Explain to me how this money is "being taxed twice". By the "logic" that right-wingers use to justify lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, that is to say the statement that this money is being taxed twice, could be used to justify tax free status for Bill Gates chauffeur, after all, Bill already paid taxes on the money he's using to pay the chauffeur, so why should the chauffeur pay taxes on that money?
The logic of having lower rates for capital gains and dividends is pretty friggin weak if you ask me. We tell someone who earns their money by going to work every day that they will pay taxes at X%, we tell someone who gets their money from a stock sale or from corporate dividends that they will pay taxes at some fraction of X%. This is justified by saying that higher taxes on income derived from investments will discourage those investments, but the flip side of this equation, that having higher taxes on income derived from going to work apparently does not apply.
I see no reason why a dollar earned from going to work at your job as a software engineer, WalMart greeter or jizz mopper at the Lusty Lady should be taxed at a different rate than a dollar earned from interest income, dividends or capital gains. Different taxation rates for different types of income are inherently discriminatory and set up a system where some are more privileged than others by virtue of the tax rates they pay.
As far as stifling the economy goes we had a pretty good economy back in the 1990s after taxes were raised by Bill Clinton in 1993, I liked that economy a lot better than the one we have now where taxes have been lowered (but deficits raised) by George W. Bush. Sure, I like the 15 percent that I paid on the capital gains from my stock sales last year, but I liked living in a society with low unemployment and decent jobs even better.
And why is this such a problem? Apple gives iTunes away for free for Macs and XP boxen and they do a pretty good job keeping it updated. You can use iTunes without ever going near the iTunes music store and downloading files with Apple's DRM. iTunes will take your CDs and make perfectly good MP3s out of them.
OK, you're screwed if you use Linux and want to use this product, but personally I think using Linux for anything other than server apps is just too painful for words, so why bother? Oh, and it doesn't support Ogg, but who cares outside of the three guys without girlfriends who use Ogg? If you have a Macintosh this is a pretty good deal, if you need more features then the Squeezebox with the built-in 802.11 is the way to go.
"...Perhaps the best question to ask in this situation is why these labs are still using removable data storage devices to store sensitive information."
I worked on projects that collected classified data and spec'd systems with removable storage. The reason we used removable storage was because it was easier to get DISCO (Defense Industrial Security Clearance Organization, yes, that really is the acronym courtesy of the Department of Defense Overly Contrived Acronym Certification Agency (DODOCACA)) to certify a system for classified use if we could show that all of the storage could be removed from the system and securely stored. Of course this relies upon having people who aren't going to lose the secure storage, which is another thing entirely. Given advances in storage since the 1990s when I was administering such systems I'd be surprised if any classified system wasn't built around removable storage systems. You can get a 320Gb firewire disk for $350. Of course you could also do your work on laptops and then lock them in your classified safe at the end of the day too.
They got a tip that a dark-skinned person was taking pictures and notes. If they had *not* followed up and those locks were bombed next month, would you want their heads? I bet you'd be outraged.
It's worth noting that those locks are a military installation run by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Ballard Locks a military installation. Yeah, I guess that those Sockeye salmon are really valuable to our national security, as is the ability for those boat owners on Lake Washington and Lake Union to get their boats to and from Puget Sound. My God! The whole country would collapse if the locks were damaged! Quick! Suspend the Constitution!
So what if people calling in tips to the DHS use profiling? I don't recall any WHITE people bombing us. When someone says the word terrorist, you know, like when we're at a heightened security alert, what mental image do YOU form? Thought so.
You don't recall any WHITE people bombing us? Do you have memory problems as well as being completely stupid? I guess that you don't recall the bombing of the Murrah federal building in April of 1995, which was done by a couple of white guys, one of whom, Timothy McVeigh, was executed for it. I guess you don't recall the bombings of abortion clinics that were done by WHITE right-to-lifers. I guess you don't recall the bombings of churches in the south by WHITE KKK members.
The mental image I form is of the Department of Homeland Security crying wolf again and again and again. The terrorist alerts, which weren't that great of an idea to begin with, have been so overblown as to become meaningless. I'm also beginning to form an image of Homeland Security releasing these to distract our attention from other events, and so are a lot of other people. Witness the latest Homeland Security alert which contained no new info and was a rehash of information from several months ago.
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, lieutenant Taco? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Spiers, and you curse the Department of Homeland Security. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Spier's questioning, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
If fucking retards such as yourself are the only thing standing between me and Osama Bin Laden then I'm fucked. Oh BTW dickhead, I spent 13 years in the National Guard as an M60 and M1 tanker, what are your credentials? A four digit /. ID number? A high score playing America's Army, a John Ashcroft Junior G-man badge? Sitting through all 24 episodes of 24 without having to get up and go to the bathroom?
Quite frankly your existence is grotesque and incomprehensible to me. Why didn't your mother abort you? Why didn't your dad drown you in a bathtub? Why don't you shoot yourself in the head?
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.
You provide me with my freedom? Did you write the Constitution? Did you fight in WWII, Korea, Afghanistan? Were you a first responder on 9/11? If not then you haven't done shit, pigfucker. You're either some sort of fucktard poseur who has spent too much time playing with his George W. Bush flight suit action figure or you actually do work for one of the idiot bureaucracies that is concerned with "homeland security". If it's the latter then I have news for you old son, you and your buddies haven't done jack fucking shit for our security. Osama Bin Laden is still out there, so is Mullah Omar and Zarqawi. What have you fucktards achieved other than harrassing US Citizens and trashing the Constitut
That sounds like something a terrorist would say! Quick! Call John Ashcroft, this man is hiding something! What exactly would you do with this information you Amurrika hatin' terrorist you!
Actually though if you want to see how useless, stupid and ridiculous our "war on terrorism" has become (hope this one goes better than the "war on drugs" cuz last time I checked drugs were winning big time), check out the story of Ian Spiers. Here is the link to his website describing his run-in with Homeland Security types or you can read this story from the Seattle Times or this column from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. For those of you who don't want to read the articles Spiers was harrassed by the local police and Homeland Security types because he was taking pictures of the Ballard Locks, oh, and he's kind of not-white looking, but that never figures into the actions of our Homeland Security Overlords.
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Mexican Attorney Generals" post?
Yes, and of course none of those people were heavy smokers. No, not a one of them (that's sarcasm by the way). Dick Powell used to advertise cigarettes, Wayne was a five pack a day smoker and even Agnes Moorehead (now this would be the name of a porno star, interesting how times change, isn't it?) was known to light up now and then. Of course killing yourself with a pack-a-day habit isn't as interesting as a conspiracy theory. Here's a nice picture of Dick Powell advertising Camels. Here's a nice clip of a TV commercial featuring the Duke peddling Camels. And Moorehead was 74 when she died of lung cancer. Oh wait, another google search reveals this picture of Susan Hayward hawking Chesterfields. Of course this could be a coincidence, perhaps none of these stars smoked at all, perhaps they were just pretending to smoke lots of cigarettes to get money from the tobacco companies. Perhaps they smoked cigarettes but never inhaled! Yes, that's it! It must have been that evil radiation!
Then of course there's the cost issue. Who the fuck can afford Microsoft licenses? Even American businesses, who have a lot more cash than Asian consumers have been bitching about the cost of MIcrosoft licensing, especially when it has become blatantly obvious to even the dimmest of PHBs that most new Microsoft products add little in the way of useful functionality but do succeed in introducing incompatible file formats and siphoning cash off to Redmond.
Then of course there's Microsoft's arrogance in offering crippleware such as XP starter edition and XP home. Explain to me what the differences are between these products and XP pro again (other than registry hacks to turn features off, missing DLLs and different packaging). Explain to me why I can't buy a CD with an installable image at retail and have to purchase OEM copies of the OS or deal with Microsoft's fucking annoying upgrade copies. Explain to me what the new version of Office does that I couldn't do with Office 98. Fortunately for me my step-bro works at Microsoft, so I can get the software through him for cheap, other than this, or getting educational discounts I can't see how anyone affords buying Microsoft products or why anyone would continue to do so.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/40341000/rm/_403 41727_song20_willcox_vi.ram
For those of you who don't have or want to install Real Media on your systems this is a BBC news clip that shows Colin Powell dressed up as the construction worker from the Village People performing a skit at the ASEAN meeting in Indonesia. Yes, there's nothing like dressing up as a gay icon in a nation threatened by radical Islamic fundamentalism and performing a song sung to the tune of another song that is about the joys of anonymous gay sex in public showers.
Michael is even more of a fuckup than his dad, I have to wonder if the only reason that Colin Powell has become such an ass-licker is to make sure that Michael doesn't get fired from his job at the FCC and end up having to move back in with mom and dad.
You write:
You should probably have learned in your degree program that laws differ from state to state. Also the rigorousness of the Bar may differ from state to state. This is clearly to protect the clients, consumer, etc.
I'll respect you in the morning, the check is in the mail and I won't come in your mouth. What do these three statements have to do with what you wrote? Well, they're bullshit, state licensing has very little to do with protecting consumers and much, much more to do with protecting professionals. For more information on this I refer you to Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations
You keep bashing on his formal education all the way through your post yet he didn't indicate that should be the main criteria for certification. He didn't propose any specific certification method. He just said there should be some.
I'm not bashing on his formal education. I'm bashing on the fact that he apparently feels that his formal education is some sort of magic talisman that guarantees him a job instead of all of those "para-engineers" that he complains about. This guy comes off like one of the dickheads I used to interview who thought that he should get a salary of 75k a year and a company car even though they had no experience and nothing other than a shiny diploma from some educational institution. I wonder if he got that sense of entitlement while he was getting all of his formal education or if it's genetic or something.
And of course we all know how well certification works. Look at all of the brilliant MCSEs out there. Yessirree, Microsoft's certification program sure has weeded out the idiots and poseurs there. Why everyone who works on Windows boxes with these credentials is now a genius with godlike powers. And then of course there's teacher certification. Thanks to teacher certification we have the best education system in the world, and thanks to MBA programs the finest management. Yessirree, certification, it's the be-all, end-all.
You are one person claiming to be a successful migration to software engineering. But there really are a lot of hacks out there.
No, I'm not claiming a successful migration to software engineering. I'm claiming a successful migration to systems engineering dumbass, UNIX, networks and Oracle databases. I write some code but only for my own amusement or to hack together system stuff, I don't consider myself a programmer, excuse me, software engineer. I'm a systems guy, hardware gives me a chubby.
Also, CS people don't call it CompSci. That's just something that dumbass PoliSci people came up with. This leads me to believe you don't actually deal with CS people or do real software engineering. You probably maintain a webpage or something.
This coming from someone who posts AC. Posting AC leads me to believe that you're a tool.
The Bar exam is a way to protect us from those who slipped through the cracks at law school. Why wouldn't you also want to protect yourself from some hack who slipped through a CS program?
LMHOWIDYMITA (that stands for "Laughing My Head Off While I Dick Your Mom In The Ass). I'll share that with my lawyer friends, I'm sure they'll find it amusing. You fail to ask the question of what protects you from the hacks who slip through the Bar, or this hypothetical software engineering certification we're discussing. You can protect yourself from hacks who slipped through CS programs, or any other discipline if you interview properly, I have found that it's generally the clueless HR fucks who are impressed by shiny certificates and diplomas. Let those guys get into the real interviews with the engineers and programmers and you can quickly find out, if you're worth a shit, whether or not those degrees mean anything. The fact is that a lot of the "para-engineers" that the original poster was whining about are probably as well qualified, if not better qualified to be software engineers than he is, despite his formal education, and given that he dropped a bunch of money and time on getting shiny diplomas that really pisses him off.
Well, bully for you, what do you want, a fucking pony or something? As someone who holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Washington I can say that categorically you're full of shit. Licensing doesn't exist to protect consumers, it exists to protect the class of people being licensed, as an example look at the Bar, you can be admitted to the Bar in one state but not in another, does this protect people seeking legal counsel? Well, not really, but it does protect lawyers from too much competition, which leads to such things as judges in the state of Texas attempting to ban software from Nolo press because it allows people to write wills without consulting a lawyer (See http://www.nolo.com/texas/index.cfm for more on this) If you had taken a couple of basic political economy classes insetead of wanking your way through some of formal education that you got in CompSci (hint: no one uses Scheme or Eiffel in the real world) you would have learned about how these state sanctioned monopolies work.
Oh, by the way, another reason that your whine really pisses me off, aside from the obvious chip on your shoulder and the snivelling sense of entitlement you carry around because of your degrees (notice that I didn't say "education") is because I consider myself a systems engineer, despite my lack of formal training (well I took courses at the U of Wa, but they were mostly a waste of time, my best training was OJT working in a lab there). Why do I consider myself an engineer? Well, because I designed, procured and managed large scale systems that came in on time on budget and worked in high intensity production environments for years. I worked with a lot of other people who did similar things without any benefit of this formal education that you speak of (What does that consist of anyways? showing up for class, sitting up front, kissing your professor's ass whenever possible?)
Of course if I had a dollar for every piece of shit code that had been written by a CSci graduate who called himself a software engineer, and which burned CPU cycles, leaked memory and hammered my systems into the ground I wouldn't ever have to work again. Formal education is no guarantee of quality in computer code, I'll testify to that from experience, and it's not much of a guarantee of quality in medicine or law either, if it were malpractice wouldn't be the problem it is in those fields.
You write The problem in computer science is too many hacks are being paid and labeled as engineers when they are not. well if you had ever worked in the real world you'd realize that a lot of those hacks have CSci degrees and have studied software engineering, and despite this their codes still sucks ass. Let's face it, if the only way you can get and hold a job is to have the government artificially lock out competition then you're a worthless piece of shit.
Of course there's also the interesting question of what the Professsional Engineer's exam would look like for software engineering. Given the way government works you'd probably have lots of questions about the best way to manage loading data from tapes when programming in Cobol and Fortran. If we had the kind of government regulation that you want to protect your worthless ass then we wouldn't have a computer industry, Hell, it would still be the early 1970s with a bunch of geeks wearing clip-on ties and birth control glassesloading tapes into IBM 360s and entering instructions in assembler via a TTY.
Of course if you don't like it here in the US of A you could always move to Germany and work there, the Germans are really credential happy (I speak from experience having worked there for a year) and might give you the adulation that you think you deserve for getting those shiny Berkeley degrees, and if they don't you can always go on welfare there, which given the obvious welfare mentality that you manifest in your post wouldn't be too hard for you.
Could we get some corollary to Godwin's law on /., we could call it Multiplexo's law but that's kind of egotistical of me. The law would be that as a thread on /. continues the probability of someone claiming great knowledge of the topic, without providing any proof of such knowledge and while posting as Anonymous Coward will approach unity.
with constants. You could have pre-release versions that were .618034 (1 over phi), .707 (sqrt 2 over 2), and then once the
software was released 1.414 (sqrt 2), 1.618 (phi), 2.818 (e),
3.14 (pi), etc, etc, etc. Makes sense to me and geeks will love it.
Is this the perfect
You're missing my point though, any incumbent senator who's worth a shit should be able to crush a competitor like a bug in a vise, especially a dead one, even the dead one's widow trying to get into office on a sympathy vote. Hell, look at senators such as Scoop Jackson, Strom Thurmond, Lyndon Johnson or Jesse Helms. Those guys wouldn't have had any problem smacking Jean Carnahan down, despite whatever sympathy vote her dead husband was worth. Lyndon Johnson probably would have ended up winning the election and fucking her. Scoop Jackson would have won that election and sold Boeing aircraft to the state of Missouri and Thurmond or Helms could have won that election and gotten the MIssouri schools resegregated (which wouldn't take that much work, but still).
Now if we could just get them to legislate pi to be 3.0, hell, while they're at it they could round up the value of e to 3.0 to. It would make life a lot easier, fewer constants that are easier to remember.